>> but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.
As I exited my 20's and entered my 30's, I had to deal with several deaths in the family and having to finally deal with my own mortality, this has affected me in profound ways.
I've done the same thing you have, albeit with several movie trilogies. I skipped the last Matrix movie, I refused to go see the last LOTR movie (even though I read the books when I was in my teens and knew what was going to happen), and the same thing in the Divergent series.
It's practically become a common theme in my life - some sort of psychological avoidance to have to deal with the ending of a story, the emotions and the emptiness of something I pursued for so long, now at an end.
> I've also known for many, many years that one day I will be dead. There's plenty of existential dread in death, yet I continue my existence building up to it.
How old are you? Because maybe we can reach immortality, but probably only if you are positioned properly for that. Anyway, for me the main drive is also curiosity on what is going to happen in the future. It's like this crazy story I want to know how it ends. I don't want to die, because I want to know what happens. Dying would be like going to sleep on a cliffhanger. I'll just prefer to binge rather than sleep.
> Now, almost, 10 years later it just feel like it never happen, memories are fading fast as I went with settled life.
Dang. As a nerd in his late 20s thinking the same, you make it sound pretty bleak, tbh. I guess it's just time for me to settle down, then go explore the world with my partner because that's what matters EOD.
> For me, the fear is not of dying, but of permanently losing the potential to ever experience any aspect of life again. It's an unsettling thought that I will never be able to experience fun, laughter, love, or success again. I won't have ideas, I won't hope, I won't dream. My conscious mind will simply join the eternal void and cease to exist.
Sure, but that's no different than before you were born, and that wasn't so bad.
Perhaps, but then none of it has meaning. Personally, I'm not really interested in having meaningless experiences.
> There's plenty of existential dread in death, yet I continue my existence building up to it.
But that's an entirely different thing. I am of the opinion that it's death that helps give life meaning. I have no existential dread about it whatsoever.
A life without meaning, however, seems like a pointless waste of time to me.
> We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia.
Now here, I disagree. If someone offered me to become displaced in time, being frozen most of the time, but waking up for a few months or a year (assuming I’d not be pennyless on the street) every decade or century, I’d love it until I tire and either retire in the "now" or end my life.
I love that my life will eventually end, I hate that I won’t be able to see everything to come.
My humble opinion is that people have not thought that enough. I mean, eternity is a damn long time. I can somehow imagine my brain/consciousness/whatnot to find new and interesting stuff to engage with for a few thousand years, and that is stretching it a lot. Much more likely we are talking about a few hundred years and there is a real possibility that I am completely fed up with this world before I turn 100 years old.
And now let's start stacking those years. So, say a billion years. Meaning a million thousand year periods. I get shivers just thinking I should be hanging around that long. And what comes to eternity, we have not even started yet.
I can't think of eternal life as being anything but worst imaginable hell (regardless whether it would be in heaven or hell).
(Admittably, I would be curious to know how how the story of humanity progresses and most likely ends at some point)
You are a defeatist, aren't you? This entire thing has literally scared you into not fulfilling the genetic imperative, ending your own genetic line because you think that perhaps you may have an easier, simpler life and death this way. No need to expose yourself to the suffering of others you love, no need to invest yourself in tomorrow - just watch it all go, knowing that when you inevitably shuffle off the coil nobody is going to mind a bit.
Sad. Sorry to hear it. It's always a shame when an intelligent person chooses to ignore the sacrifice every one of their ancestors made to bring them to this point, just so that they don't have to risk the potential of having any hardship themselves. I do sincerely hope that you accomplish something great in your life that makes it otherwise worthwhile for them; to know that generations of people eked by just for you to play video games all day would be a truly disappointing conclusion.
> all of the moments that make me and everything I care about are still there, occupying their own spacetime regions, eternal, in a way.
Yes but not evolving anymore. What sucks isn't really not existing anymore, what do sucks is having no future. If a supervillain's evil plan was eternally freezing the universe right now, I would be as sad as if it was making it disappear.
> What if there's nothing after death... for the rest of eternity?
I have been mulling over this for some weeks now, more intensely than ever before in my life. I'm only 24 but still terrified of the concept, and frankly it's poisoned every waking hour with a mild to extreme sense of dread and foreboding. My mind tends to fixate and freak out over life problems it can't solve, and this is the ultimate one that no one can solve. I'm glad that I still have a lot of my life ahead of me, but I can't stop fixating on the infinite nothingness afterwards and what that truly means. It's to the point that doing enjoyable things day to day feels worthless and just reminds me that it's still all going to end, no matter what I do, and sends me back down a spiral of fear.
I know rationally that I shouldn't let it get to me, because there's nothing I can do, but that just makes me apathetic and hopeless. I'm hoping this is a phase that will just pass but if anyone has real advice for how to move through this I would be very grateful.
> I can understand the concept of ceasing to exist. I have not had anyone be able to explain to me why that makes that person so afraid, other than the fact that it just does.
Hard to explain (surprising to even have to explain), but it seems worth a shot. Consider a degenerative mental disease like Alzheimer's; does the idea of suffering from that, or someone in your family suffering from that, bother you? Why? If the disease robbed you/them of all sense of self, including any part of you/them that would be bothered by it, does that mean there's no harm done because you/they are no longer aware of it? Assuming you find that concept as horrific as I do, then a more permanent loss of any "sense of self" should be quite analogous.
Both are horrifying atrocities. Both need to stop. And I don't understand how the latter can seem any less horrific than the former. Yet far more attention is paid to the former, while a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day.
