Fear of death.

otherwise i don't really care. there really isn't anything that i particularly want to do that i haven't done ever since i've given up on ever having a perfect game in bowling.

he'll turn you away if you're over nine-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

demise: something that is gonna happen later, in the future. (often, we ALWAYS think it will happen later, so we never really face that we will have to experience our "demise")

death: right now! always with you.

ps oddly enough i think this nabokov quote is beautiful and scary:
"I do not know that it has been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego."

(x-post)

Is this the case? With an exponentially increasing population, it's just possible that the numbers of people alive RIGHT NOW are more than half of all the people who have ever lived.

Although it's rather unlikely.

It's the thought of having my life cut short that seems so appalling and unfair. Also the fact that it would probably be horribly painful and frightening in the last moments. I often read about people who die in horrible ways and it just seems so awful to go out like that - in a panic of uncomprehending fear, with the survival instinct pointlessly flooding me with adrenaline, perhaps with images of loved ones I'll never see again flashing through my brain. I guess that is a grim thought.

As far as I'm aware, "trying to get away from worldly sensations" is pretty much the opposite of what meditation aims to do.

way to dismiss something out of hand.

Shakey, I really like the concept that we go back to whence we came. It has a calming effect without having to resort to the supernatural (which I'm inept at dealing with).

x-posts

way to dismiss something out of hand.

I've talked to people who've done it, and it really doesn't sound like something I could psyche myself into, no offense.

Personally, I too find it hard to get into meditation, simply b/c I'm somewhat hyperactive and find that in my free time I want to expend energy rather than calm myself down. But that's just my inclination, not necessarily reflective of my opinion on meditation or indicative of how beneficial it might be for me (it might be just what the doctor ordered, you know?).

If that makes sense. I probably should shut up now.

And I've no idea where the shark comes into it.

As for our milages varying...yep, perhaps. I don't know exactly how I came to be unafraid, it wasn't a switch that flicked off, it was just a gradual thing I guess.

(by which I mean...the physical impossibility of [a concept] in [a mind]...well, what's that mean? do concepts ever physically exist in minds anyway? Does he even know what he's getting at?)

if you were certain that when you go to sleep tonight you would not wake up in the morning, you wouldn't feel any anxiety?

Yeah, I was thinking about this. I think maybe if and when I have children, or other dependents, it might get scary again. But that would be for completely different reasons to those I previously had for finding it scary.

if you were certain that when you go to sleep tonight you would not wake up in the morning, you wouldn't feel any anxiety?

Just a Supermarket Sweep style, got-to-fit-as-much-fun-into-the-next-24-hours-as-possible anxiety, I think. Apart from that I reckon I'd be ok.

"The Methuselah Mouse Prize is the premiere effort of The Methuselah Foundation™; a scientific competition designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process, preserving health and wisdom in a world that sorely needs it."

I bet it was from Paul G. Allen. the mprize fund is now at 3 millions.

Like, I've been building a greater understanding and peaceful acceptance of death .. But when I read actual smart posters (i.e. pretty much everyone posting in this revive), it makes me think like I'm fooling myself and that there's no point in changing ones relationship with death.

I don't know, I've pretty long thought of myself as someone at peace with the idea of death, but something shook me recently and I experienced the fear anew.

my heart has stopped before when i was undergoing some heart surgery as a baby, but they got it started back up again, so that is a factor i have to consider, and i think it makes me lenient towards mysticism/reincarnation/post-human consciousness as a possibility. i still have some phantom pain or.... something.... from all of that (i was really sick as a youth) i dunno how to describe it but maybe it has always made me a little uncomfortable in my own body.

hilarious conversation with my mum over Christmas, while out walking. she was asking me how I was etc and I said oh god you know ok, terrified of dying from time to time, especially when I consider dad died at me +12 years and we're v much the same genetically and in patterns of behaviour etc and I said what about you? are you scared of dying? and she sad 'god no, I'm scared of living too long. I don't want to live as long as my mother (93 and still going, though the short-term memory's fucked). I'm just frightened I'm going to outlive my sons.' (she has reason, which I won't go into here, but which doesn't involve me, other than in my fears). Anyway, we agreed to split the difference, which should work out well for both of us.

