Or does it?
I know we were once nothing, but it is still terrifying and depressing to me to think about returning to this. In fact, as of late, I’ve been unable to not think about it: the loss of all experience and all memories of everything, forever. All the good times we had, and will have, with anyone or anything ever will totally annihilate into nothingness. All our efforts will amount to nothing because the thoughtless void is ultimately what awaits everything in the end.
The only argument against this would have to be supernatural, like another cause of the Big Bang or somehow proof of reincarnation, but if my consciousness won’t exist for me to experience it, then what does it matter either way?
There is no comfort in Hell, either. The anvil of death weighing down, infinitely, on all values and passions is becoming unbearable for me, so I could really use any potentially helpful thoughts about this matter.
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Without trying to sound too metaphysical. I look at it this way. The atoms that make up my body were forged in the hearts of stars. These atoms have existed in some form across the universe for billions of years.
I don’t remember what patterns my atoms were before they became this one, and I don’t know what pattern these atoms will take once I am done with them, but these atoms will remain.
This consciousness that has arisen from this pattern of atoms may give way to a different consciousness in a different pattern of atoms in some untold amount of time. While this consciousness may not know of that one, and that one may not remember this, it eases my mind to know that the stardust that originated these atoms will still exist.
It eases my mind to know that in the infinite void of nothingness, this pattern of atoms and this consciousness have impacted those around me. The short period of time that this consciousness is around gives me the opportunity to experience the wonderful breadth of the human condition, because this will be the only time these atoms are in this exact pattern. Every moment of my existence I am unique.
I am of the universe, I have experienced the universe, and others have experienced the universe through me.
From an uncertain genesis to a certain end. You do not remember being born, but you know someday that you will die. This is awareness. And there is some comfort in this.
In the past you have remembrance or memory. The things that you were or the things that happened to you. In the future you anticipate what could come, or what your hopes are. You make plans. And that’s fine. It’s part of the human condition. But the now is the only thing that is actually happening.
Seize this moment. This moment is where you are. This moment is where you live. Being kind to yourself, being kind to others, being a person that others would wish to be, if they were examining your present person.
To build the world, or at least your small part of it, in the way that you see fit is all that our tiny hands can do. And there is a certain satisfaction in that. To live moment to moment. And to build your station. And to build others stations around you. To empower yourself and others. These are the things that build satisfaction. Gratification. These things are real. And these things do not require anything of the past or future.
Eventually you can stretch this now into the whole of your life. And it will provide wholeness that is not dictated by any sort of belief. For belief is not necessary. Let me repeat. You do not need to believe in anything to have wholeness and fulfillment in your life. But it certainly helps to be kind to others for its own sake. For that is the rule that others will measure you on as well.
I hope that helps.
PS. If you dig on this kind of thing, look into stoicism.
These are the things that build satisfaction. Gratification. These things are real.
But gratification is ultimately just a series of chemical reactions. So you’re saying to merely dig into the chemicals? To be clear, I don’t fault you if your answer is “Yes” and even think that that’s the inevitable answer; it just seems less… valuable to me, if I couldn’t find a more accurate adjective.
I don’t think I’m looking for any particular belief but I guess I just wish that being kind to others (which, to clarify, I will almost certainly not just stop doing) mattered on a level more than just us wanting to do it for the chemicals, now that I’ve totally sunk into science’s observations of the material world being all that there is. Since I no longer believe that there is a higher power, I’ve concluded that we just do things for the feels, good or bad. And that seems… lame(? Or something) to me, but it appears like there is no other way to go about it. Morals don’t independently exist (there is no such objective thing as “justice,” etc.) and are just guided by hormones and chemicals evoking sympathy based on our experiences and subjective thoughts of what justice, happiness, peace, etc. even mean.
And then our memories of it all will end anyway. What a waste and tragedy.
Sorry for being such a sour worm. I do appreciate your response but all this thought is leading me to “seize the moment” and therefore procrastinate on doing my taxes versus playing games, etc.
But gratification is ultimately just a series of chemical reactions. So you’re saying to merely dig into the chemicals?
No. I mean I guess you could see it that way, and you could even do that, whether those chemicals be internal or external. But I think that’s oversimplifying. The satisfaction and gratification come from knowing. Knowing that what you are doing right now is something that you want to be doing. Not want in the I want a sandwich sort of way. Want in the I want what I’m doing now to be the thing that gives my experience a more complete and deep meaning sort of way.
