sv51macross wrote...
You_Must_Recover wrote...
He who is afraid of dying does not live his life to the fullest.
You can say that all you want, but there are still people who could get 100 times what the wizard gave the Cowardly Lion and we would still be terrified of death. Atheism gives one the moral and intellectual high-ground, but at the same time...this is it. One's sentience is false and based purely on the right kind of chemical and electrical interactions in one's brain. And at the same time, that self-awareness is incredibly painful because we fear it ending. When it ends, we are no-more. No heaven, no afterlife, that's it. Dead. Life is but a meaningless, purposeless struggle to eat until we can fuck, repeat, and die off so we don't consume too much resources. Try and assign deeper meaning all you want, but that's what it boils down to.
So yeah, say nice little platitudes aaaallllllll you want. Doesn't change the face that people like me will cling to whatever scraps and strands we can until it is physically impossible to do anything but let go.
This. This so fucking much. Any form of existence is better than no existence. Pain, pleasure, accomplishment--they're all abstract constructions that we're given the luxury of interpreting only by our sentience.
I believe that the steps people go through psychologically when faced with death have been listed. I recall that they're a lot more complicated and less poetic than a simple "acceptance of the inevitable."
That said, there's risk in everything. An act as ordinary as driving a car is extremely dangerous. What you put in your mouth is probably even more dangerous. Nevertheless, it's easy to become numb to such everyday risks. And Personally speaking, being crippled by fear is hard to enjoy.