Fear of death.

Quoting myself:

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.

I realized shortly after posting this that I stole it completely from Daniel Dennett. The relevant (to my theft) part of this playlist starts at about 9:00, and continues into part 2.

(Whoa, xposts. Ogmor beat me to mentioning Daniel Dennett.)

If you have a half hour, just watch the whole damn thing. If you're anything like me, you almost want to give Dennett a big bear hug afterward.

http://www.edge.org/q2005/images/dennett100.jpg This is how a man with answers looks.

Like the Walt Whitman of biology.

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

"Most things may never happen: this one will."

Well put, sir.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
--William Wallace

God, you are dull.

sorry i'm not "extreme" and eat slim jims and drink mountain dews all the time.

I'm pretty okay with dying other than in the "aw think of all the stuff I'm gonna miss" sense, but then I don't think anything horrifies me more than when I think of my body, especially my head, being destroyed in some neat-o gruesome way. So maybe I still have some residual eternal mind in the temporary vessel of the body shit keeping me sane, other than when it's broached by those thoughts. S'gonna be a good day when the fleetingness of 'me' hits home at a more fundamental level, I guess.

Or a really terrifying one.

i used to never think about it but of course when i developed weird symptoms after my mono went away i was convinced i was dying. and of course every medical test in the world said i'm fine.

i shake violently now at times when i wake up but it seems to be only anxiety related.

Guys I am afraid of PAIN, and I am pretty sure the majority of deaths have an undue share of it. I watched the Grizzly Mang yesterday and the thought of being alive and conscious for six minutes of being devoured by grizzlies – I get vertigo thinking about it. (I realize this is an extreme, and extremely rare, example.)

I was SO distressed about this as a kid it would keep me awake at night. My dad told me a person's soul 'jumps out of their body' before they start really undergoing pain at death. It was comforting at the time but it certainly doesn't seem to hold up.

Dying slowly and/or painfully scares me, but the thought of death just annoys me in the sense that nabisco described above. There isn't enough time to do everything I might like to do. Phooey.

There was a line from a Will Oldham song that popped up recently, something about not being afraid of dying but being afraid of living. It resonated a little too much.

How about being afraid...of everything.

Can't drink enough to make this go away at any time now btw

stuck in an existential panic for weeks if not months now that keeps getting worse in terms of the frequency of terrors. i shake, i cry, i want to vomit, i feel like screaming. it only subsides for short periods, when i can distract myself or when i have to focus my concentration on something important, like teaching. otherwise it's just constantly present, a constant winding up into panic then relaxing then slowly winding up again. i can scarcely tolerate it. it's interesting to read my posts above and realize that this has been happening to me, intermittently, for more than a decade. but the last time i remember it being this bad is about 13 years ago.

experience is a pleasant thing. to see more, to learn more, to caress the things you want and love. i can't bear that this is finite, for me or anyone else. what a curse.

I have been getting pains in my head over the last couple of days - not headaches, but like what I imagine would happen if there was, SAY, something up with the blood vessels there. Obviously a trip to the doctor will be a good idea soon if it continues, if only to reduce the list of things I could be worrying about.

Anyway, I was staying over with my girlfriend last night, and as I drifted off to sleep I suddenly thought "What if I don't wake up?* and was then fixated on the fact that at one point I'll not wake up. Full panic, sweats, the lot. I think I returned myself from the brink by considering that a lot of the people I've idolised are dead - if Ghandi could deal with it, I can't really demur.

Also the partially-but-only-ever-partially convincing "Well, when I'm dead, I won't care". Hah, and as a testament to its partiality, heart beating much faster now after just typing "when I'm dead".

But yeah, the worrying about death has been kicking in over the last few years, one of the side effects has been increased sensitivity to depictions of death, up to and ridiculously including people bouncing off my bonnet in GTA IV.

*fortunately we are both saps and said "I love you" before going to sleep. Whew!

