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[–] 89 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because I forgot what it was like

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  • [–] 44 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have never experienced unending nothingness, only noted the nothingness after it was over

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    That's a good point, though I think it's also fair to say that you won't experience unending nothingness after death from that perspective, either. I can see how coming to accept that the world existed before our experience began could help one confront the world will continue to exist after our experience has ended.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'm looking forward to the nothingness, the first 14billion years was nice enough. It's the time between everyday life and nothingness that worries me.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just had a friend die of a heart attack while working in construction with his friends. Didn't make it to the hospital.

    That's how I want to go. Just times up one day.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (20 children)

    Idk, sounds kinda scary. Idk what it was like before, because I lacked consciousness to experience it. And the idea that it all ends, back to nothingness forever. We live a few years. Pretty much nothing, if we consider the forever before, and the forever after our existence.

    It's something I recall fearing as a kid, due to the scary unknown. Glad to have enjoyed a decade of bliss. Too bad the fear has come back to haunt me. It's not constant, though. Sometimes it comes, outta nowhere. Real strong. Not fun. But I don't live day to day in fear.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

    The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be.

    Marc Maron put it into good perspective. He was hiking in the hills and passed out. He noted that he could very well have been dead, and that would have been that. He wasnt scared because he wasnt conscious.

    You can't be afraid when you dont exist and you will not be aware of anything.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    I don't believe in God nor am I religious, but consciousness just feels so fucking weird man. Everything in the world can be explained through science and physics, cause and effect, hell even our brains and actions are just a chain of atoms interacting. But consciousness just feels so out of place. Why am I? Why am I even aware of my own existence? Why has a set of atoms resulted in my non-material consciousness? It feels so out of place. Why isn't it just a bunch of atoms bumping into eachother, why am I capable of feeling and thinking?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I think about this more than anything in those quiet "run the brain's existential dread garbage collection routine" moments.

    Self aware consciousness is just so wild. Like you say, how does it even exist? But it's also so common on our little planet here (even if we only count the humans) that it is as commonplace as it is spectacular.

    It feels like this magical "extra" thing, but at the same time the evidence kinda suggests it's just something that naturally happens once you get complex life.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (23 children)

    Because there is no coming back.

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    [–] 19 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Because, now that i aquired conciusness, i dont want to lose it. i dont want to re experience nothingness. ffs id rather suffer for eternity than not live at all.

    if religion wasnt so unbelievable id probably be religious. but alas i just have to hope that i am wrong in my understanding that there is no afterlife

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    [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    About 22 years ago or so, after not taking psilocybe mushrooms for a couple years, fasting for 24 hours, I took an uncounted tens of grams of dried, fine-powdered, strong psilocybe semilanceata, hot, in just lemon juice, and chugged that pint of thick mushroom super-lemony brew down as fast as i could. It started coming on FAST and STRONG. Ran the 3 strides to the bathroom sink with need to purge, which didn't last long nor purge much of it... clinging to the sink as I slumped down, with the trip immensity roaring at the doors bursting in at all the seams, I tried to steady myself, I meditatively focused on a drop of water, empathising with it likewise clinging to the underside of the sink. I empathised my way instantly to know where every molecule, and every atom, of the water in there, had ever been, and it was a short jump from there to realise I could do that with everything. My experience is that every atom, every subatomic particle, have omnidirectional infinite sense of the entire cosmos.... and this was only in the beginning seconds of the hours long trip, the ability to see behind things, to know from every perspective, everybody, all time, all times, all dimensions, all realms, all places, all interacting potentials... I cant speak to it really, only to say I remember I did experience it. Cannot take it all back with you.

    First exchange with other people after I came out of the toilet, friends had come around, one asked "how was it?", and with it all still being fresh, the immensity of having experienced omniscience, sought to offer what I thought was the most beautiful thing of it all... I said, with all glowing reverie "I know death". The look of horror on the poor dear's face though. Ho ho ho.

    But yeah, get that... we mere mortals, many, all around, can experience omniscience.

    And many are, and ever have. Say hi.

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    [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Because now I know what I'd be missing.

    Times like that, we experience it in one direction only

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    apparently I literally tried to strangle myself on my umbilical cord in the womb but my take on that was that I knew what was coming.

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    [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The After is not what we fear. It is the pain of the transition

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not afraid, I'm annoyed. I'll never get to finish my unfinished books. >:(

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Afraid? Hardly. More like

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    Nothingless void is as believable as afterlife. From scientific point of view neither make sense, it's like we're giving ourseleves some metaphysical distinctiveness from the rest of universe but are merely physical bodies inside of it according to our scientific knowledge. And according to that we precisely know what's after death: we rot in grave, and that's it. But that answer is not satisfying for us, because what we call our consciousness will stop existing at some point, and we try to find logical state of us, when there is no longer us. I don't really think it's possible to describe how's that like at all.

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    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I wasn't burdened by the curse that is awareness before I was born, and hence now as a result of this awareness, I am scared.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    We are not cursed to know, we are blessed! We are a fantastic arrangement of atoms that so happen to be arranged into people instead of rocks!

    We are, at the end of the day, infinitely small chunks of the Universe able to see, experince, know, and look back into ourselves!

    I may be hammered, and the world is in an especially frightening place at the moment, but damn is it good to have my atoms arranged into a person instead of a tree

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The key is to accept that the end of consciousness is a feature of existence, and not a bug.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago*

    We live and we die, but we don't start or stop existing. Everything that is us is still here. And in time, what was us becomes something new and different.

    The miracle of life is a rare and magical opportunity for a bit of our grand panoply of matter to direct its own future. And, I believe, the horror of death is in that return to idleness and loss of control. We don't want to return to the sidelines, to be put back on the shelf. We don't want to become mere stuff again. We want to keep playing the game.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This strangely made me feel a better about the concept of death.

    Sometimes I think about it and fall in a few seconds of existential dread. But this kinda...makes it make sense?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Tbf nobody has ever experienced either because experience is exclusive to being alive and conscious

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    [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying

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    [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's not the death part that scares me. It's the transition between living and dead that's going to suck.

    But then I had a really terrible November 2024 and am still suffering a high-suicidality psychotic break, so my opinion might be biased.

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    This is a very deep and true post for a shitpost. It’s basically when you go to sleep and don’t dream, but you don’t wake up. It’s just a black void of nothingness.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Unless the universe is truly infinite, then from the point of view of your continuity of consciousness, you will never die, because they will always be somewhere in infinity where you're exact current consciousness picks right up after you die without a blip.

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of the part before that.

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    We are genetically configured to survive at all costs. That fear is simply the wiring in your head ensuring you do what you can to survive.

    You can safely compartmentalize it. store it up there with your irrational fear of clowns.

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    It’s just that I kinda like being conscious…

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    The previous billions of years of void was a grandiose buildup to the world's largest nothing-burger, followed by an eternity of void again.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)
    And I am not frightened of dying, 
    any time will do, I don't mind
    Why should I be frightened of dying?
    There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime
    
    
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