Fear of death.

QuantumBalance · Post by **QuantumBalance** » 01 Aug 2006 02:46

Yes, thanks for that c-fan

smokefree · Post by **smokefree** » 01 Aug 2006 09:07

Well I must admit talking about death to all you fellow footbag players has helped me not worry about it, In fact I can think about it without a shot of adrenaline goign through my body, thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

Troyson · Post by **Troyson** » 09 Aug 2006 21:36

read the book "Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom. Its a great book that teaches you all about death and why not to fear it. I had to read it for summer reading and i just finished it. The book completely changed my view on what death is like, i highly reccomend you read it.

BenRea · Post by **BenRea** » 13 Aug 2006 19:35

i feel like everything i do in life is a waste because it will end eventually and eventually no one will remember me or anything i did. life is a waste...or is it?

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 14 Aug 2006 08:30

BenRea wrote: it will end eventually and eventually no one will remember me or anything i did. ?

Why do you play footbag? Eventually you will drop, and the combo will be over. You may not even remember what you hit.

sniikeri · Post by **sniikeri** » 14 Aug 2006 09:10

BenRea wrote:i feel like everything i do in life is a waste because it will end eventually and eventually no one will remember me or anything i did. life is a waste...or is it?

If you actually think this way, and end up doing nothing, then your life is a waste. And deserves to be.

BenRea · Post by **BenRea** » 14 Aug 2006 11:20

C-Fan wrote:
BenRea wrote: it will end eventually and eventually no one will remember me or anything i did. ?
Why do you play footbag?

For something to do while i wait to die.

PegLegHolly · Post by **PegLegHolly** » 14 Aug 2006 12:43

yall need to cheer up.

right now you guys are healthy. sure, maybe something could happen soon... but why worry about it now? make the most of what you have while you have it. be the best you can be. do the best you can do.

BenRea · Post by **BenRea** » 14 Aug 2006 13:15

PegLegHolly wrote: make the most of what you have while you have it. be the best you can be. do the best you can do.

for what?

Robert wojci · Post by **Robert wojci** » 14 Aug 2006 13:42

so your not a stupid dpressed emo kid, who contemplates death all day

Seriously, so what if life is meaningless, and we're just vessles to make offspring, i dont beleive in god or anything like that, but why not have fun with it?

smokefree · Post by **smokefree** » 14 Aug 2006 13:55

I understand the point Ben is making and have contimplated it many times. Its true no one will most likely remember you, but that doesn't mean you can't accomplish things before you die, I still have a fear of death but life is something that im a little clearer on in my mind.

No matter how short life is that doesn't mean you can't do something to make a difference in the world, or just make yourself happy. I understand the importance of life, the veil of death that confuses me. I don't how im gonna make my mark in the world but im gonna damn well try, and if I fail to do good for the future I'll be ok with it, I tryed. As for this philosophy, I enjoy it, it took a book to point out the worth of life to me, Terry Goodkind books that is, maybe Ill read that book on death which Troyson recommended.
When people start to view life as meaningless it becomes so.

BainbridgeShred · Post by **BainbridgeShred** » 14 Aug 2006 14:19

I can't understand why everyones so caught up in whether people will remember them. Who cares if people remember you or not? I understand the whole aspect of humans wanting to be immortal in some way, but it's kind of a false hope. How many humans do you know from 3000 years ago? Probably like 3 to 10. 99.999 percent of the population will eventually be forgotten, so just forget about it. Death is all an illusion anyways. Death is God's final punishment for man, as put forth in Genesis.

BenRea · Post by **BenRea** » 14 Aug 2006 15:29

Robert wojci wrote: Seriously, so what if life is meaningless, and we're just vessles to make offspring, i dont beleive in god or anything like that, but why not have fun with it?

now that makes sense, why not have fun with it, good point.

DaGoodSmoke · Post by **DaGoodSmoke** » 27 Sep 2006 14:28

When i was 12 years old i got diagnosed with a very rapidly growing cancer. Being That close to death gave me a new outlook on life and death, i had to accept death. but after months of chemo i got through it. i guess what i wanted to say is that Death is inevitable so just accept it.

brycimus · Post by **brycimus** » 13 Dec 2006 06:44

i don't fear death itself, but the painful ways i could die i do. but i don't think about it that much, i just accept that it's going to happen and live my life. it is weird though if you sit down and think about not being on earth anymore, you get that weird epiphany feeling. anyone know what i'm talking about?

smokefree · Post by **smokefree** » 13 Dec 2006 10:53

Yes, thats why I was so scared a few months back. I feel like you know.. im floating through space and time with no form or something. Im not very attached to reality and I space out a lot so its easy for my imagination to get carried away. When I imagine death its like im experiencing it ya know? Lately though i havent really been afraid, i just had to stop running from my thoughts and face them.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 14 Dec 2006 17:23

Interesting comments. I live life because it has so much to offer and we are ultimately (if you believe in logic, reason and knowledge - as opposed to religion) so lucky to be here, that I have a sense that it would be a waste not to take every opportunity that we are presented. While the nihilist view is a strong one, and indeed there is ultimately no reason to live, I have come to believe that it is a false view, and in fact we should try to live life to its fullest.

