Ever since I was a child I was afraid of getting older and dying. It has been in the back of my mind for most of my life.
I had phases were this fear was not really around and then phases where it is the only thing I can think of. Ever since Corona it has gotten worse and worse. It just struck me one day while playing video games with my friends. Suddenly I was like “I WILL die one day. I will not be anymore … forever. I won’t even know that I am not anymore.” and I broke down pretty much immediately.
What followed was a phase of everlasting fear and anxiety. It was so bad that I just couldn’t fall asleep unless I watched comedy until was physically not able to stay awake. Back then I thought it was a result of the isolation of Corona. Since then I moved back in with my mother (due to different reasons). Everything was fine for a while but now it is back.
I should be happy. I handed in my bachelor’s thesis a while back, will soon move out again and have gotten a job in my dream career. I finished my therapy and while I am still not completely over my social anxiety but it is getting better and better. And yet the fear was never as bad. Last night I cowered into a ball under my desk and started crying.
It has gotten to a point were I thought about killing myself to end it. It is the same result either way. I won’t remember anything anyway. Even the pain and grief friends and family would feel is only temporary. They too will be gone with everything that made them up one day.
I have no intentions of going through with it but it frightens me that I even think like this.
I don’t know were this is coming from. Maybe from the feeling that I am wasting my life, that I am a failure and too far behind peers, that I am too old to have so little but I also know that it’s not like I could have done a lot better. Due to circumstances outside of my own control I am were I am right now but I am doing my best to get better. It’s just that it takes a lot of time and I fear that it takes too much time. I also lost a good friend recently so this probably plays into it as well.
Is there anyway of changing my way of thinking about death? I know I can’t change the fact that I will die but how can I accept it without falling into existential nihilism like I currently am?
Edit: I also already called my therapist but since it’s the weekend they won’t answer before Monday.
I disagree with this type of answer. I was trying to come up with a way to respond last time the topic came up and now I think I have. Death is a part of life. All things created must be destroyed. Negation of the negation, dialectics.
-Friedrich Engels, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
All things will be destroyed by entropy, but we don’t have to die before the stars do.
Sickness is a part of life. Starvation is a part of life. We prevent those when we can and seek to abolish them. Death is no different.
Further, death is the negation of life. The negation of the negation would be something else. Recurrence, possibly? The next Big Bang that happens after our universe has long dissipated into extremely vacuous cold gas?
I don’t see immortality as either a worthy venture, nor something that is likely possible. Mortality gives life meaning. I’m sure if we were somehow immortal there would be negative unforeseen consequences. It is not desirable to conquer nature, but to live in harmony with it. That’s why I quoted Engels. Sickness will always be a part of life, but it has been and will be limited.
The fact that so many people find their lives meaningless shows that mortality has given them no meaning. In fact, many people find life meaningless because we die. Furthermore, mortality creates suffering, which itself can destroy the meaning people find in life.
I believe struggle gives life meaning. Mortality is just an unfortunate genetic deformity that we haven’t cured yet, and one we must struggle against. Once that struggle is done, we will tackle the next and the next forever. Eternal recurrence.
Humanity finds its own meanings of life. Mortality both makes things seem meaningless and gives meaning, another contradiction. Struggle is certainly a way of finding meaning. I think the drab proletarian life and the crushing force of capitalist realism is largely at fault for the meaningless in this society.
Now I’m wondering whether this debate is worth having at all. I guess it is as some find false hope in immortality instead of coming to terms with their own death. Regardless, immortality is certainly unfeasible within the foreseeable future, so we might as well come to terms with death. I don’t know if I’ll convince you, but I’ve said what I have to say.
Edit: I forgot to add Albert Camus’ famous analogy of Sisyphus being like the proletarian who daily works at something of which it’s products are not their own. Also, like the human who’s work on earth will never be complete at death. We are capable of finding purpose in such an absurd scenario. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I have to say, if Sisyphus is happy that it proves my point. He is, after all, immortal. 🙃
Not really, if I were he doing nothing but an un-completable task I’d wish I could end it all. The point is that we assume he is suffering, but as our condition is like his we should imagine him happy.
… okay so I definitely read Camus differently (well okay I listened to an audiobook whateveritdoesntmatter).
We must imagine Sisyphus happy because he has accepted the absurdity of his eternal recurrence. It’s not meant to be ironic. The absurd man is supposed to acknowledge that the search for meaning in a meaningless universe is impossible, and then do it anyway.
Then there’s no disagreement on that. Sisyphus and humans are the same. There is no inherent meaning, we will do things that don’t actually matter for any inherent way, and we must make up meaning that isn’t actually there. My disagreement is with your assumption that immortality would make one happy and that it is possible within this world. You claimed he was happy because he was immortal, when he’s actually happy because he decides to be despite no real reason.