This has been a persistent issue that’s popped up again the last couple days, and has made it very difficult to sleep.
I have bad death anxiety. I am absolutely terrified of what’s beyond death because I see no reason to believe there is anything beyond it. It’s why I’m pretty adamant about life extension. I don’t just want a hundred years of existence and then oblivion eternal.
I’m wondering if there’s anyone here that has similar feelings and issues. I’m looking for anything that might help calm this down.
I feel the same way. Nonexistence is absolutely terrifying. It's a concept without thought, without time. One second and a billion years are the same and nothing happens.
There has to be something after death. Reincarnation, an afterlife, existing as a spirit, anything is "preferable" to pure nonexistence.
As I've said before when this has came up, non existence applied to 'you' (before there was a you) for billions of years. You didn't experience it. It can't 'terrorise' you because the feeling of terror is based on having the human physical faculties, including the brain, to experience it.
If death is a return to the state of non existence, why fear what it feels like (or that it doesn't feel)?
You've already not existed before.As true as all of this is, in practice it isn’t actually comforting to people with death anxiety. As far as I can tell, the only things that actually help people overcome that angst are near-death experiences (whether one is actually dying or just experiencing a sensation one interprets as death), belief in an afterlife, and/or a worldview shift in which one comes to see the cosmos itself as more important than one’s individual existence.
