Death-- you ever feel scared of it?

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nope not scared of anything not even death, i have no fears of anything.

death is just a really big change of address.

Death makes me realize everything we love will be dead or decayed in the future. The only thing that matters is being happy and hopefully making other people happy too.


Forever a scone. ;_;

I'm not scared of death either. (Incurable atheist.)

Everything save consciousness is energy. => Energy can only change state. => The total amount of energy in the universe is constant. => There is no definitive end and the soul/self is an illusion.

I can come up with as many rationalizations as I want and it still doesn't make death any less scary. But I know for a fact my life isn't guaranteed to me and I can't keep my head in the sand. At any time for any reason I could die so I don't have a false sense of security.

I'm an atheist and it's not cuz I'm this mythological super rational Spock figure a lot of fake intellectuals claim to be. It's cuz so far I haven't found any reasons to believe in God. It's a matter of interpretation, not logic or intelligence.

I am not afraid of death...although I escaped it many times. I do believe in reincarnation as it makes sense to be that if all the universe is in cycles, why would our souls be linear?

Thank you, everyone! This is really helpful!!

I don't actually remember if I've ever actually been phobic of death. Scared, yes. But phobic, I don't know. (If this seems weird to not remember, it's that my memory completely sucks unless something triggers it the right way. And this isn't triggering any information at all about the past, only about the present.)

I do know that at the moment, I have no fear of death. None at all. At least... okay this is hard to explain. If I were in a situation where I might die but had a way of fighting it, I would probably get the adrenaline and fear-like reaction needed to ensure my survival. But in situations where I can't control it, as well as the rest of the time? No fear at all that I can tell. So I assume that I have no particular fear of death in general, given that I've been faced with it (or thought I have, in some cases) and not been afraid of it even when I thought it might be imminent.

The first example I can think of was on 9/11. I was in a city fairly far away from my home, and I had no communication device or other means of communication whatsoever. (This was because my communication device was broken and I had gone there to buy a backup, with nothing but a detailed set of instructions written by a friend who had good reason to worry that I wouldn't be able to follow them. But I was taking a risk.) I had left so early in the morning that things weren't happening until I was on the bus going over the hill. Someone with a cell phone stood up and shouted to the rest of the passengers, except whatever she said was only comprehensible if you knew about the first part of the attacks already. (All I got was that there were planes attacking somewhere.) Throughout the day, little clues like hearing the FBI talking about the city I was in being a possible target, newspaper headlines that said "America under attack," and other things like that... nothing like this had ever happened before, nothing exactly like this anyway. The idea of planes as weapons didn't cross my mind. Nuclear war did cross my mind. And I was headed straight into the heart of the city the FBI were worried about being attacked. (Once I got my communication device, I tried asking other people and they straight-out refused to fully explain to me what was happening because they saw me as ... I don't know the word. The way people see disabled people when they don't see us as fully human. The closest to a response I got involved a guy asking me in baby talk if I understood what an airplane was.)

And after concluding that I might end up at ground zero of a nuclear weapon,, it took me only a few minutes, almost no time at all, between figuring that out, and realizing I wasn't afraid at all. It wasn't something I could control. I couldn't get out of the city for awhile (not being able to deviate at all from the schedule written down for me). And I had a lot of time before my bus. I went to a free art museum, figuring that if I was going to die I might as well do something pleasant first. I literally had no fear at all, fear seemed beside the point.

And more recently, I've had several medical emergencies where death didn't have to happen, but very well could happen. And with those, the adjustment period was much faster. Seconds, if that, and no actual fear that I could feel. Just acceptance that yeah, death would happen, and I'd do everything I could to stay alive, but past that point it was out of my hands.

It's not that I want death, I don't have any kind of death wish. I want to live as long as possible. But death just seems to hold no fear for me. I don't know when it changed, because I did used to have at least some fear of it. Death doesn't erase the fact that anyone has existed, however long or short their existence was. But it's more than that, there's just no fear in it somehow, no matter how hard I look for traces of it.

Affraid to die? Heck no. At this point I am really looking foward to it and I am looking into an exit stradegy right now. I am sick of being who I am, someone with AS that will always be alone no matter how hard I try.

I stopped fearing death when my wife had a child that was obviously not meant to live; modern medicine kept him alive for a tortured 51 days of life. His death was truly a blessing to end his suffering.

After this the problems I thought I had in my life did not seem nearly as large and I focused on riding the wave of life as long as I could; knowing that eventually one day I would fall off.

Did you ever notice this:

live spelled backwards is evil
lived spelled backwards is devil

I never noticed this until I fell off the wave and stopped "living".
I'm trying to get back on the wave.

I have been afraid of other people dying. I hate the feeling of someone no longer existing, just leaving a corpse behind to be disposed of, it's uncomfortable.

The prospect of dying rarely enters my mind. I didn't quite understand it from the death of family pets, but when one of the people who raised me died when I was eight, I think I got a pretty good grasp of it. I understood it meant that person was gone and wasn't coming back, I wouldn't be seeing that person again. If I asked why a person died, I wasn't given a vague answer because it was known I didn't accept vague answers. As a result of this I never feared death as a child because logic didn't lead me to believe I was at a significant risk for dying, and as an adult I've yet to find a logical reason to fear death. It's not like I'm going to die and be sitting around dead thinking about how awful it was or regretting that I didn't live my life in a different way. I'll be dead, I won't exist as a person, my brain will stop and my life will be over. Willfully surviving and living in fear of death are two different things, so the answer remains that I am not afraid of death.

I was an implicit atheist as a child, those who raised me were explicit atheists but never told me what to believe or not believe, and now as an adult I can say that logic and reason have lead to me being an explicit atheist and have much to do with my stance on my own mortality. I tend to rely on what is demonstrably true in life and find a lot of meaning in that.

I'm afraid of not living enough... if that makes any sense.

I'm always afraid I'm not living enough. That makes perfect sense to me.

I'm not going to argue it at length, but there are other ways to understand the world than a particular thing that gets called "reason" and another particular thing called "emotion" and "irrationality". Both my native way of thinking, and another way of thinking that I have learned, fall under that category. I know that you can argue linguistically that there's only "reason" (again, one particular way of thinking, or a collection of similar ways of thinking) and "irrationality". But that's just semantic. There are other valid ways of thinking that can come to conclusions that aren't even possible to imagine in the kinds of thought that get called "rational" the most often. And that's just me stating... well 'belief' is another linguistic concept I don't claim, but close enough.