I used to be a nihilist - with the same views as Ben, for a long time.

The reason it's a false view is because it is denying our emotions. Science can now tell us fairly accurately what causes our emotions and I think for the sake of the argument we could even assume that we know exactly what causes our emotions. The nihilist says; "my feeling of joy is just a chemical reaction, its no different to the reaction in my brain when I feel hate. It's not good or bad, that's just how it is." This is partly true but just because goodness and badness are relative, it doesn't mean they're not real. Regardless of if we know what causes it or not, the feeling of joy is, from my perspective, a good feeling and the feeling of hate is a bad feeling. It doesn't matter how much you deconstruct those emotions, they are still real. I actually do feel good when I hold my niece and it doesn't matter that I know what's going on in my brain or not.

So we need to accept our emotions, because they are real. Of course with that said, we shouldn't become hedonistic. In fact I would argue that a hedonistic lifestyle would actually lead to negative emotions anyway and the science backs up this opinion in two ways. First, studies have shown very clearly that people's happiness does not change at all based on how much money you earn, over about $10,000 USD. They also show that people who work 4 - 6 hours a day are the happiest people (these statistics are sourced from the book Affluenza by Clive Hamilton - I've lent it to my Mum so I can't state where the studies took place until I get it back, but you can read the book anyway). In his book "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" - Harvard biologist Marc Hauser demonstrates very clearly (based on experimental evidence) that people all around the world, regardless of culture, have the same basic moral beliefs and he puts forward the strong argument that this is caused by evolution. Because of the way we've evolved, putting ourselves before other people does not necessarily make us happier. I know that I give a lot of money to charity, and it does make me feel really good. I'm sure everybody on this forum feels the same way.

So we have to accept our emotions and this means not being hedonistic too.

So that's basically why I'm no longer a nihilist and a very short summary of why I live life.

Do I have a fear of death? Not at all, and I think Mark Twain put it best when he wrote:

I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 14 Dec 2006 17:29

I love this quote from Richard Dawkins - apparently this is what he wants read at his funeral (as well as being from the book "Unweaving the Rainbow"

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century.' The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century's being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Switch Kicker · Post by **Switch Kicker** » 15 Dec 2006 10:12

Were you referring to one of my death topics? I think I had two.

Anyway, I'd like to offer my thoughts on how you should take this and what happens and such.

I was once effected by the mere thought that everything I do now, is a waste, because ultimately, it's all going to not exist anymore. Not to me anyway.

However, after a few weeks, those thoughts kind of vanish in the natural persuit of happiness. School, work, relationships with friends and a girlfriend, and just doing things I enjoy.

We are the only organisms that have a conscience knowledge of the fact that we're going to die. But somehow, for most of us anyway, a natural persuit of happiness overlaps that knowledge, and we tend not to worry about it. Unless, like in this case, we get bored and decide to discuss it, then we start brainstorming crazy ideas, and we all love being scared to death so we always invent crazy horrible ideas for "the end."

I don't think you should worry about what's to come, it's not in your control. (At least not yet. Maybe one day in the future... distant future...)

As for what I truely think happens when you die... Have you ever passed out? If not, (I don't know if this is dangerous or not, but we did it all the time for entertainment in Basic Training... so yea.) lean over onto your knees a bit, breath deeply, and rapidly for about thirty seconds. Then quickly stand straight up, and have a trusted friend push his hands up on your arteries in your neck. The fast breathing raises you heart rate, which speeds up how fast the blood moves through your body. By blocking the arteries, the blood will drain from your head in about 2 seconds. Basically, it makes you pass out for 15-30 seconds.

That's what I beleive happens when you die. Whatever stat you are in when you are not conscience, is the stat you're in when you're dead. There's no brain activity, time passes by without your knowledge... The second you start to pass out, you already start to wake up (In your mind anyway, even if it's been a few days.).

Ever seen "K-Pax"? Good movie. Like he says around the end. The universe will expand, and then contract, and then expand again, and then contract again, and repeat this process forever and ever throughout eternity. However, everything that has happened, and will happen, will happen again, and again, and again in the exact same way and fasion, down to the placement of a single electron. But mathematics and physics make it that way. Everything you do now, will be repeated again and again forever and ever. You won't be conscience of the fact that you're doing it again. It's just like live your life right now.

So, make good decisions where it counts. Because it's not going to effect you for the rest of your life. No, it's much worse than that. It will effect you, forever.

There's my two cents and a bottle cap.

See, I'm not always a disruptive ignorant ass who has distaste in good discussion. Just ninety percent of the time.

Switch Kicker · Post by **Switch Kicker** » 15 Dec 2006 10:21

By the way, that's a damn good quote. I didn't read all the previous posts before posting myself.