> You're talking about interacting with other people in happiness for eternity. I specifically said "forever on this earth", not "forever, period". I don't think you can achieve what you're talking about on this earth. We've had centuries of modern civilization to figure out how to stop both large-scale wars and petty relationship spats, and it's debatable whether we'll reach a level that has no pain. Yes, we've gotten better, especially if you read some of the literature on the topic, but age-old problems remain and I find no reason to think that they'll one day disappear.
Fixing mortality is one of many things that needs to happen. Given all the time in the world, I'm quite confident we can fix the various lesser problems (and next to mortality, everything is a lesser problem). Fixing scarcity would go a long way. AI (or something very much like it) seems like the surest path, though it requires a great deal of care to get right.
And I don't see why we should be limited to "this earth", or "this universe" if it turns out there are others. Forever is a very long time.
I have hope. And more importantly, I'm working towards those goals.
> I actually deal with my worries about this issue in a comment below. I think people go about this subject very selfishly without thinking of the greater consequences.
If you're referring to your comment about economic disparity making longevity a privilege: probably, but not for long. It's too important not to make universally available. And to be explicitly clear: I don't think anyone should die; I'm not just worried about myself or those I care about (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about them more). But I think it's entirely possible to build a world in which nobody dies.
That itself may lead to problems, but they'll be problems worth having and worth solving, and we'll have plenty of time to solve them.
> The worse part was that after going through the motions, I had absolutely nothing to show for it. That empire I built, gone. The world I "saved", disappeared as soon as the PC was off.
This isn't any different than real life. Everything you will ever do or build will disappear (to you) as soon as you die. If you're the type who believes in leaving a legacy, then consider the heat death of the universe instead of your personal death.
> I do not know how much longer I have in the world. It may be 1 year, it may be 20. What I do know is that for my current mental health, I work to get to a place where I can greet death as a long-lost friend
Wise words. None of us know whether today is the day we die, so we develop coping mechanisms, from keeping ourselves busy with other things, to faith in religion or technology, to sobbing at the inevitability of our death and the death of the people we love.
There is also peace in surrender, in truly accepting that we are powerless to prevent it. If we fight it we will fail, like so many before us. Thus, we live, we enjoy the time we have with the people we love, and we die.
> It's the one thing that's consistently sat in the back of my mind since age 5 and hasn't left
Sounds like my son. He's been having occasional existential crises since about that age (he is 10 now). I don't remember worrying about it myself at such a young age, though I definitely have thought about it too much as an adult. I've learned that lying awake at 2am in bed is the worst possible time for that thought to occur. Just have to turn on the lights in that case, and find something productive to do.
I keep telling myself that I didn't notice the billions of years before my birth, so I won't notice the ones following either. Life is infinitely long, from my own perspective.
Immediately when I first heard about it I thought, wow, this is fantastic, because death is a really bad thing. I believe it was mostly reading the book Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey, although I may have heard about some related ideas on various websites before that.
> And how long would you want to live for?
Certainly at least a couple hundred years, and by that point I'd have time to think about how much longer I'd want. I don't really see a reason why I'd want less than infinite time if it were possible.
> I’ve never understood the philosophy behind life extension research, because to me it seems like a case of spending a lot of resources in the hope of improving something that isn’t really broken.
I've spent several decades working really hard, or studying. Although I hope I'll have a great time in the next several decades, I sure do want more.
Also, I have many things I want to do that I know I won't have time to do in one currently normal lifetime. There are several projects like books I'd write that I will probably not get a chance to do, because there are so many other things I want to do also.
Basically the rough outline of my schedule for the next 40-50 years is pretty packed. Obviously I'm going to prioritize and so a bunch of things will be pushed off the list, but I'd really like to do all the things on the list, plus have plenty of time for general entertainment, social life, and so on.
That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that passed before I was born and expect to have no memory, feelings or consciousness after I have died. I just won't be here any more and that's perfectly okay.
> I can't honestly say whether I find eternal life more appealing than permanent death.
Unless you believe in some sort of immortal soul which might blossom into something other than a human consciousness after death, immortality is horrifying. A human mind wasn't evolved to live eternally, and doing so may well be a nightmare. Or maybe we'd just start to forget at some point and hemorrhage past centuries... that would be an extraordinary sadness to me.
> Also, I used to hold the illusion that I'd always have my family and parents to talk to. But that's not true either.
This. I used to think that way, then I lost my dad from cancer on my 20's. That's when you reflect on all the things you'll never be able to experience together.
Although I'm only 24 and still young, my piece of advice would be to enjoy your family to the fullest, because no one knows what tomorrow will bring.
> The families often are in almost some sort of denial
It was like pulling teeth to try to get doctors to tell me anything realistic.
I don't get the impression that anyone in the medical community is trying to change this.
Unlike my other family members, I had seen this person once a month obviously deteriorating in line with what every prognosis and statistic would say. My other family members were there every day and couldn't or weren't willing to see the progression. This isn't a movie with a pleasant ending. The only hope is for the suffering to end, from my perspective, and in hindsight, yes, it was a spot on analysis.
With regard to the doctors, now that part was just like in the movies. They hemmed and hawed and made sad empathic expressions, but didn't explain the possibilities at all. They just assume everyone is in a state of stupor, they probably assumed my rapid conclusions were some desensitized state of shock, just as they assumed my other family members clinging to hope was an equally dismissible state of denial.
As I exited my 20's and entered my 30's, I had to deal with several deaths in the family and having to finally deal with my own mortality, this has affected me in profound ways.
I've done the same thing you have, albeit with several movie trilogies. I skipped the last Matrix movie, I refused to go see the last LOTR movie (even though I read the books when I was in my teens and knew what was going to happen), and the same thing in the Divergent series.
It's practically become a common theme in my life - some sort of psychological avoidance to have to deal with the ending of a story, the emotions and the emptiness of something I pursued for so long, now at an end.
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