Or does it?
I know we were once nothing, but it is still terrifying and depressing to me to think about returning to this. In fact, as of late, I’ve been unable to not think about it: the loss of all experience and all memories of everything, forever. All the good times we had, and will have, with anyone or anything ever will totally annihilate into nothingness. All our efforts will amount to nothing because the thoughtless void is ultimately what awaits everything in the end.
The only argument against this would have to be supernatural, like another cause of the Big Bang or somehow proof of reincarnation, but if my consciousness won’t exist for me to experience it, then what does it matter either way?
There is no comfort in Hell, either. The anvil of death weighing down, infinitely, on all values and passions is becoming unbearable for me, so I could really use any potentially helpful thoughts about this matter.
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Yeah, everything you listed as a negative to fear I take a different positive spin on.
I will lose all sense of regret, loss, pain, fear, and guilt instantly.
The good times are still there in the memories of the living, where they belong.
The universe being a huge uncaring void means it doesn’t matter that the world is… infected with humans. That, too, one day, will pass.
Nothing matters. Be free.I will lose all sense of regret, loss, pain, fear, and guilt instantly.
Well, sure, if you’re endlessly haunted by that stuff, yeah, but thankfully, I’m not, at least for now, so the ending of everything else would feel like a net loss to me. My view really only applies to people who like, not dislike, their life situation.
infected with humans.
You sound like a prime candidate to join the VHEM.
You don’t think if you lived FOREVER you would come to regret?
It’s your choice to let your past decisions haunt you, though. You can either focus on the pain or on the lessons learned. The past can’t be changed either way, right? It’s a matter of perspective.
I’m generally grateful for my current life situation, even if it could be better in certain ways and even though I could have certainly made better decisions in my past; the results of my choices, optimal and suboptimal, have still shaped my thinking and current day-to-day life into what it currently is. So that combined with the crumbling of my conviction of the existence of souls is what has driven me into this existential crisis, I suppose.
And how many eons could you last with an intact mind and nothing to do but to think about your past?
Also, would you have perfect recall of your entire life? Memory is a flaw of the flesh. Would you perfectly remember every moment? See the well hidden disappointment in your mom’s face you never noticed?
Well, the hope/fantasy would be that humanity would survive and figure out the universe’s heat death problem, and that we’d carry forward together. There is no point to just surviving alone, true.
Memory is a flaw of the flesh.
Memory is flawed but is not a flaw; it’s perhaps the single greatest thing we’ve (all of us organisms, human or not, have) got of life experience. If I knew I was gonna succumb to dementia and it was deemed irreversible then kill me now lol. But since we don’t know that… it’d sure be nice to retain, and have the opportunity to form new, memories and not just see all our joys or the fruit of our labor come to an end.
Yeah, I meant to say “memory is only flawed because of the flesh”
It sounds like you had an imagining of an afterlife where people were alive and living together in some form. How would that work? Sounds like a huge hassle to me personally.
had an imagining
You do know which community we’re commenting in, right? It’s not like everyone can just immediately slice off decades-long-held beliefs right away…
All the good times we had, and will have, with anyone or anything ever will totally annihilate into nothingness.
No. They will still have happened. You will still have experienced them. You can only really ever experience whatever is happening to you now. If there is only nothingness after death, then you will not experience it.
Make the most of your life in the way it make sense to you. That could be having more shared laughs with loved ones or dedicate it to saving the critically endangered purple-spotted pygmy shrew.
In short: You will experience your life, you will not experience “the great void of death”.
adding another comment as I like this woody allen quote. Its not that im afraid of dying its just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.
Ha, I think I read that many years ago. I actually might be fine with being there and even dealing with the pain to the end, however it may manifest, but it’s the lack of anything after that’s bothersome. I hope I’m wrong.