I have calmed down. The experience of seeing my grandfather slowly dying of cancer, then seeing his dead body, has really taught me a lot.

i can't bear that this is finite, for me or anyone else. what a curse.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, February 20, 2012

I, very occasionally, get existential dread or sorta terrors about this - and its something that i could see if you open the door to that type of worry, could be difficult to let go of it again

But most of the time i try and view it as a return to the soil, to the earth

Well most of the time i don't think of it at all, but that is how I view it

Since my mother died a couple of years ago i've started to worry more about death, not just for myself but for my friends and family. I'm starting to believe that this is yet another one of those hurdles in our lives in growing up and everyone goes through it and we all handle it differently (i love that Andrew finds his empathy with the already deceased! I may adopt this technique for myself)

So as we start to hit the middle age and quite expectedly find other people we know in our lives losing theirs, it's no surprise it should be more of a focus to us.

I'll never forget when i was a teenager and my mother, who may have been about 40 then, asked me if i was afraid of death. I remember laughing it off as one of the most absurd things to worry about ever, she was horrified I felt this way. Of course she was going through the phase I too now am being privy too. I'm 38 now btw.

On top of all this, an added feeling of wanting to do more in our lives becomes apparent - but then the fear is accelerated due to the fact we now really don't want to die as we've just discovered more great things in live. or something.

i can't even conceive of being happy in the face of the knowledge of death. i guess this speaks less to logic than the way my brain chemistry is acting at the moment. maybe.

as a rule, i don't think about death. i have a switch that is mostly off when it comes to thinking about my loved ones dying. but for whatever reason that switch goes on immediately if i don't hear/see someone when i'm expecting to. i start imagining all kinds of horrific scenarios involving death or at least serious physical/mental injury.

yesterday i had planned to meet a friend in the evening, before my husband would be getting home. he had texted me about something in the morning, but i didn't hear from him the rest of the day. about the time he would be leaving work i sent him a couple texts, tried calling, no response. i could already feel the switch starting to twitch a bit, but i figured - his ph is probably on silent. but then that's weird bc he normally would text to say he's on his way home. maybe he's meeting someone and i've forgotten he told me? so i go meet my friend. over the course of dinner, i do a great job of acting happy and talky and normal, but i keep checking my ph, getting more and more panicky as it gets later and later and i haven't heard from my husband. i even email him, trying to convince myself that he probably left his ph at work. it's 8pm and on the bike ride home, i can hardly breathe bc i don't know what i'll do if i get home and he's not there. this is so wrong, he would have emailed me if he left his phone at work, he knows i worry about things like this.

well, i got home, busted through the door and there he was, chilling on the couch. but i gave him a serious fright with the look on my face, followed by 'OH MY GOD YOU'RE OKAY!!" and then i promptly burst into the hardest sobbing fit i've experienced in years.

poor guy, he felt really terrible - his ph was on silent, and while he had a tab open for his email, it had logged him out without his realizing. we hadn't planned that he would call or text me, as i knew he would be home straight after work, and he knew i would be out for the evening. but for me it was just that expectation of hearing from him in general (we text or email or talk a couple times at least over the course of a work day)and not having that expectation met, that was enough to trigger a complete meltdown.

i'm not sure why i'm posting about this, except that i still feel weirded-out today, maybe it is leftover adrenalin. it's funny too, bc ytth is always amazed at my general lack of death-anxiety - he is actually the total opposite and worries about death, particularly mine, all the time, yet if our roles had been reversed last night, he wouldn't have been any more worried about me than usual. which makes me wonder if i have some seriously bad case of subconscious death-anxiety.

FOD is kinda what motivates everything i do. i figure if i have as much variety in what i experience as possible, it sort of keeps it at bay.

A good view! There's always something to look forward to, or to explore.

basically, the distraction principle!

