Or Detroit.
It sounds kind of hippy and new-agey, but there’s a funny almost throwaway line I read on the internet that helped to shape my idea of what death is like. “If you leave hydrogen alone long enough, it will start to think about itself.” A more succinct and poetic way I’ve seen it written is “We are the universe becoming aware of itself.”
This is literally true. For all the woo silliness of it, there is only one actual thing that exists: the universe it its entirety. Just as your body is a single thing made up of lots of tiny parts, everything that exists is part of a larger whole. Even the Bible has Jesus come fascinatingly close to this philosophyhere.
If you can stretch your perspective to something closer to a universal scale, your life and death just becomes a small process in a section of a gigantic, constantly-changing, eternal thing. You can never be destroyed, but only changed, because nothing can ever be truly destroyed.
One of my favorite Life in Hell strips.
I have to admit to thinking about my own death more frequently as I age.
One comforting thought that occurred to me: Once you are dead, every single problem and worry that you have goes away.
Once you’re dead, you’re good to go (so to speak).
Not that I want to die just yet.
mmm
Maybe “aspire” isn’t the best word - but I think we should all expect our attitude toward death will probably change as we move through life. I think by the time most folks reach their “golden” years, they’ve come to terms with the inevitability of death, and as I mentioned upthread, they’ve done most of the things they ever thought of doing, and resolved most of the uncertainties in their lives (e.g. their kids are productive and well-adjusted adults - or if not, provisions have been made for their care through a will). No doubt there are some geriatric individuals who haven’t come to terms with it, and will take every available effort to cling to life even when it becomes abject misery - but I think most people in “life’s December” are OK with the knowledge that it will all come to an end relatively soon.
Right, because in every experience you’ve ever had, you were right there. So in the back of your mind it doesn’t make sense that there could ever be a time when you didn’t exist, because you’ve never experienced that.
So in a way you’re right, when you’re dead you won’t experience oblivion because you won’t exist to experience your own non-existence. But in another more accurate way you’re wrong, because death means total annihilation. The fact that you won’t experience your own oblivion doesn’t mean that your oblivion won’t happen.
“I think, therefore I will be for a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.”
[RIGHT]–not Descartes
[/RIGHT]
I think death is the worse possible thing that can happen to a person and is the ultimate tragedy. I think that many people sometimes feel that “they” would be better off dead, apparently not understanding “they” wouldn’t exist to be better off. I have a hard time understanding why they don’t understand this. I think it is because it is impossible to imagine one’s own nonexistence. Also, if you take surveys asking people if they would like to live forever, many say no.
To me, this is just incomprehensible. What makes peoples’ lives so miserable or uninteresting it creates this attitude? We are participating in an incredible adventure possibly unique in the Universe. We are watching a drama which may exist nowhere else. Why would anyone want to check out, to leave the theater before the curtain comes down. Why not stick around to see if the Universe ends in heat death, the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip, which actually seems the most likely. Why leave now, just when we have discovered gravitational waves and we will probably be able to detect those created in the Big Bang. “No, I am sorry, life is so miserable, I think I will just end it and go to a better place”. Christ!
“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?” – Woody Allen
And nobody has even quoted this famous passage yet:
… To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
To the OP: While drifting peacefully to eternal sleep sounds like one of the better ways to go, there are probably many ways that people spend their last bits of consciousnesses. My guess is that shear terror, extreme pain and choking for air are just as likely.
My fear is laying there dying someplace completely lame, like a garbage strewn McDonald’s parking lot and thinking something completely stupid like: “why is that trash can upside down?” or staring at some dumb billboard.
As for life extension, I would say it is a bad idea on an over populated planet with finite resources. However if it does come about, most likely only the rich will be able to afford it. Who will control the world then? Dynasties of hyper-rich immortals or the AI’s that work for them? Or will post-scarcity really happen? At any rate you and I will be long gone by then. Maybe they will look back at us unhealthy, decaying, short lived beings with pity.
Well, I’ve just seen this thread.
Maybe the big alien who runs this simulation will just copy and paste me into a different reality.
it took billions of years to get to THIS POINT in your life, so when you actually die, it’s like going back to that state … just billions of more years. the illusion of life is just pointless, in the grand scheme of things, we are already dead, like our life spans are little blip in the grandness of the cosmos.
Actually, that sounds pretty good. I’d like to be lucid enough to be thinking “Why didn’t they kern the headline on that billboard? You could drive a Yugo between that T and H…” And then I’d chuckle.
What is a gravitational wave and how does it improve my shitty life?
Whoa… Heavy.
Had a friend tell me he was thinking of “ending it all” and the first words out of my mouth were “But it won’t be the end, it’ll keep going on without you. I know you–you never like to be left out. Don’t you want to see how it works out? What the next big thing’ll be?”
Death does no worry me, it’s the days or weeks before. The past year I witnessed 2 people live the last days of their lives. Each went in a very different manner. My wife’s aunt was diagnosed with MS about 30 years ago. Her body slowly gave out over the years till the point is could not support life. She was never in any real pain, she slowly slid into the beyond.
My aunt was diagnosed with cancer last December. She had been a life long smoker and it finally caught up to her. Early February she began treatment, chemo and radiation treatments. Unfortunately for her, it was a case of the treatment doing more harm than the disease. One of the radiation treatments burned her esophagus. She was unable to eat or drink anything. All the doctors could do was stop the cancer treatment till she healed from the burns. This never happened, she basically starved to death. It was a painful and miserable way to die.
I watched 2 others die about 28 years ago, my mother and mother in law. Both died in a similar manner to my aunt, a slow painful death from cancer. This gave me the strength to quit smoking, that is not the way I want to go. If I choose a manner to pass, it would be like my grandmother. Go to bed one evening and never wake up. Or as the joke goes, I want to go like my grandfather, heart stops and die on the spot. Not screaming or yelling like the passengers on his bus.
Now that I am on the other side of 60, I figure my time on Earth is getting short. Hopefully I have some of the same genes as my father, he just turned 87. His mother lived to 104. If I was to die tomorrow, I could say I had a pretty good life. I only have 2 concerns, my wife and how she will manage and what will happen to my Crayola crayon collection.