Yeah the nothingness has given me the existentials in the past but I tell you if someone tell me I could die today painlessly and cease to exist or 40 years from now but it will be from alzheimers which progresses over the last 30 years or 20 years from now an incredibly painful one. Ill take today. Maybe I will mention something I have sometimes mentioned around life. If someone dies in the prime of life or earlier and its a tragedy. Even later as they reach middle age it can be like wow they did not get a chance. You get to 50 though. And yeah its early to die that decade but you know. It happens and like that person had a life. They had their shot. To say they were robbed of having a life or such is just false at that point. Don’t get me wrong they could still have a magnus opus or something but thats unlikely. So if your younger than that I can see the anst but I bet when you get there you will start realizing that sure. It would be great to keep living. I mean consciousness is great. But you know it would be way more great if like the world were a better place and you could keep that nice youthful health. It gets to seem more like a break from this crazy locomative breath train. No idea if it helps but its just a perspective.
Oh yeah, if we knew dementia was coming for us, then screw that! But I’m more talking about the ending of even the best lives lived (whatever “best” even means). I am definitely under 40, haha.
By the way, that is a %$#@ing insane instance domain in which you joined Lemmy, haha; it sounds as awkward as it is hilarious!
yeah. the guy who put it up, originallucifer, pretty much says that was the why he chose the name in the about. I have gotten many comments loving the domain despite me being some bastard who just happened to make my account here. I was reading the faqs and abouts and such on a few different federation domains though and did just like the cut of his jib.
Another answer to persistent impact is communality. Your actions echo in the people and places you’ve shared with others.
The laws, traditions, buildings, sentiments, norms, societal wounds, environment, relationships, etc. all come from people doing things during their lifetime. You can be one of those people, and choose what your contribution and legacy could be.
What will you leave for the next generation?
You can’t affect if your consciousness will live on or not, but you can affect your conscience. Maybe start there?
I already am; for half a year now, I’ve been running regular, even near-weekly, gatherings for the public to try to fight off loneliness in my community and help people make friends. But they will all eventually die; everything you said—these relationships, the environment, law, society, the Earth, the solar system—will eventually fall apart with enough time; I’m talking about going all the way past humanity colonizing Mars, to the point of our sun—no, all such main sequence stars in the universe—eventually becoming a red giant, then a white dwarf, and finally disintegrating into black holes. Eventually it will all collapse in one way or another.
I feel like all morals are shortsighted for not looking far ahead enough (I mean faaaaaaaaar ahead, eons upon eons) at what little basis there is for themselves; we’re talking about eternity here by comparison. I guess religion’s approach is to just cap it off with heaven and/or limbo and/or hell, but any of these is still tremendously disturbing IMO.
To clarify, I’m not gonna suddenly stop running my social gatherings nor trying to help other people with their problems, but this existential crisis puts quite the dampener on everything.
Do you fear the void before birth you emerged from?
Same shit.
The 70s happened before I was born, so yes.
That’s a different situation because we hadn’t experienced life beforehand. Do you not value the memories of your own life experiences? It’s that loss that sucks.
thats debatable. There is a fair amount of evidence that the flow of time is an artifact of our perception and that nothing is really beforehand and your death is nor more in the future than your birth.
Really? Do you have any reading that you’d like to link to about this?
most of them have been videos. things like pbs space time. I will see if I can track any down but its come up haphazardly with science shows talking about relativity.
so here is one from a quick search but its a subject that comes up again and again the series. Its really nice to actually watch the series from the start as episodes will reference discussions from other episodes. The channels purpose is to explain big things as simply as possible so not exactly for the average person but someone who understands algebra and equivalent level science. From my experience finishing high school should be enough although I think most people who retain that stuff likely went to college. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkWT-xMTm1M
Yeah, but by the same uncertainty, maybe you gain all dead people’s memories when you are submerged in the void? We all just go back into the pot, so to speak.
Not having to pay rent will feel pretty great too.
Fair, we cannot truly know what happens after… but at this point in my life, I’d be glad to keep paying for everything else I’m getting, so perhaps that’s partly where this struggle comes from: net enjoyment > suffering at the moment, which I don’t want to see vanish.
I suppose it depends on how attached you are to this life. The loss of fear, worry, pain, drama, hunger, thirst, illness, etc. It might help to look at scientific talks about time. In particular if it does have a direction. Basically you perceive this thing happening in the future but that is just an artifact of existence as your future is no more separate than the past.
