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
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.