I would quote here but it seems pedantic.
You speak of chemicals and hormones evoking emotions (sympathy was your word) based on some arbitrary morals that don’t exist. And I don’t think you’re wrong. But I think in this case you’re not oversimplifying you’re overcomplicating. Erm. Let me see if I can elucidate. I’m thinking this through right now so let me see if I can get it right…
Think of yourself as an ant. On a very big round hill with a whole bunch of other ants. You are Flagstaff the ant. You are part of a colony. I am monocle the ant. And we are discussing this in some sort of bizarre moderated telepathy that we call words. I think some things, you think some things, and these things that we think of are all controlled by our hormones and chemicals. Pathways of how we think are familiar routes for those neurons that fire. That’s how we have been conditioned to be who we are.
We make decisions based on that. Our identities are based on that. What make us up are our experiences. And what we decide to do with those experiences. Just like every previous experience from every entity that we have ever come in contact with. So it’s like we couldn’t have ended up anywhere else because that’s what we have decided to do. This conversation is what we’ve decided to do. This is the question of free will.
So if you zoom way out, I mean like way way out, all you see is the colony. Like Flagstaff and monocle don’t really exist, except that we do. You don’t give names to ants. It’s just ants. You look at an ant colony, and you think there’s ants. Yet all the ants are communicating in a somewhat similar fashion as to what we are.
Is it pointless? What the ants do? What we do? Maybe. But there is some amount of meaning in the question that you asked. Or at least we hope there is. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here answering it, and you wouldn’t be replying to my answer, and I wouldn’t be replying to your counterpoint.
Being good to yourself and others. Whatever that is and whatever chemicals that it produces, cause and effect and all that. We don’t need a higher power for that. We are the higher power, we are the colony.
Well that sounds really hokey and like a bunch of metaphysical horse crap. But I’ve re-edited this thing like 10 times and I have work in the morning at my factory job. So I have to let it go for now. Hope that helps.
Oh, what you typed isn’t crap, haha, and dang, you don’t have to prioritize this before some tough upcoming work! I’m not suddenly going to off myself upon having these thoughts (rather, I want to keep positive experiences going), so I’ll still be here to read—but I appreciate the care nonetheless.
Like Flagstaff and monocle don’t really exist, except that we do. You don’t give names to ants. It’s just ants.
I’d rebut that by saying that’s only because they all look identical to us, and their more basic form of organism limits them from exhibiting drastically different behavior as people can way more observably demonstrate. I don’t know if scientists have studied whether bugs can identify each other; perhaps they can. Perhaps even their sense of the passage of time is different from ours.
We don’t need a higher power for that.
This isn’t a matter of “need,” though; we basically can’t turn back to thoughts of a deity because of the massive logic defiance alone anyway, among other things. Rather, I would also raise uncertainty over this:
we are the colony.
I just don’t know about that. Sure, society makes us relatively much safer off than we otherwise probably would be without it, but we still very much have our own individual independence or else there wouldn’t be anywhere near as much social rebellion and harm done to others, from Luigi’s shooting to the auto-denied claims equally. We are a part of society and can either continue supporting it, trying to change it, or actively leaving it or even antagonizing it.
I just don’t see any overarching reasons to prioritize one or the other beyond:
- evolutionary altruism
- fear of discomfort
- feelings
In light of the eventual death of even society (that’s an assumption I’m making, I’ll concede, sure), one can’t claim to take any particular one-of-the-above-actions versus anything else… beyond merely wanting to do it or not. Anything else is a false sense of nonexistent moral superiority over the other possible actions/reactions. One only helps the colony/society because it makes one feel good, but death still ultimately obliterates all—and all values with it. I guess that is where the crux of my developing, reluctant philosophy lies.
So it’s like we couldn’t have ended up anywhere else because that’s what we have decided to do. This conversation is what we’ve decided to do. This is the question of free will.
The indeterminability posed by quantum physics—specifically quasars—would like to have a word with you. There is some interesting stuff here to suggest that bugs aren’t all instinct, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_Cognition
All the good times we had, and will have, with anyone or anything ever will totally annihilate into nothingness.
No. They will still have happened. You will still have experienced them. You can only really ever experience whatever is happening to you now. If there is only nothingness after death, then you will not experience it.
