This is my problem with death. The fact that everything ends forever, from my perspective. That and the inevitability of it. I can’t comprehend it so I try not to think about it.
I’m crossing my fingers and hoping my obesity kills me before I develop dementia and burn through the money I plan to leave to nieces and nephews.
Nope. Not ready yet, but I will be some time. My goal when I was young was to make it to 2001 when I’d turn 50, so since I’ve made it way past that I’m okay.
My father-in-law died at nearly 101 with all his senses, but not able to write music anymore. He was ready to go and died in a few days. My father went to a Seder at 95 and died the next day. If I can go like them, I’m fine with it.
Given how we’ve screwed up the world, the last thing I want to do is be stuck somewhere to see it all fall apart without being able to do anything. How would a Roman who lived and died in the golden age think about being stuck watching the sack of Rome? I think I have fear of immortality more than I have fear of death.
I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it, you’ve gotta go sometime
Exactly. I felt great comfort in my bout with cancer, to decide that if it got to much for my courage, I could end the pain by taking the rest of the painkillers at once.
Not that I wanted to die, but if I was going to anyway I would decide the hour.
No, neither oblivion or afterlife is to be feared. It will come when it comes. Like a visit to the dentist you will get past it in time. There is no reason to worry beforehand.
For the past 30 or so years, I’ve always had “a way out” in my medicine cabinet. I’ve obviously never used it, but it is a comfort knowing I’ll never have to deal with pain if I do not want to.
If I’m forced to enroll in the afterlife program, I’m going to negotiate it on my terms.
Too much and too long of anything will get boring after a century or so, so I choose reincarnation. But not your garden variety reincarnation.
Here are my terms:
- I must return as a mammal. I have no interest in living as an insect, or bacteria, or slime mold, anything else considered icky.
- I must be the apex predator in my environment. Number 2 just won’t cut it. Orca, grizzly bear, tiger, etc. will be fine. Being an animal of prey is for losers.
- I won’t accept any downgrade in intelligence, or self-awareness. If you must split me off into an alternate universe to make me an empathetic, vegan grizzly bear with opposable thumbs who enjoys Bach, so be it.
- I must retain at least some of my current memories, because if my memory banks get wiped entirely, can it really be me? I think not. My memories can emerge slowly, so that by the time I’m a teenage bear, I’ll remember some of my prime human accomplishments, like getting to 3rd base with Sally in high school.
So, yeah, give me all that, and I’ll sign on the dotted line right now.
I guess if a I “fear” anything about aging, and it is really more a distant apprehension than visceral fear, it is dementia. Pain is pain - I’ll either be able to either take it or not. If not there are options to end things as others have mentioned. But dementia is insidious and can creep up on you without you ever noticing. Diminished faculties is frustrating enough, but actual personality change is disturbing on a whole different level.
If I was intermittently aware I’d feel like a prisoner in my own mind. Even if I wasn’t I’d hate to inflict the stress of potentially turning into a truly shitty person on those who know me. I saw one sweet guy turn into a vituperative racist who was also hateful towards his family. Some mental ping pong ball or three from his youth got dislodged and started bouncing around in his skull until he was basically a different (and much worse) person in his final years. The possibility of turning into that does disturb me a bit.
But it still doesn’t keep me up at night.
Since I have already died twice so now it doesnt scare me.
I can. Having to depend on paid strangers.
I wouldn’t say “anything”.
Right now, 21st century Earth is pretty intellectually stimulating, especially if you have the money and time to be able to travel around (and there wasn’t a pandemic on) and continually learn.
I’d say, if the world were 10x more rich and quickly evolving than now, it would already be at the point where I could live indefinitely and never get seriously bored. My memory is finite, and anyway it takes a non-zero amount of time to experience new things.
I try not to waste what time I have left worrying about things I can’t change. One day I will be dead. Being my mother’s son, my big concern is that I don’t leave too large a mess behind me.
I’ll grant that a contained consciousness could remain stimulated for a very long time in a sufficiently stimulating environment. But eternity (assuming it exists) is orders of magnitude longer than that. At some point, I believe even the chore of living would become overbearingly tedious. Some form of consciousness regeneration or re-booting would need to be built into the process.
But it *is* built in, already. In terms of your episodic memory, for example, every time you retrieve a memory it is stored again, and changed in the process. And how much you remember of a portion of your life, and how vividly, depends on its salience to your life now.
A human that lived for centuries, dementia-free, would likely “re-invent” themselves many times over, and remember little of their “first” life.
(Sorry for the tangent)
Mark Twain said
“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.”
That resonates with me.
The essence of Robert Heinlein’s book Job: A Comedy of Justice is the idea that what happens after death is what you believe will happen. Seems to me that would be perfect justice.
I think about it. Thoughts pondering that it could come any moment and what have I made of my life up to now if it were to suddenly happen in the next five minutes. That sort of existential inner thinking. I won’t call it fear but it is not all pleasant. Making peace with death is something that will come only when there is satisfaction of a life’s journey and I feel there is a still a long way for me to go.
I tend to think about the practical matters for those left behind more than what happens afterwards. I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe there’s anything after the final moment. It’s like a light switch going off.
My parents are both in their late seventies and one is in bad health. I’m quite terrified of what happens when one or both of them go. Funeral arrangements, selling the house, getting rid of all their stuff. My dad’s basement workshop is enough to give me a panic attack…how does one get rid of a table saw? My mother has a cabinet full of Lladro figurines. What the hell do I do with that junk? One sibling is still in university and the other is on disability and can’t organize a bag lunch, let alone the legalities surrounding an estate. TL;dr my parents’ death while I’m still here frightens me a thousand times more than mine.
This describes my position on the subject, too. I don’t talk to anyone every day and I don’t know how long it would be before someone discovered me. I don’t have any family, so there will be no one to be with me at the end like I was with my husband, my mother, and a dear man I loved. I just hope it’s fast.
I’ve read all the books and watched zillions of YouTube interviews with people who have “died” and come back. What they describe is beautiful, a sense of being infinitely loved and returning home where they belong. Most of them didn’t want to come back but they did because of unfinished business. I can’t imagine that I have any unfinished business. In fact, I can’t think of any reason why I was even born in the first place since my life has been inconsequential and I have left virtually no mark. Naturally, I don’t know if these after-death accounts are true, but there have been thousands of them. <shrug> I choose to believe they are true (not trying to introduce that topic here-- just answering the topic question).
Unless the following poster would like to spin off a new discussion…
Tell us more. Probably in a new thread.
No, because I don’t fear or worry about things I have zero control over.