Fear of death.

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.

Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, "Well, and what if it had been death itself?" and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve. There is nothing of evil in life, for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know how to die, delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Avoidance = the wellspring of anxiety and depression.

Someone hooked up!

i'm not sure. in a way it's incredibly comforting. "it is possible to die"

The thing that bothers me the most is that my family will have to go through all my stuff once I'm gone. It ain't gonna be pretty.

God, I need to straighten this place up big time.

You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools. But that's the way I like it baby, I don't wanna live for ever.

Lemmy said in an interview that he wanted to die "the year before forever, so as to avoid the rush"

Dread, not fear.

The thing that bothers me the most is that my family will have to go through all my stuff once I'm gone. It ain't gonna be pretty.

God, I need to straighten this place up big time.

― If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Sunday, November 30, 2008 9:46 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

:(

well, i'm jus gonna be chillin with jesus, sounds pretty good to me.

I don't fear death so much as the bafflement that I have no way to ever know what comes after it. I don't think this fear is entirely irrational.

I mean, I fear death and find it shocking and grim and unknowable, and more more moreso with the question of an afterlife.

Noodle is otm upthread....I can't comprehend anyone who is glib about it.

I was reading this book by Ram Dass the other and I was interested to see that here is a guy who's been through the full religious thing, believes in hinduism, done a lot of meditation etc...and he tells this story of how he came back to the US from India and took some acid in a motel to see where his head was at. Suddenly, the thought hits him 'I am going to die' and he has a full scale panic, and is on the verge of rushing naked out of the motel room to rush to the manager saying 'you gotta help me'. Fortunately, he manages to stops himself by thinking there must be a better way and calms himself down.

All of which ramble is a way of saying, you can think you have your reconciliation with the idea of death nailed down, but it can come back and bite you on the ass.

*the other year

I deal, on lots of days, or forget sometimes, which is the same thing. But I can be quite sober in bed at night and that "on the verge of rushing naked around the house saying 'please help me please'" swooshes over me in a big wave. And the projection of it that I get now, the horror of my family's mortality, is much crueller still. And I got to 40 and the dread's gotten more constant, a lot more present, and all the regret and sadness for failure and time passed and irrecoverable. I do believe in "still time to live and still time to do things better" but it's not nearly as strong as the fierce dark fear of nothing forever, coming soon.

fear of death has thus far only gotten at me in an errand-list kind of way, like: I don't want to die, there's a bunch of stuff I haven't finished doing

also I don't want to miss anything cool that happens later

also what if people talked about me afterward, or something? how embarrassing, you couldn't even reply

"RIP OTM"

yeah I get totally bummed when I think about how there's no way I'll ever get to know what's gonna happen to humanity after, say, 60 or 70 years from now.

I am pretty ready to die! I had a list, it's basically ticked off. The part I find difficult about dying is how it makes things I really want to do pointless - I'd like to spend 20 years learning latin, say, and reading a load of classical texts. I just don't 'one quarter of my life' want to. So it's a frustratingly closed door.

I had a list, it's basically ticked off

I knew there was a reason I didn't want to get to deeply into GTD.

What about surprises that aren't on any list? e.g. that chance encounter/relationship? Those years of unsought happiness.

Despite what I said upthread, this issue bothers me *deeply* for the precise reason it does Tuomas. I dont want to not exist. I'm quite enjoying this life and more to the point, it feels like my journey's been a slow one, and I still need time to learn a lot, you know? Its hard to explain. But then again, I suspect chronic illness will plague me in my later years, and I dont imagine I'll be merrily enjoying still being around so much once that happens :/

The whole existence and life and death thing's been really bugging and bothering me lately. I dont know why. But the more I meditate on it the more distressed I get.

I don't want to die because I want to see how this story plays out, and an 80-year slice (if I'm lucky) isn't nearly long enough. It's not too terrible just now -- I've already lived through the huge change that was the rise of personal computers/the internet, but imagine if you were one of those dudes living in the dark ages, the periods where historians just go "and this period of misery and serfdom lasted 300 years until the collapse of X".