Make the most of your life in the way it make sense to you. That could be having more shared laughs with loved ones or dedicate it to saving the critically endangered purple-spotted pygmy shrew.
In short: You will experience your life, you will not experience “the great void of death”.
The counterargument that works for me is - why must it be terrifying to return to nothing? It’s something immutable. We weren’t owed anything by the universe - why bemoan what we don’t have, when we could enjoy that which we do?
Take a walk outside. Read a book. Snuggle something furry. It’s perfectly natural to fear death, but if it stops you from enjoying your life, isn’t that a little self defeating?
We were never nothing. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
I’m talking about our consciousness, though. It doesn’t matter what the individual atoms do if we individually end up losing our own capacity to experience the best that our lives have to offer (unless you’re beset by some major chronic illness, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about here).
However, if you believe death isn’t the end, I’d love to read your thoughts because I’d love for it to not be true. All the evidence suggests that it is, though…
It doesn’t matter to our current consciousness as it can’t perceive anything outside of that. We do not know what is beyond our rudimentary understanding of what makes us who we are.
Something like this seems far more likely to me than consciousness being finite.
Keyword being like this, as in whatever is actually going on is far beyond our comprehension, but it’s a nice palatable story that gives it shape. Consciousness might exist beyond death as part of a universal ‘field of awareness’ and reality could be a holographic projection from a deeper non local field of information. Upon death the quantum information could “return” to the universe (orchestrated objective reduction), Monadism, fractal consciousness, pantheism, etc.
I think of it this way. Do you remember your great grandparents? How about your great great grandparents? How about your great great great grandparents? At some point, you’ll go, “Gee, I’ve never thought of them before.”
But do you think they mattered? You may not know what they did, what they hoped for, and the struggles they faced, but had they not existed, neither would you have. They mattered, even if you remember very little about them, and on top of that, you can probably learn about many of them with some effort in genealogy.
You may not have some cosmic importance with the power to change the world, but neither did most Christians, even when you were a believer. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean you don’t matter.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence, but consider this:
Your life is like a plate of cookies, warm and sweet and delicious, and it is best when shared with people you love. One day, that plate of cookies will be empty, but the cookies are no less delicious and the sharing no less meaningful just because there is a finite number of cookies.
One day, my plate of cookies will be empty, but if I am remembered fondly, then it will have been a life lived well. I don’t need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
if I am remembered fondly
The problem is that this doesn’t matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness? I don’t think many people understand just how vast infinity really is. You can tell yourself that your life choices matter, but that’s not the truth, given how everything goes to basically science’s version of Sheol/the OT “grave.” For them, there was no out; that was it.
It may sound cold, but what would it matter to research our ancestors’ struggles, hopes, dreams, and experiences? Struggle itself will cease to matter—collectively for everyone/everything—as well as everything else we’ve mentioned. It would sure be nice, even great, if it mattered, but I can’t see how any particular value can be objectively derived from anything given the vast entropy that awaits all things, including the permanent death of knowledge itself. Our own discussion here will crumble. It’s maddening that nothing will be untouched; nay, even nothing less than being completely obliterated. Therefore, any “well-living” of one’s life would simply be because one wants to do it, with no further basis other than just feeling good (from evolutionistic altruism or whatever provides the dopamine or serotonin, sure)—certainly not “morals,” which technically don’t exist and were just collectively agreed upon to sustain hive minds’ survival. And while I’m certainly not gonna suddenly go immoral…
That severely bothers me.
I don’t need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
It’s not about importance to other people or beings; it’s just about our own continued experience of experience itself. If you won’t be there, why does what anything you struggle for matter? If you cause someone more pain… they’ll eventually just die anyway! If you fight to reduce waste and help other people reduce pain in their lives or others’… they’ll all just die anyway! “But for the span of their lives, they’ll have felt better/worse”—so what? There is no basis for any valuing of one way or another relative to the absolutely immense size of eternity that awaits after such a speck of < a century of some more/less suffering/enjoyment. Am I missing something here? Seriously, I hope I am, but this is all I can conclude.
I feel like the only consolation is that those in massive suffering (whether physical or otherwise) will eventually find “peace” through death, even though nothingness is technically not actual peace, either; the phrase, “lay to rest,” seems to ultimately be still more anthropomorphizing and feel-good comfort, to me anyway, for basically anyone who isn’t in the height of constant, unavoidable pain.
