Scared of death

[Jeff W]

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I've heard a quote before...but I can't remember the exact wording or who said it...it was something like...

"I'm not afraid of death. I was dead for a long time before I was born and I wasn't the slightest bit inconvenienced by it."

anyone know who said something like this?

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Sounds like Mark Twain. I don't know for sure though.

[Alobar]

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Something that is even more intriguing to think about is if the human race is a disease/virus or not? Think about it; our species natural instincts are to procreate and protect our species. And then what do we do?

Destroy the planet that sustains our life and anything that is weaker than us. If something gets in our way, we develop technology (or/and evolve) to be able to destroy it. Even things we have always had control over we have developed a more efficient way of doing so.

Think about how a virus works (AIDS for instance) then think about the human race. Are you ever going to be happy to be alive again? Are you going to have kids and contribute to the virus? Are you going to kill people because you are sick of it spreading?

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yeah dude, we've all seen the matrix already [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Badger]

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As Metric said in my earlier linked post, you only exist within a certain area of space-time, and birth and death are just some of the boundaries. I never lived in China, the same way I never lived in 1927, the same way I never lived on Mars, the same way I never lived in 3011.

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This reminds me of Slaughter House 5. Are you a Tralfamadorian, or whatever they were called?

They were an alien race that, if I recall correctly, travel through time in a similar manner to the way we can walk across the room. Time was just another dimension that they could pass through at will. Good book.

I've experienced similar fears, but I tend not to reason through them, they just subside after a while. It seems like a fairly normal and unavoidable idea. But you can't do anything about it anyways, so what's it matter?

[POKEROMGLOL]

Awesome i love how a giant pit develops in my stomach and my heart starts racing when i read this.

GREAT THREAD.

[uarecool]

Love this thread too. Love this community here at 2+2, just hate how I keep getting banned for expressing myself. I don't get it?

[Xibalba]

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They were an alien race that, if I recall correctly, travel through time in a similar manner to the way we can walk across the room. Time was just another dimension that they could pass through at will. Good book.

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So, I have postponed reading that book for over a year. Thanks for making sure I start soon.

I always liked the Great Race in Lovecraftian fiction. By time traveling into the past and future, they escape their own extinction.

[WJL]

I've got degrees is Psych and Philosophy, so as you might imagine I've had to consider these issues a bit.

I was big into Existential Psychology, which has as one of its tenets that the fear of non-existence is perhaps the most fundamental building block of the psyche, and many human behaviors are responses to dealing with the fear of death. I'm not going to go deeply into this, but one of the most poignant things I came across was that without death, the moments of our life have no value. If you lived forever, any particular moment has no particular value, because we would have an infinite number of them. The fact that we are beings who are going to die puts a value on every moment we live, because we only have a limited number of them. When we are young, it seems there is a near infinity of time before us, but as we age, we realize that each passing moment is more important than the last, and we really don't know how many more we'll have. The earlier in life you become aware of this fact, the less time you will waste on things that are petty, cruel, and pointless, because you don't have time for these things. Surround yourself with good people and don't waste any time on people who don't give a s*** about you. Do what you love, and do it with the best you have as much as you can, and you will find those actions have a peculiar power that gives meaning to those moments. A life without meaning is no life at all, and when the big yellow bus comes for you, you want to look back at that last moment and feel 'I did it'.

[Boosted J]

I'm frequently extremely scared of death, but not timid of it. I, like most of you in this thread, is just frightened by the thought of ceasing to exist. I had a bad motorcycle accident on 2/6/2005 which put me out, I ran into a car head on. I was life lifted by a helicopter to the hospital and I dont remember anything until about 1/4 of a second before I hit the car, i just remember very faintly my friends screaming around me when they rushed to the scene. The car I hit was totalled as well, so that shows you how bad the impact was.

Anyways, I'm extremely scared of stuff I dont have control over, such as airplanes. I've been to Vegas 3x this year Bahamas once, and I'll be flying home to Florida from Italy in 2 weeks.

I think a lot of you made excellent posts that might make dealing with the thought of death easier.

Funkymunkey and WJL, your posts are EXCELLENT in this thread.

[gol4pro]

This should help;

When you're asleep, you don't know you're asleep. This occurs because you aren't conscious, and therefore have no way of knowing you're asleep.

Death is just a nap you never wake up from.

[27offsuit]

Great thread.

I am in line with most of the people here. I think about death more often than I should, but only because I have no 'afterlife' to look forward to.

My biggest fear, however, is not the fear of death itself, but the fear of what I call 'dying stupid'.

I think it would just suck to die from something like:

-getting killed by a 17 year old drunk driver
-aneurism
-frozen piss falling from the sky
-random robbery gone bad
-getting T-boned by some 88 year old who mistook hit gas for his brake

Basically, wrong-place-wrong-time stuff just scares the bejeebus out of me.

Even more so now that I have small children. The thought of dying before they are grown is infinite sadness.