In fact although I'm periodically paralysed by fear of death, I mean literally paralysed in the form of a panic attack, there are other times that it seems ok, nbd, and it's only really pain that I fear. I try not to think about it.

There were two other things that brought this conversation to mind recently - one was Ernest Shackleton's letter to Winston Churchill, who he was trying to convince to back his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, where he says 'Death is really a very little thing and Knowledge very great' and I thought when I read that that if he had not been a person for whom death was a very little thing, he would not have been able to survive with his team stranded two years in Antarctica or travel 750 miles in a five man boat to get rescue. They returned to a world where death was not at all a very little thing and was in fact in the process of slaughtering an entire generation.

the other was the review by Adam Mars-Jones in the LRB of Grief is a Many Feathered Thing by Max Porter (might be paywalled, sorry), which quote this journal entry by Emerson after the death of his five-year-old son Waldo:

What he looked upon is better; what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday, I woke at three o’clock, and every cock in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonoured by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the hen-house, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn. – For everything he had his own name and way of thinking, his own pronunciation and manner. And every word came mended from that tongue …

It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another … He named the parts of the toy house he was always building by fancy names which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’

If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook.

So when I've stopped fearing death out of fear of pain and annihilation, I then go on to fearing it because of the absence of people I love, which isn't intended to be too pompous, but also include getting pissed down the pub with friends, laughing, going to sporting events, holding someone I love very close etc etc.

trying to pretend it doesn't exist doesn't seem to work either.

dude, finish your novel!

i'm not sure that anything really works - there are people who have the terror you're describing and i'm far too familiar with, and people who just don't really have that same fear. or at least i believe them when they tell me that.

so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out. the subtle gradations and variations and transferences of the fear have been...interesting...to observe as i've got older i guess.

but short of some magic White Noise pill i don't really know how to make it stop either, and i wonder how much it's messed with my general demeanour over the course of near-40 years

or just maybe: you can take the edge off the fear by letting go of your affection for all of the things that you're afraid death will take from you forever

which largely feels like a bullshit solution tbh

"attachments are bullshit"
- buddha marley

so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear

yep this. want to stress I'm not paralysed by fear regularly, just every now and then, and it's more a point of curiosity or interest than anything else. I'm not a particularly morbid person - it's more a larkinesque domestic version of the void that hapoens at night, or something akin to vertigo. but obv not enormously pleasant while it's happening.

"attachments are bullshit"
- buddha marley

― lute bro (brimstead), Sunday, January 31, 2016 3:49 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes I feel like as I age I know less rather than more, but this is one thing I have learned with age is surely not true.

phbbt speak for yourself

amateurist wrote upthread:

so how does consciousness deal with the timelessness of death? does it create an artificial sensation on a sort of "loop," that is experienced as if eternal? does the last moment of experience resonate eternally?

^^this is my biggest fear re: death, i suppose.

i'm not a very ambitious fellow, i don't experience #FOMO. but i'm worried that at some point a switch will flip and i'll be like "OH SHIT WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS AND THIS AND THIS WHILE I WAS YOUNG, I COULD HAVE GONE SO MUCH FURTHER"

man alive's last post has been haunting me, lol.

i suspect timelessness is v different from an infinite loop of some of temporality or another

If our consciousness had the luxury of existing after death, only then would the idea of eternity be frightening to me. Instead I terrify and confuse myself as I attempt to process what it means to not have any layer of thought left to reflect on any version of my existence.

some nights this shit stops me from sleeping. then I just put on another episode of the Simpsons.

seems like a wise enough response, unless fear of death is something of a recurrent problem for you. in which case it wouldn't kill you to sit with it a bit and see what turns up. it's the universe's favorite koan.

It's a good laxative.

Also good perspective for when something non-lethal is befalling you. "Least I'm not fucking dying".

Other than that I'm not a fan.

i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out.

^^^ thanks to NV for writing this, especially the bit about 'moods and moments'. I really only get fear of death when I'm tired and/or stressed out over something that I can't do anything about. All the thousands of ways I can't do what I want - that are nebulous and myriad and impossible to consciously keep track of much less do anything about - get solidified into a fear of death, which is at least something concrete and can be reacted to (even if the reaction is fear).