I think of it this way. Do you remember your great grandparents? How about your great great grandparents? How about your great great great grandparents? At some point, you’ll go, “Gee, I’ve never thought of them before.”
But do you think they mattered? You may not know what they did, what they hoped for, and the struggles they faced, but had they not existed, neither would you have. They mattered, even if you remember very little about them, and on top of that, you can probably learn about many of them with some effort in genealogy.
You may not have some cosmic importance with the power to change the world, but neither did most Christians, even when you were a believer. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean you don’t matter.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence, but consider this:
Your life is like a plate of cookies, warm and sweet and delicious, and it is best when shared with people you love. One day, that plate of cookies will be empty, but the cookies are no less delicious and the sharing no less meaningful just because there is a finite number of cookies.
One day, my plate of cookies will be empty, but if I am remembered fondly, then it will have been a life lived well. I don’t need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
if I am remembered fondly
The problem is that this doesn’t matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness? I don’t think many people understand just how vast infinity really is. You can tell yourself that your life choices matter, but that’s not the truth, given how everything goes to basically science’s version of Sheol/the OT “grave.” For them, there was no out; that was it.
It may sound cold, but what would it matter to research our ancestors’ struggles, hopes, dreams, and experiences? Struggle itself will cease to matter—collectively for everyone/everything—as well as everything else we’ve mentioned. It would sure be nice, even great, if it mattered, but I can’t see how any particular value can be objectively derived from anything given the vast entropy that awaits all things, including the permanent death of knowledge itself. Our own discussion here will crumble. It’s maddening that nothing will be untouched; nay, even nothing less than being completely obliterated. Therefore, any “well-living” of one’s life would simply be because one wants to do it, with no further basis other than just feeling good (from evolutionistic altruism or whatever provides the dopamine or serotonin, sure)—certainly not “morals,” which technically don’t exist and were just collectively agreed upon to sustain hive minds’ survival. And while I’m certainly not gonna suddenly go immoral…
That severely bothers me.
I don’t need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
It’s not about importance to other people or beings; it’s just about our own continued experience of experience itself. If you won’t be there, why does what anything you struggle for matter? If you cause someone more pain… they’ll eventually just die anyway! If you fight to reduce waste and help other people reduce pain in their lives or others’… they’ll all just die anyway! “But for the span of their lives, they’ll have felt better/worse”—so what? There is no basis for any valuing of one way or another relative to the absolutely immense size of eternity that awaits after such a speck of < a century of some more/less suffering/enjoyment. Am I missing something here? Seriously, I hope I am, but this is all I can conclude.
I feel like the only consolation is that those in massive suffering (whether physical or otherwise) will eventually find “peace” through death, even though nothingness is technically not actual peace, either; the phrase, “lay to rest,” seems to ultimately be still more anthropomorphizing and feel-good comfort, to me anyway, for basically anyone who isn’t in the height of constant, unavoidable pain.
With that said (and I mentioned this in another comment elsewhere here), the ace in the hole that completely throws my argument for a loop is the potential development of anti-aging technology should we be able to get anything like it, thanks to all the billionaires striving for it these years. It really resonated with me when Seth McFarlane said in The Orville about whether one would choose to live forever or not: “I want to see what happens next.” If we can actually achieve that, then there’d be a better argument… in my understanding, anyway.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence
Not really; I just want permanence regardless, lol.
The problem is that this doesn’t matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness?
It doesn’t. But I’m a cosmic nihilist, so the impermanence of everything we do doesn’t bother me. Whether it lasts forever does not change the present, and I will make this one life I know I have as good as I can, since I must experience it, and I will make others’ lives as good as I can, because it does not make me feel good to do otherwise. I have no control over death or its imminence, so what good does it do me to worry about it?
I just want permanence regardless, lol.
I’m sure a lot of people do, but it doesn’t exist, as you already pointed out. Even anti-aging medicine can’t stop the heat death of the universe. Trying to hold onto that wish won’t make it real, and it seems like all it’s doing is giving you anxiety. Dwelling on those things can feel like trying to solve a problem, but it’s one without a solution that only accomplishes frustration and worry.
