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Touching stuff...

It could be middle age tainting my perspective... but sometimes I feel this sort of... not visceral, but very close and undeniable... experience with death is easier for people who are young.

Death isn't real for most people at 17, no matter how much they have seen, many see the death of a grandparent, or two, or perhaps even four, before reaching 17, but most still enter their late teens, feeling invincible and like death is a whole lifetime away... because on a sort of undeniable personal narrative level is is... it is a lifetime away... and things that feel a lifetime away are much easier to think about than things that feel like they get closer every year. In middle age you know your to some statistical average "about half way there"... and that's a very different place from which to begin having this kind of life experience.

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As someone of the same age I feel the same. Sometimes I'm enjoying myself or finding it especially easy to be stoical about mortality. But sometimes it makes me breathless with dread for a few minutes.

The realisation I was probably born a bit too early for technology to give me immortality saddens me; I only have so many weekends left to do hobbies and even fewer blocks of a few thousand hours to master something new... So I have to prioritise which is annoying.

I was afflicted with an awareness of existence from an early age and struggled with it till around 40. Having kids obviously enhanced that but also changed me so profoundly and I realized we are just human sized atoms flying through the universe.

I’d simply advise to get on getting on. It is. You are you so see what you can do with it in the way you feel you can.

What is the point of being immortal, if lt bring eternal suffering, Life in itself current form is suffering for many, unless you solve all other problem other then just mortality, life in itself bring difference with long lifespan. Inherently I see no difference if I live 100 years or 1000 years.

There are countless people who have died before you that were born too early for things like penicillin.

You can always find a reason to be grateful (just as, I suppose, we can always find a reason to be saddened ... and probably our future counterparts will as well.)

I dont get this obsession with immortality, if its unleashed then it will be to enhance slavery. Dictators that dont die, potential dark ages.

Enjoy rather current times, we have it easy and pretty compared to whats coming

FOMO, quite literally.

Quite hard to enjoy the current times if you're dead. I would take my chances with the immortality even in spite of some vague "dark ages" hand-wave scenario, thanks.

Well, if there is a immortality drug, it won't be cheap. So only the rich can get it, who will then live longer, and have more time to accumulate wealth, while thinking, "the earth is already overpopulated. If the drug becomes too cheap, that problem will worsen" So it will stay out of reach for the masses.

So the result will likely be immortal overlords and mortal peasants. Hard to see any other outcome.

As long as we're writing science fiction, if immortality was known to exist like that, there are swathes of ordinary people who would stop at nothing to obtain it. Perhaps the cure IS cheap (how could you know for certain it's not?) and it's not an issue in the first place. Perhaps some of the rich will not be so cynical and give immortality to the finest minds in the world, allowing scientists to build knowledge indefinitely instead of whole generations of knowledge and experience being permanently lost consistently every 80-100 years. Perhaps those scientists with massive amounts of experience thanks to the time they now have bring about a utopia.

I was thinking about death occasionally until I got my first anesthesia (around 45).

I then realized what death is: a switch is flipped off and you are done. No memories, nothing. You just stop to exist.

From then on I do not worry anymore and stopped wondering about death altogether.

I think for many people, myself included, the worry isn’t “the switch flipped” it’s losing everything and everyone you’ve ever cared about. Life is pretty awesome. Don’t want to give that up for any reason.

What has been lost? You no longer know loss then.

Right, and we won’t be anxious about it then.

But now is not then.

That's what they're saying, though.

The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death. It's just insanely difficult for us to internalize that idea because we're animals, we avoid death instinctively and fear loss instinctively.

Yeah, I get it. None of that does anything to mitigate the feeling when the yawning expanse of inevitable non-existence comes into one's mind.

[EDIT] Oh, also:

> The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen.

Ceasing to exist will happen. It's guaranteed to happen.

The fact of anxiety being useless doesn't do much to get rid of it. If it did, there wouldn't be much of it at all.

> Ceasing to exist will happen. It's guaranteed to happen.

Not from your point of view! You can experience every moment leading up to your death and may be lucky enough to realize you're about to die, but it's not possible to be aware of the end of your own existence. It is always a future event. (Based on our best models, that is. Obviously the living can't possibly know what it's like to be permanently dead.)

> The fact of anxiety being useless doesn't do much to get rid of it.

I don't agree; it's valuable to be aware of the unconscious motivations of anxiety - it's just that awareness alone isn't sufficient to cure the anxiety.

> None of that does anything to mitigate the feeling when the yawning expanse of inevitable non-existence comes into one's mind

Again, I don't agree! Being able to think about "the event" from different angles gives the brain an escape hatch from anxiety traps. The anxiety might come, but now you have tools to handle it instead of be dominated by it.

Yeah, I've done the stoicism thing and all that (since before it was cool, LOL). It's not like I'm crippled by anxiety about death. I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.

> since before it was cool, LOL

You must be quite old, then!

> I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.

What is the point then?

This:

> The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death.

Isn't addressing the thing that (I think?) most people are worried about when they worry about death. I don't think most are worried about how bad they will feel after they die, which is what this is concerned with. It's totally beside the point.

The point is that we are conscious, now, and imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant. Upsetting, even. It's subjectively identical to the end of the universe.

"But you used to not exist"—irrelevant, because 1) I do now, and 2) I at least get some kind of window into what all that was, since it's... the past.

"But you'll experience nothing, so it won't be unpleasant"—even less relevant. I'm not worried about that state of (not) being, being unpleasant. I'm not worried about existing with an awareness of having died, as mentioned in the quoted bit.

> imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant.

It's unpleasant, and it's difficult to imagine, that doesn't mean you should be anxious about your own death.

