I've been going through a total existential crisis for awhile. I'm terrified of death. Both for myself and my loved ones. And because of this pandemic, every time I feel weird I get a panic attack. I've run through every single religion desperate to find some way to find peace with my mortality, but nothing felt right. Is there any philosophy out there that can help me find peace?
In the Apology by Plato, Socrates says that if there is an afterlife, then death is not the end. If there isn't, then your conciousness will be extinguished and you won't ever experience death. In a sense, you will never be dead because you will cease to be. This helps if you're fear isn't around dying and getting old and watching your loved ones pass, but it helped me come to terms with the possibility of just randomly dying.
Broke: Quoting the idealist virgin Plato
Woke: Quoting the materialist chad Epicurus
Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death does not. When death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
Also can we start having struggle sessions about Platonism vs. Epicureanism vs. Aristotelianism (sp?) vs. Stoicism?
Epicureanism is clearly the best and I feel like nobody says this enough
I was about to make an Ancient Greeks struggle session joke in response to your other comment but you beat me to it lol
I may be stretching a bit here, but Epicurus laid out the methodology for empirical study over a thousand years before the European renaissance and enlightenment revived his thinking.
He was right that life came from a type of natural evolution. He was mostly right that diseases were spread by something tiny spread by filth and touching. He was onto something with atomism, in that it was more accurate than any of his peers to actual physics. He was right that the soul and consciousness emerged from material atoms in movement. He even predicted a bit of quantum science when he said that atoms were not deterministic, but had some kind of random swerve and eschewed the crude materialism of his predecessors.
He also taught slaves and women as equal in his garden, didn’t own slaves, taught for free, was volcel but orgies were probably going on at his 24/7 garden parties.
Marx wrote his thesis on him. The dude was certainly onto something. Way ahead of his time, millennia ahead of his time
Edit: Also he also called laws of thermodynamics. He believed all atoms that exist have always existed and will always exist, and therefore believed matter could not be created or destroyed but only rearranged. He didn’t know about the Big Bang, but he did get some of the big picture correct
wow, and yet it seems like he is barely taught in universities since undergrads are only dimly aware of him as a contemporary of Plato and not much else. Would be interesting to learn why he didnt get more recognition and academic prestige to be studied alongside Plato and Aristotle.
Well for one 90% of his work is lost because it was destroyed by Roman Christians who deemed it heathen. What we know of Epicurus is often in short epistles or secondhand from his followers. Cicero devotes a few chapters to him but really strawmans him and is quite uncharitable. The elite of Athens were quite hostile to his thinking, which was mostly to not own slaves, do the minimum required for content conditions and then gain friendships. Those things made it quite the punching bag for the government and the aristocracy, which preferred Plato.
Ah, the base-superstructure relationship strikes again lol
True, I think the Greeks are overrated except Epicurus who is underrated. Epicurus also shares a lot of philosophy with Buddhism and eastern thought, so it’s easy to see why he was sidelined
This is why it’s imperative to get assisted suicide available to everyone near death. Let us go out with dignity, painlessly, on our own terms.
I've tried various philosophical perspectives, but mostly I trained myself to only think about death intellectually so I don't experience the wave of horrifying existential dread that washes over me when I actually contemplate non-existence. Wow that was not comforting after typing it out.
The human condition is to find meaning in a world that is inherently chaotic and devoid of higher purpose. Like Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill for all eternity, the world is absurd. We are born to die in a way, all you can do is try to make it through the day.
I've stopped thinking about death as end, it's a transition. I wasn't dead before I was alive, I was simply a different vat of chemicals. Someday I will return to that. I don't know if that helps you, but it's how I've made my piece.
You don't! I was in a fear-of-death rut for a month or two that I just got out of. Losing sleep and everything. It's terrifying. But also, it's inevitable, it's natural, and - in a way - it's good. Our time is limited and that scarcity is what gives it value. Worry less about dying and more about living.
I hate to recommend a Kurzgesagt video because they've turned into a front for the weird neoliberal technocracy the Gates Foundation is pushing. That being said, their take on "Optimistic Nihilism" was the turning point of a year-long existential crisis for me. Long story short: your life has whatever meaning you want it to, so you may as well make it about maximizing human happiness and minimizing human suffering, for yourself and everyone else, to whatever degree you're able to. Work toward a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist utopia, even if it seems utterly impossible in our current material conditions. Because life is inherently meaningless, because there are no universal standards of "how to human", ya basically got nothing to lose. And that can take a lot of the pressure off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14
You didn't exist for basically infinity time before you were born. Death is just more of the same, really
So this comment gets posted a lot in these discussions, but I don't think it makes any fucking sense at all.