With that said (and I mentioned this in another comment elsewhere here), the ace in the hole that completely throws my argument for a loop is the potential development of anti-aging technology should we be able to get anything like it, thanks to all the billionaires striving for it these years. It really resonated with me when Seth McFarlane said in The Orville about whether one would choose to live forever or not: “I want to see what happens next.” If we can actually achieve that, then there’d be a better argument… in my understanding, anyway.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence
Not really; I just want permanence regardless, lol.
The problem is that this doesn’t matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness?
It doesn’t. But I’m a cosmic nihilist, so the impermanence of everything we do doesn’t bother me. Whether it lasts forever does not change the present, and I will make this one life I know I have as good as I can, since I must experience it, and I will make others’ lives as good as I can, because it does not make me feel good to do otherwise. I have no control over death or its imminence, so what good does it do me to worry about it?
I just want permanence regardless, lol.
I’m sure a lot of people do, but it doesn’t exist, as you already pointed out. Even anti-aging medicine can’t stop the heat death of the universe. Trying to hold onto that wish won’t make it real, and it seems like all it’s doing is giving you anxiety. Dwelling on those things can feel like trying to solve a problem, but it’s one without a solution that only accomplishes frustration and worry.
Life is beautiful, is worth living in the present, because it’s fragile and rare. I have the unique opportunity to be the universe experiencing itself, and worrying about permanence won’t change that.
Thanks, good thoughts all around.
I don’t know if my input is wanted here but you should know everyone, everyone goes through this feeling at some point. We are so beautiful because we are so small and temporary.
One day the bones of the universe will crumple to nothingness in what we call heat death (we don’t know if this is accurate but the thought exercise is still valuable) and time itself will cease to have any real meaning. But you were real, you still happened, and nothing can change that. You’re beautiful because you’re a speck. If you’re ex-faithful you may have come to internalize that it’s by chance we exist at all (though I don’t know or want to tell you what to believe). It is by chance that an asteroid didn’t kill us in our pre-history like the dinosaurs. It is by chance that we developed cognizance and things like music and culture. It is by chance that the Cold War didn’t go hot and kill us all in the 80s. Every single day is a miracle. We are so gloriously, exultantly insignificant.
It’s true, I had forgotten about Einstein’s saying, that we can treat nothing as a miracle or everything as miracles. Thanks for the reminder.
And dude, spoilers! I haven’t seen BR yet lol. Anyway, I do appreciate your thoughts.
I suppose it depends on how attached you are to this life. The loss of fear, worry, pain, drama, hunger, thirst, illness, etc. It might help to look at scientific talks about time. In particular if it does have a direction. Basically you perceive this thing happening in the future but that is just an artifact of existence as your future is no more separate than the past.
I’ve had an overall decent life. I still have a lot of time to live with my friends and family. But I take solace in the fact that I will just cease to exist when I die. Or obviously, that’s my opinion anyways.
I don’t want to argue my beliefs, but that’s how I feel about it.
It seems like a just end. Literally nothing. A final sleep.
Yeah, I suppose I’m being too greedy or something. Thanks for sharing.
I’m sorry.
I did not want to imply anything on your view(s) with my post. I just wanted to say my personal feelings.
You shouldn’t feel guilty or anything based on what I said.
But I’m here if you want to chat.
Again, don’t feel bad about what you feel based on my post.
For me, it’s easy to not fear it when I’m healthy, but as soon as I have health problems, I get this strong fear of mortality. It’s a visceral thing though. In my mind, I know it’s fine, it’s inevitable, and there has never been a better time in history for medical treatment. But the fear I feel is separate from that rational knowledge. That is what’s hard for me to harmonize. There is an anxiety underneath it all. And the funny thing is I never used to get that either, but after my brother committed suicide, I have had this visceral, mortal fear.
Daily meditation has helped me identify the feelings, but has not helped much in overcoming them. It has helped me find peace among them, which is a decent middle ground.
The mortal fear also helps me clearly prioritize things in my life, so it does have its benefits.
adding another comment as I like this woody allen quote. Its not that im afraid of dying its just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.
Ha, I think I read that many years ago. I actually might be fine with being there and even dealing with the pain to the end, however it may manifest, but it’s the lack of anything after that’s bothersome. I hope I’m wrong.
