Death anxiety

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Everyone dies, no-one gets out of this Earthly life alive, at least, not in the same form as when they lived. Once you accept that, and realise that you are a speck of dust in the universe and not remotely improtant in the grand scheme of things, you can achieve zen.

Your mental events of anxiety are transient and only last as long as you let them control you.

I totally agree. I was afraid of death as a kid, but when I figured out how the world works, and that we are only here for a short while and then we cease existing and that there really is nothing to fear about being dead, I did achieve peace with death, and no longer fear it. In some cases I would prefer being dead over alive (severe chronic pain, terminal illness, that kind of thing).

Yeah, I have the same experience.

Stopped being afraid of death in 2012 - and then died. Ouch.

I am mostly scared of a painful death, not death itself.

I refuse. We finally live in an age where it's theoretically possible to slow down or even reverse aging (already scientifically proven to work in mice), so I have no business coming to terms with death. I don't really have anxiety towards death/nothingness/whatever comes after, I just have an intense dislike towards death. I like living, and *that* I have come to terms with.

There are more forms of Zen than the one that embraces its own (yes quite likely inevitable) demise.

Often I wonder how idealistic the concept of zen can be ? Until you have lived in extreme suffering or ongoing
Mental abuse , incarceration , whatever .And you have only experienced the opposite of those conditions .
It becomes hard to appreciate the quality of life. Life is precious thing , Alternatively depending on your life conditions it might be a living hell. If you can mentally zen your way out of suffering , you still have to live through it.
Perhaps if you are a lifelong Zen master perhaps you can survive mentally, But if all you are doing is surviving,
Where is the quality of a existence? …. And just btw , I am a believer in the concept of Zen , regardless .

Problem is you are the speck of dust that could end up being the reason we get off this rock and settle the cosmos.

Or you could be the reason the next Elon Musk gets too depressed to seek out a career in aerospace.

All it takes is one wrongplanet post that encourages a person to be the next musk, or makes them too cynical to even try.



If everyone gets cynical we fail, not giving a s**t doesn't work, everyone has the potential to matter, and for a sane society you have to act as if you are the one that makes a difference.

Making a difference doesn't mean you're the one that cures cancer.

It could be something as simple as your post being the first post an autistic college kid reads upon being diagnosed.

You could be the reason that kid gets pessimistic about his situation or you could be the reason he succeeds that's the nature of the butterfly effect.

Last edited by ChiefEspatier on 31 Jan 2022, 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You say that until you actually have to face it.

Our societies rejection of religion, combined with smaller family sizes, greater medical services, means people only deal with death is very narrow windows of their life. I.e. death of their parents, death of themselves.

In my opinion people born after 1950 are gonna have a radically harder time dealing with their own death than people born in 1900.

If you have ever worked in a nursing, you start to get a more realistic view. Of how our government and corporations deal with death . Society at large does not really care if life is prolonged it would seem, the Contradiction is hospitals
And doctors , They are merely Corporations and people employed by them doing their bidding . These Corporations then put limits on the treatments they allow in their hospitals . And Doctors are taught to deal with patients within those limits . And their schooling reflects that. Few take extra steps to learn things beyond that . As a patient I had seen this up close as was a patient in recovery for a very long time. Within the degree I was allowed to be repaired.
I have been both patient and nurse in my life. And the oxymoron of taking care of patients , and then having to restrict the amount of care that I could see was needed . Caused me to quit and never look back. Serious errors in patients charts regarding end of life wishes, made me crazy. And yes I do have a harder time dealing with death.
Hopefully in a ideal situation you will pass when you are unconscious

I don't have much, if any. Life and/or mental illness doing that one.

Faced death...more times than I like to admit. Dying? Yes. Pain greater than I can describe? Yeah (beyond trigeminal neuralgia). I don't have inner-peace. The first time, I was terrified. It was as a little one. Fear greater than the pain above, which is interesting as that was brought up to me recently. Maybe that's what numbed me to it all, that initial experience.

Violence, venom and illness.

Sorry you have been through that Dilogic…….am able to relate very much to your medical/ mental life dilemma .

Thanks, and I'm sorry there for you too. It's alright. Just life in the end. Some things we choose, some things we don't.

I don't care about dying, but I feel no lasting peace, either awake or asleep. Just simmering panic. Which is contrary to the thread. I've felt some transient peace, and I still do. I care about others. So, there's still something left there when it comes to me, and I'd rather care about others anyway.

Glad your surgery appears to have gone well.

Anxiety disorders are psychiatric diagnoses, and could have a lot of different causes.

There is not enough information to determine what causes anxiety

i console myself by saying to me, "just on the other side of the veil, there are no more earthly worries."

Idk I am worried about death, like I want to see what happens next. I wish there was a way to put my consciousness into a robot or something so I could continue existing to see what happens next after my body expires. I guess I just don't really want to stop existing.

i am confident that when i am in heaven, i will have been apprised on what is happening in my absence, i will have seen it. and i likely will be ok with it.