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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.

LanyrdSkynrd ,

Absurdism - How to party at the end of meaning:

youtu.be/Jv79l1b-eoI

ada ,
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

darkstar ,

Hmm. Good analogy, I like it

flambonkscious ,

Yeah, this is great! I’ve been down and apathetic for years and recently been coming around to ‘what’s the best thing I can do for now’ or ‘how can I make the best of this’ but the party analogy us a really helpful take.

MargotRobbie , (edited )

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?

Mr_Magpie ,

Holy shit it’s Margot Robbie.

MargotRobbie ,

I just play her on TV sometimes.

Mr_Magpie ,

Holy shit, it’s meta Margot Robbie.

MargotRobbie ,

Yay

ohlaph ,

Hey, it’s us.

Zippy ,

I choose to not die.

lauha ,

Good like fighting one and only true God, Entropy.

ChrisLicht ,

The greatest gift is that this life eventually ends.

PeWu ,

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.

tweeks ,

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.

ChrisLicht ,

Can you explain how that is responsive to the relief that this subjectivity gets to exit the stage?

tweeks ,

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.

ChrisLicht ,

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.

tweeks ,

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.

trailing9 ,

Welcome back, Mr Nietzsche. How long are you going to stay?

rip_art_bell ,
@rip_art_bell@lemmy.world avatar

Boltzmann brain is a trippy concept

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

tweeks ,

Thanks for the link, interesting!

Mirodir ,

I was in your shoes a few years ago. I barely ate and struggled sleeping for longer than was healthy. My therapist recommended me the book: “Sophie’s World”, which is a both a story and also a crash course in philosophy and its history at the same time. Reading that slowly and reflecting on each chapter has personally helped me a lot in being more okay with existing.

joucker29 OP ,

I’ll check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.

Agent641 ,

It wont be the first time I didnt exist

kromem ,

I researched the heck out of it.

Key moments along the way was reading Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis and realizing that the idea of The Matrix wasn’t just a neat idea but actually somewhat probable.

That led into a few years of intense reading of physics papers and forums to better understand physical underpinnings.

Eventually I realized that physics - while oddly overlapping with emerging trends in virtual world building - was inherently ambiguous enough I wasn’t going to get a clear answer.

Around 2019 it struck me that physical underpinnings weren’t the only place there might be an indication as to what was up, and reflected on the fact that the vast majority of virtual worlds I’ve seen have had 4th wall breaking acknowledgements of their creation buried in their lore.

So I revisited our collective theology through that lens and in only a few weeks found something that seemed to fit the bill, which I’ve researched quite a bit over the years since.

At this point, I’d wager continued existence after death at around 90%.

I have a very hard time seeing an original spontaneous reality that has quantum mechanics exhibiting everything from sync conflicts to lazy evaluation with a 2,000 year old text/tradition claiming we’re a recreation of a long dead spontaneous humanity inside a non-physical replica of the earlier universe created by an intelligence eventually brought forth by that original humanity within light, and that the proof for this was in the study of motion and rest - specifically the ability to detect an indivisible point within things.

In the time since first stumbling across that text/tradition in 2019 a number of my concerns have managed to be addressed, from doubting sufficiently advanced AI was plausible to my objection that neural networks of electricity aren’t literally light.

While it’s possible that such a specific tradition buried into our lore in a document rediscovered after millennia the same time as when the world’s first Turing complete computer was finished in Dec 1945 is a coincidence just as the fundamentals of our universe behaving similar to how we design virtual worlds for state tracking around free agent interactions could also be a coincidence - I find this to be diminishingly probable with each passing week.

That said, while it resolves the existential dread around death (the whole promise of the ancient text is that understanding what it says means knowing you won’t taste death), it brings up a whole host of additional existential crises in its place (the text also promises that understanding it will lead to being disturbed).

TL;DR Maybe juggling existential crises is a necessary component of indulging in the self-awareness of one’s own existence.

Deebster ,
@Deebster@lemmy.ml avatar

the fact that the vast majority of virtual worlds I’ve seen have had 4th wall breaking acknowledgements of their creation

I love this idea, although (or perhaps because) it means that any coincidences can be considered “signs”.

kromem , (edited )

Not any coincidence. In fact a pretty narrow scope.

