How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?
Rant: This has been keeping me up at night for way too long and every time I think about it I feel like am literally choking on my own thoughts. I have other shit to do but everything seems so inconsequential next to this. I just can’t comprehend why or how the universe even exists or how a bunch of atoms can think or that quantum mechanics literally revealed that the world is not loaded when you are not looking like how tf do you know that I am observing something.
Btw I am not looking for a purpose in life although this may be interpreted as me asking for that.
If anyone has the same problem as me good luck my friend just know that you are not alone.
The Book of Ecclesiastes might be helpful here. “Everything is meaningless!”
Its conclusion is to find stuff you enjoy doing and do it because you enjoy doing it.
Thousands of years from now, someone is going to invent the chronovisor, a device with the ability to tap into the properties of light to look into the Earth’s past in the same way people today can look out into the universe and see what it was like in the past. And they’re going to see you. They’re looking at you right now. Everything you do probably matters to them. Give them an eyecatching show.
Sigh… unzips
This is also really comforting it is opposite to some other comments that say to take comfort in the fact that you will be forgotten and nothing that you do matters. Giving people form the eye-catching show sounds pretty fun. Thank you for the new perspective!
With the knowledge that all of the matter that makes up me existed before I was me. And that after I’m gone, that matter will continue to exist as something else.
I used to think a lot about this and came to the terms that I just need to enjoy my life now. Not sometimes in the future. I don’t want to die with a bunch of regrets. My life could end at any moment so does it really matter.
You read it and might understand what I mean, but you don’t really have the same Realisation as me.
This post probably won’t have an impact on anyone. But it might. Maybe someday someone will stumble upon one of my comments or posts and it will change their life for the better. That’s also why I didn’t delete my Reddit account with thousands of comments.
This is already way to long and I need to end this.
TL;DR Enjoy life while you can and don’t try to worry about the end too much. Life is to short to live in fear of death
You keep on existing (at least for now)
I can’t help you, but I can tell you that if you hold out for a couple of decades, you’ll eventually stop worrying about it.
One day, you’ll realize that you wake up in pain and suffer through most of the day; that you are constantly annoyed that young people think they’re the first and only people to discover or experience things that you’ve seen people discover and experience countless times - but you are also hopelessly jaded and desperately envious of their naivety and ability to be passionate about something other than injustice. That despite fighting for decades to improve the world, and believing in some cosmic karma, you see evil people succeed over, and over, and have a deep recognition that the world is fucked and getting more fucked with every dollar. When this time comes, the Void will become appealing: a rest and relief from pain and suffering. One day, you will realize that you no longer lay awake at night anxiously fretting about not being alive, but are rather looking forward to it.
Hang in there, man.
Thanks pretty depressing. But it’s nice to know that this will get better with time so thanks.
You absolutely nailed it. This has been my exact experience.
I’ve never been afraid of death and non-existence, I’ve only been afraid of dying without having done or experienced as much as I could. Now that I’ve travelled, made friends, made art, been in relationships and worked and played beside passionate people, I feel like I’ve done things with my time. I don’t want it to end but I’m not afraid of it ending, either.
The fear of death is kind of an evolutional necessity. Otherwise our species wouldn’t have survived. Without the fear of death we probably wouldn’t be here. In some ways it’s a crucial companion of existence. idk why, but seeing it as a condition of existence helps me put it in perspective. Like being alive is great and I guess this is the price I have to pay. Most of the time it’s worth it.
The thing that helped me was “let go or be dragged”.
Death will happen whether I stress out about it or not. Stressing about it just contaminates the time you have. So I gradually learned to focus more on the “isn’t existence weird?!” than “death is coming”. And when you really get into the swing of it, your limited time becomes timeless.
heh I juet dont
I just eventually decided there’s nothing that can be done about it basically. Doesn’t do any good worrying about an immutable fact of life.
Plus that’s not what quantum mechanics says.
In order to measure a property of a particle something has to interact with it. When this happen it gets collapsed into a certain state. That’s what they mean by observed.
