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Comment by Jeff_Brown | Hacker News Reader

I have an aggressive cerebral garbage collector. I've forgotten all the dreams, visions and miraculous experiences that I thought were personality- and/or life-changing at the time. I've come close to dying a couple times and that's literally all I can say about it.

At some point I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant. Spirit or no spirit, I want to live this life well. If there's something good on the other side of death, great -- I'll get there. But I see nothing to be gained from worrying about it.

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> I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant... If there's something good on the other side of death, great...

I agree, I think you just cease to be, and that's it. Frankly, I find that terrifying; I'm not sang-froid about it at all. I totally see why people come up with buy into the idea of an afterlife.

Quite the opposite here. I was raised catholic and as a child nothing scared me more than concept of eternal life. I am much more comfortable as an atheist, just assuming that game over means game over. Dying and being hurt is still scary, but death itself? Hopefully it comes when I am old, but I am getting ready to embrace it when time comes.

Ha, yeah, atheism is a much different perspective. I think that in many ways it's more intentional and positive, but that's my bias.

Lucky you. I don't have a garbage collector so much as a "good-memories" collector. My mind is kind enough to surface my embarrassments and disappointments from years past (some of which are objectively irrelevant) and very rarely the happy memories. Taking this mind deficiency into account, I have started aggressively taking photos and documenting happy instances as well.

I think being optimistic and positive by default is a superpower that some people possess.

Bad experiences haunt me too, but seem to stop shortly after I believe I have nothing left to learn from them.

I've noticed that telling stories or writing them down burns in memories. I'd like to journal more. My main motivation for that would not be as a memory aid, though -- it just feels healthy.

For a time in my life I was quite angry. I meditated and journaled heavily during that time, and that really was transformative. Among other changes, I became able to recognize an unhelpful habit -- like fuming over something someone had done -- and staring its unhelpfulness in the face for long enough that the urge to do it went away. Or at least, until something else seemed more helpful, at which point I would switch to that.

As a recommendation from someone who suffered this way too long, your way of thinking is why you only store the bad memories. I often thought “I’m just a negative person” and accepted it, but not until I decided to focus on my mental health did I realize I had to let this go. I’ve been happier each and every day since. It took almost a year or two of “fake it until you make it”, but once you’re on the other side of this coin, you will never look back.

What were the thinking patterns that you changed? What did you do to fake it in the beginning?

As someone who regularly receives comments like "I wish I thought more like you": literally don't even entertain thoughts that make you feel crappy. Don't give those anxious, negative trains of thought the time of day. Recognize "this is not actually conducive to experiencing a quality existence" and discard that crap. Dunno, that's putting it simply, but gives an idea of the kind of discipline it may take to "resist the temptation" to basically troll your own consciousness. Spiraling negative thoughts are quite self-reinforcing and require conscious effort to combat, in my experience. You could literally redirect to something more uplifting, pretend you're trying to pep-talk a friend, except it's in your own head. Instead of dwelling on "man I said the most awkward thing earlier, what an idiot, that was so bad", you remind yourself "that's irrelevant, people say awkward things every single day, it was probably forgotten within the hour, and in fact the person seemed to really enjoy the rest of the conversation".

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