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How do you deal with a existential crisis?

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.

HappyMeatbag ,
@HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org avatar

Most of what happens in the world would happen regardless of whether I existed or not, so even while I’m alive, the impact of my existence is negligible. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I won’t know or care when I’m gone, either. It seems futile to waste any of my short life worrying about the inevitable.

Glide , (edited )

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.

daanzel ,

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

Zippy ,

Now I am depressed about all that list time I can never get back.

Glide ,

By the same logic, you have infinite more ahead of you.

xilliah ,

I think it’s a positive thing because you’ve found another perspective.

quinnly ,

I don’t know if I ever came to terms with it, the thought of one day not existing has always brought me a level of deep comfort. Maybe try looking at it as a good thing instead of a bad thing.

homoludens ,

How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?

I don’t. I think it’s fucking unfair and I would rather live for a much, much longer time. But I can’t change anything about it, so I try not to think about it. Fortunately this world is full of wonders so there is a lot to distract me. Just looking at clouds - they`re fucking huge and diverse and constantly changing and have so many shades of different colors.

PenguinJuice ,

Watch some near death experience videos on YouTube. It's comforting.

shinigamiookamiryuu ,

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.

joucker29 OP ,

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!

radix ,
@radix@lemm.ee avatar

This is so anti-nihilistic that it makes me happy. Thanks for the perspective.

Agent641 ,

Sigh… unzips

RizzRustbolt ,

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.

newIdentity ,

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

Braindead ,

You keep on existing (at least for now)

Montagge ,
@Montagge@kbin.social avatar

I don't really care, and I don't really enjoy existing

Illecors ,

The point of existence is to be happy, not the existence itself. I’ve found what and who I love and I’m happy. Fretting over something so inevitable feels like a massive waste of time.

sxan ,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

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.

joucker29 OP ,

Thanks pretty depressing. But it’s nice to know that this will get better with time so thanks.

Tyfud ,

You absolutely nailed it. This has been my exact experience.

rufus ,

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.

Yondoza ,

True! Add do that 13 million the 13 billion years before that too!

Then it gets fun! You can think about whether you didn’t exist before the big bang! Did you not exist, or since the universe didn’t exist and you couldn’t exist can you count that as you not existing?

SpiderShoeCult ,

The same nagging notion sometimes claws at my brain as well.

The notion of consciousness not existing is especially troublesome for me to wrap my mind around. Logic says that no consciousness means nothing to perceive said lack of consciousness, therefore no loss there (for the subject, of course). That somehow… does not make it any better.

First time I’ve been through general anaesthesia I was wondering what it’d be like and a bit fearful of it. Happened in an instant, and I woke up what felt like immediately. Afterwards my conscious mind fixed that with perhaps artificially introducing passage of time to make everything fit. If I think back now, I certainly know some time had passed. But had it? And how much? No idea. Clock said around 3 hours, so I’ll go by that.

Shortly thereafter I had a massive bleed and lost about 1/3 of my blood (by looking at amount of hemoglobin before and after the event). The more I lost, the less coherent I was and the less anything mattered. By the time I got to the ER, I had tunnel vision and survival mode on. But I wasn’t scared for some odd reason… nothing mattered much. Not sure how close I came to actual death then, but it felt pretty close.

What I can advise… enjoy what you can, and don’t waste your hate on anything. It’s pretty much not worth it. Unless your life or the life of loved ones is in immediate danger, screw it. Guy cut you off in traffic? Fuck’em. It’s not worth shortening your life for some rando with not enough respect for himself or others as to break the social contract. Just choose your preferred intensity of sustainable (for you) hedonism and go from there.

I also hope it gets easier with age, but the prospect of becoming more jaded that I am now is not appealing. Though if it makes everything easier…

I will say this, though. Not existing was (probably?) fine. But being brought into existence just for it to be taken away after a blink of an eye (in terms of billions of years of non-existence vs the average lifespan) seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

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