Again... from your subjective experience, I'm not sure it's even meaningful to say that you will die. You will only ever experience being alive.

You can't even be sure that the universe will continue after your death, either. Does it seem most likely that it will? In some models of the universe, it's actually infinitely more likely that it won't, because it all exists inside your (Boltzmann) brain.

Like what is the specific thing that causes anxiety? That's still not clear to me. Not-knowing, yeah, that can cause anxiety. And it can be soothed by changing your perspective, taking delight in the mysteries of existence. We all have a visceral anxiety about death which our bodies evolved to have, because it's quite useful for a living thing to want to stay alive. But that's not based in reason, and we can use reason to alleviate our anxiety.

For me it’s… let’s say I enjoy wine. When I die I won’t get to enjoy wine. But I like wine! I’d rather continue to live and enjoy it than die.

I’m not worried about the nothingness after I die. I’m anxious about the impending loss of enjoying my wine.

Have you ever been to a party and it started winding down and people left and you wanted them to stay and the fun to continue? That’s the anxiety.

I do understand that, yeah. And thanks for the neat analogy.

What I believe is, you probably won't actually ever have to stop drinking wine. From your perspective, I'm not sure it's meaningful to say you'll ever stop existing, because you can't experience it. You'll (probably) just stop existing for me, and I for you.

It's fair to be sad about it just like I'm sad that the elves left Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age. But neither my own death nor the leaving of the elves is something I can ever actually live through - they're both just stories to me.

I think, I do understand both the perspectives (or at least believe so). One, that after death, you lose your continued existence. And the other, that, this non-existence isn't a loss, since you can't experience it anymore.

Inevitably, the distinction lies in the belief of, whether the world continues to exist once you die - because if it does, then your non-existence is still a loss for your peers and the rest of the world.

On other hand, your qualia (sense/experience) of the world is all you have - i.e. your sense of sound, sight, touch etc. So, at most, this sense of experience is what you can call your "world" - nothing more, nothing less. And once that ceases there is no "world" anymore.

Well, you are not losing anything because you just don't exist.

You have everything, and then you are not there anymore to feel that your lost something.

But I can relate to what you are saying, I see it rather like a form of "future nostalgia": it is Sunday afternoon and your are sad that it is going to be over. This is something I learnt to actively fight and live in the present.

I don't worry much about it being unpleasant, hurting, whatever -- I too have had the experience of general anesthetic. That's never been the part that bothered me about dying. It is the permanence. You get your shot, then you're done, forever. There are going to be fascinating discoveries and developments in the future that I'd like to see play out. Ah well.

But it's definitely true, worrying about death is a privilege granted only to the living.

> There are going to be fascinating discoveries and developments in the future that I'd like to see play out.

I used to feel this way, but looking at how things are going, particularly in regard to climate change, I no longer envy children born today for the world they will live to see. I try to be more optimistic, but that isn't exactly my nature, and events seem to be moving even faster than my pessimism would have predicted.

I've often pondered this Christopher Hitchen's quote on this:

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”

I can't honestly say whether I find eternal life more appealing than permanent death.

Recently, my two-year-old daughter asked me where she was in a picture of me and her mom. I made the mistake of saying she "didn't exist yet". She seemed horrified by the idea of non-existence. I had never considered before that the eternity of non-existence before birth could be just as horrifying as the eternal death afterwords. I actually find it kind of comforting that death will be no different than before I was born.

> I can't honestly say whether I find eternal life more appealing than permanent death.

Unless you believe in some sort of immortal soul which might blossom into something other than a human consciousness after death, immortality is horrifying. A human mind wasn't evolved to live eternally, and doing so may well be a nightmare. Or maybe we'd just start to forget at some point and hemorrhage past centuries... that would be an extraordinary sadness to me.

I find it comforting, somehow, and it helps me to keep a healthy perspective, to think about how, Right now, I don't exist on the top of Mount Everest, or the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or on the Sun, Moon, Mars, or any other potentially infinite places. And it's not a problem.

I also don't worry about not existing almost every place and at every time that I could have existed. There is no direct pain or suffering associated with it.

I don't fear death, I fear pain and torment. Which is pretty common in the old age and can hit you at any time, even in the young age.

That's why my mental bandage for the very likely torture at the end of the line is medically assisted suicide. I don't delude myself that I will never need that, in fact I'm almost certain I'll get to a point where it will be the humane option. Everyone I got to know in my family died agonizing deaths after oftentimes long period of illnesses.

Of course in my country, Retardia, this medical euthanasia isn't an option but as an EU citizen with enough money I will get it in Netherlands or Switzerland if and when I'll need it.

>medical euthanasia isn't an option

Aren't there plenty good open source alternatives to achieve this without aid from the government? Like something as simple as CO poisoning would do the job convincingly and cheaply.

I've heard of meditation as a form of preparation for death. As a way to approach and contemplate it, and as a way to maintain equanimity while facing it.

I'm still in my 20s, so maybe I still have some youthful arrogance and distance rattling about up in my noggin that makes this an easy and useless thing to say. I have witnessed the death of my father, and a couple of my friends from childhood are already dead. But I come from suicidal stock, so maybe that's part of it too.

I think at this point I fear more the nature of getting older, having seen some of the early, innocuous signs of it in myself. Still at the age where in another life I could die in some glorious way, valorizing youth. But I'm set up for the long haul in this life, even as I want to do something reckless.

Oh absolutely. I personally had legitimately 0 fear of death until 30. Then it began to creep up.

Life is unbelievable. Then we hold on. And then it’s gone.

Pick how you wanna live it.

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