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.
Whenever I’m anxious about something in my life, I take a deep breath and remind myself “none of this matters.”
The idea of the universe’s indifference can be crushing, and it can be liberating.
Definitely. I take what ever is bothering me and remind myself if my entire world crashed around me tomorrow I’m not going to just drop dead or anything. Time will march on, life will go on. There may be many stages of grief and things that make me feel uncomfortable but ultimately every night I will still go to sleep and wake to start again.
Life is just a series of events. Not inherently bad, not inherently good, just the results of a universe in spin. We can direct the course of our life but if a meteor strikes tomorrow there is nothing an individual themselves could have done to stop it.
Personally I find it’s easy to not fret about it because I can’t control it. Also, I didn’t mind not existing before I was born so I won’t mind not existing when my time is up.
Made a movie about it with a toy company’s money.
Remember that the way you are right now doesn’t have to be your ending, and you can grow beyond your roots and find your humanity again.
Postmodernist cynicism had it’s time in the sun, but now it’s time for a New Sincerity: So what if you live in a world where nothing matters, when you’ve always had the capability to choose what matters to you?
Holy shit it’s Margot Robbie.
I just play her on TV sometimes.
Holy shit, it’s meta Margot Robbie.
Yay
Hey, it’s us.
Man, I can’t wait until the day I don’t exist anymore. My existential crisis is that I’m currently forced into existing.
Came here to say this. Won’t have to pay bills if I’m dead!
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.
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!
This is so anti-nihilistic that it makes me happy. Thanks for the perspective.
Sigh… unzips
I spent a lot of time as a child thinking about this.
I came to the conclusion that there’s not much I can do about it, so I’ll enjoy life while I can, although I am going to enlist in cryonics just in case.
The greatest gift is that this life eventually ends.
I’d like to be sooner than later, but it’s enough already. When I was younger, I thought the eternal life would be nice, but after contemplating it through my years, it would be worst curse for me.
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.
It wont be the first time I didnt exist
I think of how small I am in the universe. We’re all just memories at the end of the day, so try to leave nice ones.
You’ve already not existed before. And then you were born.
I miss the nothing, what I ended up with here isn’t better, and damn sure isn’t as peaceful.
You’ll be back there eventually, don’t worry.
Make the best of what you have in the mean time.
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
I see this experience as a once in a universe chance to explore. I try not to worry about the inevitable while I have control of the now. Buddhism has a great philosophy on the impermanence of things and existing in this moment.
I agree. Meditation in general - focusing on existence/experience without your mind’s narrative - would probably be good for the OP. The narrative is what is scary, because it is what’s afraid of not existing. Setting that aside can be very liberating.
Eventually you learn - not just rationally, but also behaviourally - that insignificance gives you a sort of freedom. Even if not solving the most important questions in the universe, you still got to live your life. Your pleasure might be meaningless, but so is your suffering - so you’re free to choose one, another, both, or neither.
Kind of off-topic, but regarding QM: what you’re saying is the Copenhagen interpretation. I tend to side more with Einstein in this, the moon doesn’t “magically” stop existing once you stop looking at it; it’s just that the difference between “it exists” and “it doesn’t exist” becomes insignificant from your subjective PoV.
I agree with many here in that I expect not to be any more inconvenienced by death than I was before I was born.
A thought that I appreciate that others haven’t mentioned is: The atoms that currently happen to think they’re me have previously thought they were a fish or a raccoon or a different person, or whatever, and they will, eventually, again.
Since my life is probably just ripples on a pond, I am motivated to, ideally, make an interesting, pleasant splash. I hope I’m remembered fondly for the brief time (cosmically) that I’m remembered at all.
I also hope (perhaps against reason) that humanity (and whatever replaces us) are growing more compassionate, so that whatever interesting form my current atoms might join next may also have a decent time, and have a chance to leave more pleasant memories in others.
(And hey, maybe there’s an afterlife. If so, maybe whoever runs it isn’t one of the assholes that the con artists tell us to expect. Or if they are one of those assholes we’ve been promised, maybe they can be distracted and assassinated. I plan to be ready to roll with it, just in case.)
I haven’t thought about the fact that I (what makes me up) might someday be reborn into another form in this way. It is a really comforting realasion l do thank you.