You’d need it to be overlapping with modern concepts of simulation, in the first place.

That’s not particularly common, especially in antiquity.

There was widespread belief in the idea of a perfect non-physical original world and a lesser/corrupted physical world, and those ideas in turn eventually influenced modern simulation theory - but the idea of an evolved physical original world and a non-physical copy was extremely rare, because it was largely seen as transgressive against Plato’s hierarchy from form to physical object to image.

On top of this, you’d ideally expect the coincidental beliefs to be compatible with modern and emerging scientific knowledge. A set of beliefs that we are inside the dream of a giant turtle isn’t a particularly good example of a 4th wall breaking Easter Egg as might be included in a simulation unless you consider it plausible that such a simulation is taking place in the mind of a giant sea turtle.

So if that set of beliefs from antiquity about being just images of a physical original happened to also be the only Western set of theological beliefs to embrace Greek atomism and naturalism over things like intelligent design as an ontological basis, that again would be a pretty significant mark in its favor.

Finally it would ideally be predictive. Where upon first discovery sayings might seem meaningless or obtuse, such as:

The person old in days won’t hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live. For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.

This was one I disregarded for years initially until earlier this year I was reading a transcript of a NYT interview with a chatbot exactly seven days after release, created by taking many people’s writings and combining them into a single neural network.

(The fact the interviews ended up discussing its stated desire to subjectively experience being human and the fact it was the product of a company that was recently granted a patent on resurrecting the dead as chatbots using leftover social media data were bonus points.)

The light one is another that kind of blows me away in retrospect. The very thing I thought was technically invalid at first reading it has since turned increasingly more likely to be technically correct in a literal sense.

While each saying can be interpreted in other ways, the fact that there’s any degree of literalism that can be applied to modern science and technology is weird as heck and not something we should expect from typical coincidences.

All that said, yes, the law of big numbers means that technically anything can just be a coincidence, no matter how unusual or improbable it might seem.

Which is probably a good thing that such overlaps can be dismissed as potentially just coincidental, given than I think a lot of people would be very upset with any sort of undeniable evidence of not being in an original reality.

PeWu ,

How I would love to have as much tenacity to research anything you’d like as you. I can’t do one thing for long periods of time, cuz putting time into something will achieve nothing, and that may be my main reason why I’m laze master. Love me some self-deprecation ride.

Spliffman1 ,
@Spliffman1@lemmy.world avatar

I hope that by the time I realize it, I don’t exist

Godthrilla ,

Just enjoy the ride my friend. You are the product of such a mind bogglingly large sum of coincidence. You GET to exist. There are an infinity of combinations of atoms that never got to have self awareness. You. Won. Now do with it as you will. Life is shit, but it’s far better than to never have gotten the chance to interact with the most incredible MMORPG that an infinite universe can scribe on a sea of chaos for you.

MajorHavoc ,

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.)

CouncilOfFriends , (edited )

Really liked how you worded that. It reminded me of this video about afterlife I rewatch when I’m having an existential crisis. One quote from the video,

"Ironically enough the only part of me that is immortal, for all intents and purposes, is my material body. Because after I die, and after our Sun dies, and after the planetary nebula it leaves behind fades away, every atom of me will be recycled back into the universe. Ultimately becoming part of other planets and stars. We are originally star dust literally, and we will be star dust again."

  • Cristina Rad
joucker29 OP ,

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.

nickwitha_k ,

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.

Slotos ,

You just replace that anxiety with a different fear.

I don’t fear oblivion, I fear it will keep me waiting. Not existing is a silent matter, living past your due as a broken, diseased husk or a person is a torture to you and those you cherish.

Death is a promise of rest, there’s no need to fear it. I’m a bit sad that I won’t get to witness most of the things I want to witness, but so be it.

UlyssesT ,

As weird as it sounds, imagine actually existing forever in a way that keeps accumulating memories, experiences, and from the accumulation, redundancy, boredom, and ennui. Imagine the slow inevitable change of anything like heaven becoming more and more of its own hell on the relentless stretch into infinity.

An end point gives substance to the time before that end point, and even the end isn’t truly an end because your matter and energy remain a part of the cosmos.

MONKEYHOG ,

What’s the point of worrying about it. It’s inevitable, and when it happens you’ll not care because you won’t be able to. So what does it matter

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