10th June 2024

Free time, and getting over my fear of death

Two things to discuss today.
For the first time in my entire life, I am not afraid of dying. Maybe that's a stretch, but I'm certainly not as afraid as I've always been. Oh, also, I've got a lot of free time.
This is gonna contain some confronting descriptions, but its not a vent. I'm actually quite happy right now as I write this. This is more of a celebration that I've finally made progress in a problem I feared I would never solve.

The history of my fear of death


My fear of death is not a fear for others, it is purely self-centred. I have always been afraid of the concept that, one day, I will cease to exist. The idea of my thoughts and experience of everything just ending is a very unsettling one to me.
A value I have always held steadfast is that of being honest with myself. Much to the occasional suffering of my mental health, I am unable to do what some people can where they "skip logic" to create for themselves a worldview which stops them from being so anxious about stuff. If I do that, it feels like I'm lying to myself, and that simply won't do.
When I was a kid, my mum would tell me God existed not because she's religious (I come from a long line of religious sceptics on both sides of my family), but because it's an easy way to pretend to answer a kid's big existential questions. But at some point when I was very little, I remember going through the gates of our house paddock and realising that God couldn't logically exist, because the concept of an eternal being violated a fundamental concept of my reality, cause and effect. As I got older I found more philosophically sound ways of justifying my disbelief in any higher beings, or souls, or any of that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, my understanding of the world leads me to logically conclude that our minds do not exist separate to our bodies, and that when we die physically, it means the cessation of our existence and our internal world. A lot of people think this, and for some it's a comfort: after all, an afterlife of eternal hell is probably a lot worse than nothing at all. But for me, it has always just been so existentially terrifying to think that, inevitably, my existence is going to finish.
What's ironic is that, even though my fear of death stems from my uncompromisingly logical autistic brain, the fear itself is plainly illogical. Why should I be afraid of not existing anymore? I'm not even gonna notice!
One unusual aspect of this discomfort is not knowing what will happen after I die. I'm a very curious person, and sometimes the fact that I'm never going to know where humanity ends up in the far future, or even what the weather will be like on the day of my funeral, or even that my will will be properly carried out...all of that unsettles me in a way that I honestly find a little funny. It's so like me that I would get upset about not being able to learn after dying.
My fear of death has caused me intermittent panic attacks since the age of about 7 or 8. These ain't your granny's panic attacks: I wail, I hyperventilate, and I get a feeling throughout my entire body of needing to run, as if I want to try and run from my own mortality. Sometimes I do run: on the most recent occasion where this happened in public, I'm sure I looked very silly running through campus, hyperventilating and stammering and sprinting out of nowhere. I remember staying up long past midnight in the boarding house, discussing my panic attacks with stumped housemasters, who were absolutely untrained to deal with mental health of any kind because it was an all boys school.
I'm pretty sure a fear of death is universal, and that it manifests in different ways for different people. My mum and I used to take long walks in the bush together with our dog(s), and chat for ages about whatever. Sometimes I would confide in her about my fear of death, and her responses obviously got more honest as I got older. The full story seems to be that, when she was my age, she was existentially afraid of death too. But as she got older, that fear transformed from an internal existential fear into an external fear about, what if she dies and her children can't manage without her? That sort of thing. I bet that as I get older, and I start a family of my own, I'll become less afraid of my own subjective death and more afraid that I won't be around forever to care for my family. And that will be painful too, but for some reason it seems preferable to my current fear.
I am starting to feel it, now that I've got a partner with whom I intend to stay for the rest of my life. If I could spend eternity with her, I would like to. It's sad that we can't spend eternity together. This really came to the forefront of my mind when my nanna died in February. I wasn't bothered by her death, because her mind was long gone by then anyway. But what did bother me was my grandpa. They had been in love since they were in high school, and had stayed together until her end. I saw my grandpa weeping at the loss of his love, and I wept with him. I can't stand the thought of living to see my partner's death.
...lucky for me, though, I'm probably gonna die first. She's had multiple centenarians in her family, so she'll probably live a standard deviation or so longer than me. Sucks to be her!

I'm not afraid anymore

Simon Roper cured me of my fear of death.
...I know, right??
A few days ago he uploaded this ramble, where he talks pretty extensively about the death of his father, and his own non-fear of death. He said a lot of things that surprisingly calmed me about death, but here it the most important quote, edited sligtly for conciseness:
"Being on the cusp of death, I think, is always presented as this profoundly dramatic thing which is completely unlike all the rest of your life, and it's the most dramatic, important moment of your whole life, and you're always wondering, 'When will it come? Will I die well? Will everything be in place? Will all the right people be around me?' In reality, it just happens when it happens, and whoever's around you is around you, and it happens in whatever way it happens, and then afterwards people deal with it. The experience of dying is not necessarily that different to the experience of living."
Somehow, after hearing that, I haven't been so afraid. Hell, the fact that I've managed to write all this about my fear of death is an amazing step in the right direction.
I always assumed my fear of death would gradually subside as I got older, but I really didn't expect to make such a leap in progress from watching a single YouTube video. I'm really happy about this.

I really do type exactly how I talk, ay? I can hear myself saying "I'm really happy about this" in the most monotonous voice and being so genuine about it. I love autism. It makes me so quirky and unique.

Free time

Oh yeah, uni's over, so I got a lotta free time. Wonder what I'm gonna use it for. I think I'll finally start that game show channel I've been wanting to make. That'd actually be a really good use of my time! In the meantime, I'm gonna chill out and have fun.







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