Ask HN: How did you overcome your fear of death? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you overcome your fear of death?

3 pointspvsukale33 comments

I'm not talking about death as an accident but the inevitable thing happens to everyone. I'm 21 and the feeling of being unconscious after death for unlimited time scares the sh*t out of me sometimes. Have you had this feeling , how did you overcome it?

PS : obviously not everyone has this feeling, I'm just asking people who had this feeling.

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I think that the fear of death is natural, normal, and impossible to overcome. The only thing you can do about it is to stop thinking about it all the time and being stressed because of it (or trick yourself into thinking that death is too distant/not that painful/positive in some way). I cope with the fear of death by just not thinking about it too much since I fail to find anything positive about future death. And when I do, I strive to use thoughts about death as a tool for making my life more productive/efficient.

Dying is part of living. You cannot live without dying eventually (at least for now). Being born ultimately leads to dying somewhen. There is no way around that, that's just how living works.

Since you cannot change anything about that you just have to accept the fact of being dead in the future. So what to do about it? First thing is to realize that everything is temporary. You, humanity, earth, the universe. It's just a huge coincidence that you were born in the first place (you can try doing the math ;) ). So while you cannot prevent yourself from dying, you can do the best of the time when you are not dead.

You cannot know, what happens when you are dead. Maybe there is nothing, maybe there's some kind of paradise, maybe you can f*ck 42 virgins or maybe you are born again depending on how much karma you collected. Maybe the universe and existence itself is just a loop and when you die, you just start over where you started last time. Who knows and since you cannot know, there is not much sense in worrying about. Just be the best human you can be and accept the fact that someday it will be over.

What that called is Thanatophobia. I have had this for quite a long time. The earliest I remember was when I was about 7-8 years old. I am 25 now.

I have not overcome it really. It just goes and comes with periods - makes it incredibly hard to sleep when it does.

The periods are worst when I am stressed but they seem to get a bit better as I get older (ironically I suppose).

A thing that helped greatly is talking about it with my wife and going to sleep together, it relaxes me enough to fall asleep relatively easy..

I am not sure what would work permanently as I tried various things over the past 17 years but nothing made it go away entirely.

If you want to talk more in detail about it, you can sent me an email (it is in my profile).

Good luck with it!

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