Life is beautiful, is worth living in the present, because it’s fragile and rare. I have the unique opportunity to be the universe experiencing itself, and worrying about permanence won’t change that.
Thanks, good thoughts all around.
I don’t know if my input is wanted here but you should know everyone, everyone goes through this feeling at some point. We are so beautiful because we are so small and temporary.
One day the bones of the universe will crumple to nothingness in what we call heat death (we don’t know if this is accurate but the thought exercise is still valuable) and time itself will cease to have any real meaning. But you were real, you still happened, and nothing can change that. You’re beautiful because you’re a speck. If you’re ex-faithful you may have come to internalize that it’s by chance we exist at all (though I don’t know or want to tell you what to believe). It is by chance that an asteroid didn’t kill us in our pre-history like the dinosaurs. It is by chance that we developed cognizance and things like music and culture. It is by chance that the Cold War didn’t go hot and kill us all in the 80s. Every single day is a miracle. We are so gloriously, exultantly insignificant.
It’s true, I had forgotten about Einstein’s saying, that we can treat nothing as a miracle or everything as miracles. Thanks for the reminder.
And dude, spoilers! I haven’t seen BR yet lol. Anyway, I do appreciate your thoughts.
There’s no use in fearing the inevitable. It will come, whether you like it or not, and no amount of fighting can stop it. Fearing it only makes you focus on some indeterminate time in the future and lose sight of the now.
But we plan for the future and take action accordingly. How many of your actions are rooted in just fighting boredom versus addressing future matters, after all? This does influence everything. It’s sort of leading me to live more in the moment to the point of procrastinating on issues that I’d normally probably try to address more promptly…
Planning for the future has nothing to do with whether or not one fears death. And it’s perfectly okay to live more in the moment, because the moment is all we have. The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now. So go ahead, procrastinate a little! The vast majority of our problems are not so time-critical that an hour long walk is going to ruin your future. Treating yourself to a coffee and a donut every now and then doesn’t leave you fated to be destitute in 5 years.
The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now.
Sounds like you’ve read The Power of Now. I never did finish that book… Thanks for the reminder. Now… *continues to procrastinate on taxes*
Embrace the void, like the womb it is. Safe, tranquil, forever at peace. Closest thing to a real heaven
The loss of my memories is not something I look forward to (again, presuming that’s what would actually happen).
Without trying to sound too metaphysical. I look at it this way. The atoms that make up my body were forged in the hearts of stars. These atoms have existed in some form across the universe for billions of years.
I don’t remember what patterns my atoms were before they became this one, and I don’t know what pattern these atoms will take once I am done with them, but these atoms will remain.
This consciousness that has arisen from this pattern of atoms may give way to a different consciousness in a different pattern of atoms in some untold amount of time. While this consciousness may not know of that one, and that one may not remember this, it eases my mind to know that the stardust that originated these atoms will still exist.
It eases my mind to know that in the infinite void of nothingness, this pattern of atoms and this consciousness have impacted those around me. The short period of time that this consciousness is around gives me the opportunity to experience the wonderful breadth of the human condition, because this will be the only time these atoms are in this exact pattern. Every moment of my existence I am unique.
I am of the universe, I have experienced the universe, and others have experienced the universe through me.
this will be the only time these atoms are in this exact pattern. Every moment of my existence I am unique.
True, very interesting thought!
I’ve had an overall decent life. I still have a lot of time to live with my friends and family. But I take solace in the fact that I will just cease to exist when I die. Or obviously, that’s my opinion anyways.
I don’t want to argue my beliefs, but that’s how I feel about it.
It seems like a just end. Literally nothing. A final sleep.
Yeah, I suppose I’m being too greedy or something. Thanks for sharing.
I’m sorry.
I did not want to imply anything on your view(s) with my post. I just wanted to say my personal feelings.
You shouldn’t feel guilty or anything based on what I said.
But I’m here if you want to chat.
Again, don’t feel bad about what you feel based on my post.