Yeah the nothingness has given me the existentials in the past but I tell you if someone tell me I could die today painlessly and cease to exist or 40 years from now but it will be from alzheimers which progresses over the last 30 years or 20 years from now an incredibly painful one. Ill take today. Maybe I will mention something I have sometimes mentioned around life. If someone dies in the prime of life or earlier and its a tragedy. Even later as they reach middle age it can be like wow they did not get a chance. You get to 50 though. And yeah its early to die that decade but you know. It happens and like that person had a life. They had their shot. To say they were robbed of having a life or such is just false at that point. Don’t get me wrong they could still have a magnus opus or something but thats unlikely. So if your younger than that I can see the anst but I bet when you get there you will start realizing that sure. It would be great to keep living. I mean consciousness is great. But you know it would be way more great if like the world were a better place and you could keep that nice youthful health. It gets to seem more like a break from this crazy locomative breath train. No idea if it helps but its just a perspective.
Nothing can stop the good times we’ve had from having happened.
Sure, the events are locked into the frozen river of the past, but they only matter if we can remember them. At least, that’s how I can’t seem to not see it as…
Yeah, everything you listed as a negative to fear I take a different positive spin on.
I will lose all sense of regret, loss, pain, fear, and guilt instantly.
The good times are still there in the memories of the living, where they belong.
The universe being a huge uncaring void means it doesn’t matter that the world is… infected with humans. That, too, one day, will pass.
Nothing matters. Be free.I will lose all sense of regret, loss, pain, fear, and guilt instantly.
Well, sure, if you’re endlessly haunted by that stuff, yeah, but thankfully, I’m not, at least for now, so the ending of everything else would feel like a net loss to me. My view really only applies to people who like, not dislike, their life situation.
infected with humans.
You sound like a prime candidate to join the VHEM.
You don’t think if you lived FOREVER you would come to regret?
It’s your choice to let your past decisions haunt you, though. You can either focus on the pain or on the lessons learned. The past can’t be changed either way, right? It’s a matter of perspective.
I’m generally grateful for my current life situation, even if it could be better in certain ways and even though I could have certainly made better decisions in my past; the results of my choices, optimal and suboptimal, have still shaped my thinking and current day-to-day life into what it currently is. So that combined with the crumbling of my conviction of the existence of souls is what has driven me into this existential crisis, I suppose.
And how many eons could you last with an intact mind and nothing to do but to think about your past?
Also, would you have perfect recall of your entire life? Memory is a flaw of the flesh. Would you perfectly remember every moment? See the well hidden disappointment in your mom’s face you never noticed?
Well, the hope/fantasy would be that humanity would survive and figure out the universe’s heat death problem, and that we’d carry forward together. There is no point to just surviving alone, true.
Memory is a flaw of the flesh.
Memory is flawed but is not a flaw; it’s perhaps the single greatest thing we’ve (all of us organisms, human or not, have) got of life experience. If I knew I was gonna succumb to dementia and it was deemed irreversible then kill me now lol. But since we don’t know that… it’d sure be nice to retain, and have the opportunity to form new, memories and not just see all our joys or the fruit of our labor come to an end.
Yeah, I meant to say “memory is only flawed because of the flesh”
It sounds like you had an imagining of an afterlife where people were alive and living together in some form. How would that work? Sounds like a huge hassle to me personally.
had an imagining
You do know which community we’re commenting in, right? It’s not like everyone can just immediately slice off decades-long-held beliefs right away…
As someone who is very depressed, the idea of heaven and hell kind of disturb me. I’m so very, very tired, and I just want it all to stop. I want to stop experiencing, I want to stop doing, it doesn’t matter how nice. Suicide is so appealing because I could just turn it all off.
I talk about this because I think an eternity in conventional heaven would eventually depress you. I think that faced with eternity, true infinity, eventually you’ll have wringed out every last drop of happiness you can from existence and you’d long for rest just as much as I do.
Sorry, I want to be comforting to you and to me this is but I doubt it is to you. I’ll leave you with this thought–because I don’t believe there’s an afterlife punishment or reward, it makes being the best person I can be all the more important. My actions are driven from me wanting the world to be a better place, not from me trying to earn a reward.
