Anyone else feeling anxious over their own mortality after reading this?
Now facing open-heart surgery with all its risks and complications sometime soon. I knew that was always a possibility due to a congenital heart defect but five years ago it seemed unlikely and suddenly in the last 18 months it became a clear eventuality.
Trying to reframe that in the most positive way possible in my mind and also stop blaming myself for not taking better care of myself. It’s hard.
Of course I will need to become a better swimmer.
The most important thing for me now is to preserve my health for the next 30 years so I can see my kids grow up and hopefully have their own children. Seems exercise, diet, and sleep are things I need to prioritize.
So my wife and I decided to just be “hybrid digital nomads” flying across the US with a few weeks in Mexico and Canada so we could be in US time zones. We will be living in Florida from September through mid March and traveling the other six months while our place is professionally managed by a property manager.
We sold our cars, threw almost everything we owned away that wouldn’t fit in three suitcases and rented our house out. We will sell it mid 2024.
We were going to do that at least two years. But, I was using my stock vests to offset the costs and well you know how stock is doing these days.
Next year we will add a set fee to partially offset some of those expenses like a real apartment does.
To end on a positive note, I still find it less terrifying than the alternative, which is living forever.
As a religious person this is actually like the most negative note imaginable for me. I mean, sure, I'll grant you life after death is "terrifying" in a "fear of the unknown" sense, but I would definitely prefer seeing deceased loved ones again and continuing to learn and progress after death vs. ceasing to exist.
Would they still feel that way if they had youthful energy and a more elastic mind, I wonder? Hard to tell. I myself hope I'm more like Donald Knuth in my old age - still curious and learning and progressing.
She was very peaceful, she died at 86.
Seeing your loved ones is great. Exhausting the total combination of <1hr long conversations with them over an infinite amount of time, not so much. What do you even do after that? You've spoken with them about everything you can express with english words.
Do you continue to make up new concepts forever to keep yourself entertained?
Well assuming everyone is conscious in the next life and can interact with each other, then that would lead one to assume next life has technology at least as good as ours, if not better since it collectively contains the sum knowledge of every human who has ever lived. Unless we are just disembodied consciousnesses that can't interact with matter anymore. In any case though, the mere existence of an afterlife in which you can visit with deceased loved ones is a strong sign there is a benevolent God over all and I'm sure said God would help solve the boredom problem. So I'm not terribly worried either way. Cease to exist = can't worry about it. Continue to be conscious = won't worry about it.
Great idea. It will probably take a while for me to internalize it but I really like what you're saying.
Near death experiences can change your whole perspective. When I was young and single, I did all kinds of crazy things that could easily have ended me. Once I got married and had children, I definitely became much more conservative in the personal risks I was willing to take because it wasn't just about me anymore.
Tomorrow is promised to no one, but each of us can do things to minimize risk.
I've lost count of how many "ordinary" infections I've lived through thanks to antibiotics. One would have for sure killed me. A puncture wound on the bottom of my foot in a dirty river in the south.
We're not even 100 years into having antibiotics. A species just getting started tbh. I wonder what will come next that is similarly "magical" to antibiotics.
https://dailystoic.com/memento-mori/
And other "bad things" with negative visualization.
I think it takes a lot of courage to face your last tweet...
Quotes like the above, ideas, feelings about meaning, thoughts about my wife and kids all were completely absent. I just felt blank and completely alone. No words or concepts or language could penetrate that feeling.
The way I have reconciled this is through accepting that I have already died, thus every day is a gift.
This was supposed to write resuscitate.
Then again, I am in the line of work best described as willingly agreeing to put an airplane together as I fall out of the sky. Not a whole lot of downtime in my days.
Whet line of work are you in exactly, if you don’t mind sharing?
The main reason I've been servicing airplane engines in flight for my employer is because on my own I already had "to put an airplane together as I fall out of the sky."
* book "Staring into the Sun" * book "How we Die"
Eliding my 2c on these books -- it's your 2c that matters.
LLAP
Heu quantus est noster dolor
"You who remember our passing, I beg you to be what we are, you will be. We were once what you are
Alas, how great is our grief"
"We were what you are; But the time will come, And it will come to you swiftly, when ye shall be what we are."
Like the dance of death and the triumph of death, the motif is emblematic of the medieval admonition memento mori. Simultaneous depiction of the topoi is common, for example in Francesco Traini's mid-fourteenth-century fresco Triumph of Death, which depicts the three living and the three dead. The legend was also integrated in the Dance of Death by Kientzheim.
A fresco from the Isefjord workshop in the church of Tuse (Denmark) from the 15th century shows three mounted kings on the hunt, who are met by three dead kings from whom maggots and worms escape. Each of them is assigned a banner. On the first dead man's banner is written: "Vos qui transitis n(os)t(r)i me(m)ores rogo sitis" (You who are passing by, I beg you: Remember us), on the second: "Quod sumus hoc eritis" (What we are now, you shall become one day) and on the third: "Fuimus aliquando quod estis" (We were once what you are now). Above their heads one reads: "Heu qua(n)tus est noster dolor" (Oh, how great is our pain)."
https://old.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/n8dzuo/quod_sumus_ho...