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.
But now is not then.
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.
[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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's definitely true, worrying about death is a privilege granted only to the living.
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.
“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.
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 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.