Sometimes, when I'm reading a book or watching a movie in which there's a scene with an autopsy or embalming or funeral or suchlike, a little voice in the back of my head says, "One day, that's going to be you." After which I get gripped by this utter, nauseating existential dread thinking about just . . . not being, while people I don't know dispose of my remains. It's like near-panic-attack levels of fear.

Happy Thursday!

as an ex once said to me, "you only get one ticket to la ronde."

I only think about death once in a blue moon. I'm a very "now" kind of person.

i feel like there is literally nothing productive about dwelling on it so i just mentally change the subject.

Agree with Scik and s1ocki - a minute spent thinking about death is a minute that you might as well have been dead.

^^ this is the pep talk i regularly give my husband. i always tell him he'll have plenty of time to feel sad if i die before him, why waste time being sad about before it's even happened??

wish i cd reason away my fear of the unreasonable

like i said best way i've found is to ignore it and try and think about something else, maybe thats not in good faith but wth

good advice but unfortunately depression kind of gets in the way of that, mind drifts to certain topics even when i consciously try to distract myself

oh

i just suffer from anxiety

haha

i get along v well with depressives tho, our neuroses are complementary

btw justine i occasionally freak out when my girlfriend is unreachable for one reason or another for a long time--i don't get mad, but i'll pace the floor and sometimes i'll cry a little when she gets home, or at least give her an unnervingly intense hug.

note that i use "depression" as kind of catch-all for a certain habit of mind, i don't really believe in "clinical depression" per se

i do

xps yeah i felt bad for him feeling bad - he felt super guilty, but it wasn't his fault at all, or anything he did wrong. it's just a weird trigger for me.

an ex of mine, who was involved in a lot of pretty shady activities, would often disappear for days at a time, without warning, and wouldn't contact me. i wouldn't sleep till he got back and then he'd get mad at me for worrying. so that may be of my problem now.

I had several paralyzing fear of death episodes throughout high school and college - a severe one brought about by reading the death of ivan ilyich! then I took a lot of acid, the end.

After which I get gripped by this utter, nauseating existential dread thinking about just . . . not being, while people I don't know dispose of my remains. It's like near-panic-attack levels of fear.

Happy Thursday!

― Julie Derpy (Phil D.), Thursday, June 28, 2012 12:48 PM (1 hour ago)

i only really get this when hi, and then only rarely

BUT ... my back "went out" the other day, and i wound up spending about 14 hours lying on the floor in near-screaming pain, basically unable to move. first time anything like that has ever happened to me, and it wasn't scary, exactly, but it did make me think lots of matter-of-fact thoughts about death. like, will anybody find me? will the cat eventually eat my lips? how often will i soil myself before i go? and so on. eventually i managed to get myself back in bed, and not long after made my way to the hospital. i'm okay now, and more than anything else, the experience seems to have kick-started my general will to live. so, a good thing on the whole. a realistic understanding of impending mortality helps keep things in perspective.

Have mentioned this before on other threads -- I don't really fear death, just any pain and debilitation leading up to it. Death itself would be kind of a relief, tbh. Finally a chance to put my feet up and relax without anybody wanting a piece of my time.

oh dont smoke weed btw

quitting that = best thing i ever did

i mean, not ever. and i'll still every once in a while. but it is BAD for FOD

real talk

xxposts to Phil D - I experience a similar feeling. If that passing thought of 'hey one day you won't exist' enters my brain, I'll have a full blown panic attack unless I shoo it away *immediately*.

Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I can't help but cry about it, but that doesn't happen much anymore.

I've been that way since I was little. I used to have random outbursts when I was very small and supposed to be going off to sleep where I'd run out into the living room crying to Mum and Dad 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die' and they'd have to calm me down. I dunno where it came from, but it's nowhere near as bad now as it was back then.

i don't know what's scarier - 1)one day you won't exist or 2)you will exist for all eternity. obv i know the latter won't happen so by default it's the former but jeez... fuck...