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.
My friend invites me to her party.
I have two options. I can tell her no, because as fun as the party will be, I can’t handle the fact that it’s going to end a few hours after I get there. Or, I can go and have fun, despite knowing that it’s going to end.
I can’t help you, but I can tell you that if you hold out for a couple of decades, you’ll eventually stop worrying about it.
One day, you’ll realize that you wake up in pain and suffer through most of the day; that you are constantly annoyed that young people think they’re the first and only people to discover or experience things that you’ve seen people discover and experience countless times - but you are also hopelessly jaded and desperately envious of their naivety and ability to be passionate about something other than injustice. That despite fighting for decades to improve the world, and believing in some cosmic karma, you see evil people succeed over, and over, and have a deep recognition that the world is fucked and getting more fucked with every dollar. When this time comes, the Void will become appealing: a rest and relief from pain and suffering. One day, you will realize that you no longer lay awake at night anxiously fretting about not being alive, but are rather looking forward to it.
Hang in there, man.
Thanks pretty depressing. But it’s nice to know that this will get better with time so thanks.
You absolutely nailed it. This has been my exact experience.
Radical acceptance. Do I want to cease to exist? Not particularly. Is it going to occur whether I want it or not? Yup. Is there some kind of afterlife? That’s a boring question and I really don’t care - there’s no way that I can possibly know until I’m gone.
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.
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?
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.
I thought that once, and then I came to the conclusion that if the universe is infinite and time is as well, our atom arrangement will almost certainly happen again in the future. Essentially creating a new self, that is not aware of its previous self, but has the same kind of consciousness… As far as we can tell in an endless cycle.
Welcome back, Mr Nietzsche. How long are you going to stay?
Can you explain how that is responsive to the relief that this subjectivity gets to exit the stage?
I’ll try. For example, our nightly state that forms a sort of split in our stream of consciousness is similar.
It’s a bit like saying you are happy life is over when you go to bed, but in reality there’s a pretty good chance you’ll start a dream state which you might not remember afterwards.
Still, even if you might not remember a nightmare, you don’t want a form of yourself to experience it. As you know in that ‘now’ it will be suffering for that version of yourself.
I think I might be self-specific psychopath, as I can’t gin up much beyond mild sympathy for some other instance of the self whose outcomes I can’t influence.
Could be, or maybe I’m the over-anxious one being too emphatic. But I can just imagine there will be a moment that I’m going to be that instance of self, which will experience the world similar to me.
Like it’s as much me as the me in one hour is going to be me. As long as our chemical setup is the same, with (roughly) the same organization of atoms and thus having the same brain, I can relate as I know exactly how it feels.
Man, I can’t wait until the day I don’t exist anymore. My existential crisis is that I’m currently forced into existing.
You and me both.
That one is easy
Ha yeah, I kinda have this outlook too a lot of days.
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.
Having this conversation with a friend once, he told me what helped him.
Do you remember anything from before you were born? The hundreds of thousands of years before your existence? Did you spend it experiencing nothing all before you finally were born and began to experience something? Of course not.
You’ve already done a millennia of non-existence. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t scary. You’re not something that started and will eventually cease to exist. You are something that didn’t exist, and then eventually, you did. Sure, you’ll go back there one day, but that’s just it: you’re not going to a new place. You’ve been there before, and it was fine, just as it will be when you’re there again.
Reminds me of a quote I find kinda comforting:
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain
The thing that helped me was “let go or be dragged”.
Death will happen whether I stress out about it or not. Stressing about it just contaminates the time you have. So I gradually learned to focus more on the “isn’t existence weird?!” than “death is coming”. And when you really get into the swing of it, your limited time becomes timeless.
I think you will need to make the transition from negative nihilism to positive nihilism.
Aside from that I don’t think I’m really convinced that interpreting the quantum wave function collapse when observed as the world not being loaded when you aren’t looking at it is accurate. Even our best explanations could likely be a misinterpretation of what is really happening.
This channel is great by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP6iyVJ70OU
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.
That it is ultimately inconsequential is the reason for me to relax and enjoy what we have right now. Easier said than done, of course, but the way I think of it is this: if nothing I do matters, then it doesn’t really matter what I do. And when I find myself taking things too seriously, it helps to be reminded of it. Life is absurd, but it doesn’t matter, so why not have some silly fun in the meanwhile?
What the ultimate reality of things are doesn’t really matter to us living in this reality. To whatever end this reality was created for, if, for example, we’re just a simulation, we can’t really know and at the end of the day, shouldn’t really care about. It’s literally (in both senses of the term) way beyond us.
This is a really liberating way to think about life basically making the most out of a really shitty situation. Instead of dreading death take comfort in the fact that what ever you do is meaningless. Thank you for this.
You’re welcome. Others might think it’s too bleak, and I sort of agree. But it’s freeing, as you’ve said. It allows us to focus on the here and now. And while we’re here (for whatever reason, be it by choice or not), why not enjoy what we can?
heh I juet dont
Come to the conclusion that you already havent existed for the previous at least 13.7 million years. Now you exist and after that you won’t exist again.