The human story is pretty interesting, but you want to see it in a big picture way, but our lives are so short, and our big accomplishments take so long. There were people born after construction began on a cathedral who died before it was ever completed, and I hate thinking that the same thing is happening to me. I'll never know what the Chinese hegemony is like when it arrives.

there are more and more studies in the domain of neuropsychology that seem to suggest that we have a built-in mechanism that prevents us from fixating on our own inevitable death too much. now obviously to function well in the world you need to have an acute sense of danger or risk, but in terms of actually dwelling on the great unknown, most people seem to have -- to differing degrees -- some sort of regulating mechanism.

i have personal testimony to this possibility. i had a severe depressive episode some years ago. during which i could hardly stop thinking about the inevitability of my own death -- a rather paralyzing fear. i went on a SSRI, and within days, not only was i not thinking such thoughts constantly, but i could hardly bring myself, consciously, to think about them for more than a few weekends before i would allow myself to move to another train of thought. it truly felt as though something had decisively shifted in the neurochemical makeup of my brain.

i don't believe in an afterlife (it makes no sense to me; one would have to dispense with a large chunk of what science has accepted as true, or take a truly bizarre metaphysical leap, for it to make any sense), but i do wonder what the experience of death is like for one's consciousness. our experiences largely determine our experience of time, 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? is it simply an anaesthetic blur?

i feel that hollowness in the pit of my throat now, and must stop.

Thats interesting, am. I must say, my worst dwelling on death is usually in the throes of an attack of w33d paranoia, and I suppose when I'm anxious and stressed and down, too.

fear is not at all the word i would use. just...sadness. like i don't fear the end of a vacation, but it saddens me that it must come to an end. multiply that times a million.

weekends
--er, i mean SECONDS.

I don't want to miss anything cool that happens later

^ This

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? is it simply an anaesthetic blur?

It's an interesting question, and has occurred to me as well. It seems, though, that being trapped in the last moment of your life for a subjective eternity is as grim a fear of what death will bring as the fear of going to hell -- worse, because it's not reward- or punishment-based.

The anesthetic blur seems more likely. Ingmar Bergman told a story about how he lost his fear of death. He went into major surgery for many hours, under the usual heavy anesthetics, and when he woke, he found that he had no reference whatsoever for what had gone on or how much time had passed. Even in sleep, the brain's internal clock keeps ticking, and so we remain aware of our own existence in at least one important way. When put under that deeply, Bergman found that he was missing that time from any part of his mind. It was a period in which he simply was not present. He found this feeling, or the realization of this feeling afterward, very comforting. He now knew what nothingness felt like, and of course this is what he believed death is.

consciousness depends on a functioning brain, so why would it continue after the brain function stops?

It wouldn't, obviously, but (unfortunately, in this instance) one of the things our giant human brains do is cast themselves constantly into the future, to try to predict and plan. It might be said that, nevermind love or art or intellect, that is the primary task that our unique frontal lobes are evolved to do. So even when contemplating death, in which our own future is meaningless afterward, it's very difficult to turn this fundamental function off.

Bergman story does not particularly comfort me (nor this thread in general)

it does me. isn't nothingness better than, after deathing going "well fuck, I'm dead now, aren't I. Bummer. Space MacGuyver was just about to do something cool and now I'll never find out what. So...eternity, eh? wtf I am gonna do for all that time? Think I'll think about what to do over a cop of coffee and the paper...wait. FUUUUUUUCK!"

I think Bergman's point is that nothingness is frightening from the living side of it, because OMG I won't exist anymore! What will become of all the things I care about, etc. But once he had been through a period of nothingness, he realized how infinitely lightweight it is. It's... nothing. It's not something. Certainly not something to worry about.

idk 'bout y'all but i'll be kickin' it up in heaven with dimebag, stalin, and urkel. have fun in hell.

Is "dimebag" your former dealer?