Like, sure I wasn't alive before being born, but because of that, I didn't know what being alive was. I didn't exist. Now that I do, I'm not so keen on losing that awareness.
It's one of those statements that maybe sounds wise, but is pretty fucking useless, IMO. No offense intended, it just doesn't work for me.
doesn't help with the transition, of losing ones awareness to death, but gives you a pretty good idea of what it'll be like afterward, which you've already "experienced". but sure, different folks different strokes also this
I feel the same as OP and anytime I hear this it's not very helpful, not to rag on your specifically. The issue for me isn't so much the not existing part but thinking about the fact that I will no longer experience anything. Not very eloquent, but it's hard for me to put into words.
I know transhumanists get shit on for plenty of perfectly valid reasons, but if someone offered for me to be cryosleeped to be brought back or the opportunity to be loaded into a computer I'd take it without missing a beat. I can't wrap my head around just being over.
I mean quite frankly there's no making peace with Death, that's what makes it so fundamental - its radical indeterminacy. I tend to agree with Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the neurotic belief that there is something out there that can eliminate the radical Otherness of Death is a fundamentally fascistic one. It causes one to cling onto some mirage of internal wholeness, which is fundamentally impossible in the face of the contradictory shaping of our own subjectivity by our conscious and unconscious, their many desires and drives - all of which ultimately return to death, not of intent, but of necessity.
Here's a quote from Alenka Zupancic's What is Sex where she discusses Freud and Lacan's death drive which I think shows the radicality in recognizing the fundamentally radical indeterminacy of death and why it's not something to be at peace with. Because it's always already there! And none of us are at peace are we?
It is the death drive that opens up the space (the scene) of achievements that stretch beyond the ordinary, and beyond business as usual... We can now say that the death drive, in our meaning of the term, could be described precisely as establishing (and driving) the ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. The organism dies, but it is more than an ideological or reli-gious phrase to say that there are things (creations) that outlive it. And it is precisely at this point that one has to situate the concept of the death drive, and insist on abandoning the idea of the duality of drives: there is only the death drive. Yet it cannot be described in terms of destructive tendencies that want (us) to return to the inanimate, but precisely as constituting alternative paths to death (from those immanent in the organism itself). We could say: the death drive is what makes it possible for us to die differently. And perhaps in the end this is what matters, and what breaks out from the fatigue of life: not the capacity to live forever, but the capacity to die differently. We could even paraphrase the famous Beckettian line and formulate the motto of the death drive as follows: Die again, die better!
That's the answer that worked for me. Completely cured of the fear of death.
What I like to think about is the fact that, no matter what, your actions will have a lasting effect on the world. Even after you're dead, even after the sun explodes, even after all of existence goes dark, there will always be this little segment of causality that was you. There's no way to erase it. You are alive, and with every heartbeat, you are remaking the universe in your own small way. Sometimes you even get to choose the mark you leave.
Modern, Western, Capitalist society does not give us any frameworks to deal with mortality- quite the opposite - it pushes it away, denies it at all costs and is very negative about it. Like so much we deal with, this is a societal failing, not a failing at the individual level.
I align with a lot of the Buddhist views when it comes to my ontologies. I’ve had some experiences that took away my fear of my own death for a while but I still wasnt accepting the idea of loved ones dying.
Like a lot of people I guess I compartmentalise the concept with some resignation that it’s just how it is.
What would the right amount of time to be alive be? 100 years? 200? Forever? Then no one could have children and there would be no new people. I don’t know how it could be different than it is now - maybe trans humanism at some point.
Unironically, a lot of acid and nihilism are what helped me. At a certain point in my last trip, I just zoomed out on life in my mind's eye and realized how microscopically small we are. I've instead made peace with the meaninglessness of the universe. I'm not afraid to die, I'm more afraid to use what time I have here doing nothing or worrying about the end. I guess that take is a bit pre-pandemic, but regardless I'm just trying to make the best use of my time and help others as we all struggle through hellworld together. I know this isn't the most bloomer answer, but I genuinely do find solace in the void, lol.
