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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.

kinther ,
@kinther@lemmy.world avatar

I just follow the Mr. PeanutButter philosophy on life at this point

“The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you’ll be dead”

Basically stop thinking so deeply about the enigmas you will never understand and try to enjoy the small things in life. A walk in a park. Helping someone less fortunate. Cooking a good meal, etc.

brunofin , (edited )

This feeling has been haunting my thoughts since my 20s and honestly it’s just intensifying. The thought of it just sucks and puts me in a very nihilist mind state which sucks too. I don’t know, I just can’t accept that death is normal and everyone is ok with that, and we can’t do anything about it, and one day, I’ll be gone too. And I can’t stop simulating those very last moments in my mind, and it too, sucks.

strawberry ,
@strawberry@artemis.camp avatar

heh I juet dont

spitz ,
@spitz@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

diaphanous ,

The fear of death is kind of an evolutional necessity. Otherwise our species wouldn’t have survived. Without the fear of death we probably wouldn’t be here. In some ways it’s a crucial companion of existence. idk why, but seeing it as a condition of existence helps me put it in perspective. Like being alive is great and I guess this is the price I have to pay. Most of the time it’s worth it.

0_0j ,
@0_0j@lemmy.world avatar

Swipe ⬅️

spittingimage ,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve never been afraid of death and non-existence, I’ve only been afraid of dying without having done or experienced as much as I could. Now that I’ve travelled, made friends, made art, been in relationships and worked and played beside passionate people, I feel like I’ve done things with my time. I don’t want it to end but I’m not afraid of it ending, either.

Lmaydev ,

I just eventually decided there’s nothing that can be done about it basically. Doesn’t do any good worrying about an immutable fact of life.

Plus that’s not what quantum mechanics says.

In order to measure a property of a particle something has to interact with it. When this happen it gets collapsed into a certain state. That’s what they mean by observed.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Montagge ,
@Montagge@kbin.social avatar

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

Braindead ,

You keep on existing (at least for now)

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

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