Oh, I’d already long shut out the concepts of H&H from my expectations, and I was previously Protestant and did not derive faith from works so I wasn’t/haven’t been doing good deeds for the sake of a personal reward anyway. That’s why this:
because I don’t believe there’s an afterlife punishment or reward, it makes being the best person I can be all the more important.
… seems contradictory because the ultimate death of everything seems to reduce the importance of anything we do, which is what bugs me.
Anyway, my perspective doesn’t really apply to people whose life situations have involved more suffering than enjoyment, like it sounds yours unfortunately has; I rather generally like my current life situation. I hope things improve for you, given how this seems like it’s all we’ve got.
Maybe a simpler way to put it
You find a lost crying child in a mall. Do you help them find their parents, do you ignore them, or do you kick them over? In 100 years, it won’t matter. No one’s going to punish you for ignoring them. But, the choice you make matters a lot to the kid.
Sure, that’s fair. Call me brutal or cruel, though, but this whole existential crisis had me stepping back even further in scope than yours to: do the kid’s feelings matter? Does the kid even matter in the first place?
Beyond evolutionary altruism and social norms, I can regrettably no longer seem to see anything other than just brain chemicals/feelings and anyone merely wanting or choosing to say “yes” to those, which is not wrong or bad, but the loss of the framework of any post-death existence to further support just treatment of others has just been unnerving to me.
Is there anything beyond these seemingly rudimentary drivers of motivation to support the stance of helping others or, to go even further out in scope, doing anything in particular at all, like even surviving? It doesn’t seem like it. I continue to live because I currently want to play Slice & Dice, help others make friends in my neighborhood with events I offer to the public, etc., but that’s it—there’s no further basis. I just want to do it. I guess I feel like without an afterlife, we effectively plunge into our own hedonism, buttressed by personal morals—that still bow ultimately to each individual’s sense of pleasure.
And I don’t like that.
There were a lot of good ideas here, though, which have been helping. I’m not suicidal in any way—just rethinking the entire framework of motivation for why we bother to do what/anything that we do. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
It’s interesting, because I see it as like
The world shapes us heavily, and we shape the world slightly. If I do my best to be kind and helpful, at least a very small amount of the time, those actions will lead to someone else doing the same. My individual actions might have a small impact relative to the world, but I’ll leave it a little bit better than I found it. Or at least, a little bit better than if I hadn’t existed at all.
To my mind, this is different than a legacy. No one, not even me, will ever truly know the effect I’ve had on the world. My actions aren’t going down in history books. No one will remember me in 50 years. However, it doesn’t matter. My positive effect on the world, however small, remains.
I used to be scared of death, too, then I realised how terrible life was. Now I look forward to it so there will be no more suffering. Oblivion is better than pain. I’m still scared of the pain of dying, just not of what may lie beyond.
Well, life for me currently is not terrible, so while oblivion is certainly better than pain, satisfaction and fulfillment are better than either. If my life situation changes, though, I may join your ranks.
For all we know it’s an eternity of being frozen in whatever instant you were in at the moment of death. The people who die in their sleep literally get eternal slumber but the people who get chainsaw accidents get a moment of limb tearing pain stretched to eternity
Probably not though, probably your thing
It might be anything, we have no way of knowing. Hopefully it’s not reincarnation, as most lives on this planet are worse than mine.
Do you fear the void before birth you emerged from?
Same shit.
That’s a different situation because we hadn’t experienced life beforehand. Do you not value the memories of your own life experiences? It’s that loss that sucks.
Yeah, but by the same uncertainty, maybe you gain all dead people’s memories when you are submerged in the void? We all just go back into the pot, so to speak.
Not having to pay rent will feel pretty great too.
thats debatable. There is a fair amount of evidence that the flow of time is an artifact of our perception and that nothing is really beforehand and your death is nor more in the future than your birth.
Really? Do you have any reading that you’d like to link to about this?
most of them have been videos. things like pbs space time. I will see if I can track any down but its come up haphazardly with science shows talking about relativity.
so here is one from a quick search but its a subject that comes up again and again the series. Its really nice to actually watch the series from the start as episodes will reference discussions from other episodes. The channels purpose is to explain big things as simply as possible so not exactly for the average person but someone who understands algebra and equivalent level science. From my experience finishing high school should be enough although I think most people who retain that stuff likely went to college. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkWT-xMTm1M
The 70s happened before I was born, so yes.
