Existential Dread

 In media, or expressed by people, I often have seen the sentiment regarding immortality that living forever would be terrible, because you’d outlive everyone you love, or because you’d eventually get sick of life, or you might get permanently trapped somewhere. Similiarly, I’ve also often seen people say that they are afraid of death just because they are concerned of the pain involved, but that they don’t fear what comes after, nonexistence, because they literally won’t exist and thus won’t be around to experience it and thus it can’t be bad.

 And like, I feel the complete opposite. The idea of nonexistence terrifies me. I cannot imagine what it’d be like to not exist, it is fundamentally impossible for me to imagine, and that is honestly the scariest thing to me. It sometimes keeps me up at night, and sometimes strikes me at random times during the day. I don’t fear pain or injury - I face both daily. I don’t fear living so long I become trapped and cannot move - I also face that, more or less, daily as a physically disabled person. I do fear missing my loved ones, for sure, and I don’t know how I’d cope without them, but that doesn’t make me want to not exist anymore if they are gone - at least, not now. Maybe that will change once I’ve experienced a more fundamental loss - all my relatives who have died were ones I visited at most once every few years, and so while I loved them and miss them, my life isn’t substantially affected. The death which has affected my life the most so far was not my great Aunt, who I loved dearly, or my step grandmother, who I low key hated, nor my maternal grandfather, who was kind of a jerk but I loved him anyways, but my dog of thirteen years, Triceratops. But I don’t think that even remotely will prepare me for when someone from my immediate family dies, a prospect I dread facing but is not only likely inevitable, as we all die someday - in theory I could die first tho - but increasingly likely, as my dad has been battling cancer for several years now. Still, though, in the abstract, the prospect of losing my loved ones does not make me feel like I myself want to die someday - quite the opposite.

I don’t believe in god, neither the Christian god nor any other, although I also don’t think I can strictly rule the possibility out. I was not raised religious and have never believed in a god, and even as a kid I remember getting into arguments with kids in daycare about whether god exists. Of course, the existence of a god does not dictate the existence of an afterlife, and vice versa, although people often tie them together. Afterlife, though, is something that… I wouldn’t say I believe in, but I am closer to believing in it, and precisely because I cannot conceive of nonexistence and on some fundamental level I just want to believe in it so much that it feels real to me. Is that what faith is? I honestly don’t really understand what religious people mean by faith. I mean, definitionally, I understand, that it is belief without logical explanation, without reason, without concrete evidence. But I don’t really -get- it. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that. My alexythimia of course doesn’t help at all here, maybe I have felt it and just don’t know because I cannot really tell what I am feeling at any given moment with any specificity, but I certainly don’t understand it.

Anyways I was up late musing morbidly on the nature of existence so decided hey, why not write a blog post about it?