Oh, no, I had no issue with your thoughts! I literally meant what I said and that perhaps I should just learn to cherish the time in our lives more and not try to struggle for something that’s effectively, most likely unattainable. I don’t know; I’m still thinking about it, but no, you said nothing wrong or problematic. It’s a difficult topic no matter how you slice it…
I used to be scared of death, too, then I realised how terrible life was. Now I look forward to it so there will be no more suffering. Oblivion is better than pain. I’m still scared of the pain of dying, just not of what may lie beyond.
For all we know it’s an eternity of being frozen in whatever instant you were in at the moment of death. The people who die in their sleep literally get eternal slumber but the people who get chainsaw accidents get a moment of limb tearing pain stretched to eternity
Probably not though, probably your thing
It might be anything, we have no way of knowing. Hopefully it’s not reincarnation, as most lives on this planet are worse than mine.
Well, life for me currently is not terrible, so while oblivion is certainly better than pain, satisfaction and fulfillment are better than either. If my life situation changes, though, I may join your ranks.
Practice radical acceptance
There is no benefit in attaching ourselves to the suffering and rumination of that which cannot be changed. We practice radical acceptance in this instance because it, more than any other instance, is unchangeable. Allow yourself to feel the frustration, sadness, grief, anger, etc that you feel when you think about death but allow yourself to let the thoughts pass by rather than attaching to them. If you struggle with it (which of course you will, you’re only human) reflect any analyze your resistance to being able to accept.
It takes practice. There’s a lot more to it, I’m paraphrasing a lot. It’s worth reading about if you’re really struggling
I had forgotten about this phrase, thanks. I had thought “radical acceptance” was just about one’s individual, undesirable personality traits or physical appearance, but I apparently haven’t read much into this topic! I’d appreciate any resources.
https://hopeway.org/blog/radical-acceptance
I don’t endorse this website necessarily but skimming the content this page seems like a solid overview
The classic therapy book is “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha” by Tara brach
But that hints at what it really is: radical acceptance is really co-opting the Buddhist concept of equanimity (upekkha), one of the four sublime states. We have co-opted mindfulness from this as well and made it something a bit removed from its original form
https://www.buddhanet.net/ss06/
“But the kind of equanimity required has to be based on vigilant presence of mind, not on indifferent dullness. It has to be the result of hard, deliberate training, not the casual outcome of a passing mood”
Yet many mindfulness “apps” are the opposite of this, promoting indifference. They miss the point. A takeaway from my post, if nothing else, is that this takes effort and diligence
A similar concept is 不動心 or fudoshin, the “immovable mind” from Japanese martial arts
https://www.amardeep.co/blog/how-to-use-fudoshin-the-right-way-to-be-unstoppable
Although a lot of the writings on this are like this, about endless achievement and goal orientation. This is not without merit of course but because of the association with martial arts you get a lot of “dojo people” writing on how to get to the next level, instead of a focus on inner peace. That may align with your goals though and it certainly has its applications
We were never nothing. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
I’m talking about our consciousness, though. It doesn’t matter what the individual atoms do if we individually end up losing our own capacity to experience the best that our lives have to offer (unless you’re beset by some major chronic illness, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about here).
However, if you believe death isn’t the end, I’d love to read your thoughts because I’d love for it to not be true. All the evidence suggests that it is, though…
It doesn’t matter to our current consciousness as it can’t perceive anything outside of that. We do not know what is beyond our rudimentary understanding of what makes us who we are.
Something like this seems far more likely to me than consciousness being finite.
Keyword being like this, as in whatever is actually going on is far beyond our comprehension, but it’s a nice palatable story that gives it shape. Consciousness might exist beyond death as part of a universal ‘field of awareness’ and reality could be a holographic projection from a deeper non local field of information. Upon death the quantum information could “return” to the universe (orchestrated objective reduction), Monadism, fractal consciousness, pantheism, etc.
I read that short story years back, yeah. I am also aware of the possibility that we could be in a lifelong simulation, which actually sort of falls back in line with Christian thought about this life just being a prelude to the real one.
I guess I just wish we had to go off more than merely hypothesizing…
Nothing can stop the good times we’ve had from having happened.
Sure, the events are locked into the frozen river of the past, but they only matter if we can remember them. At least, that’s how I can’t seem to not see it as…
