How do you keep on living while knowing that you will die?

The inevitability of death for all life is a unifying factor that gives us an opportunity to empathize with each other. All arguments, etc are pointless when we’re all headed the same place in the end.

Because of this we have an opportunity to experience tremendous, overwhelming love with all other life that will die just as we will.

These are things I tell myself when I am in a bad mental place.

"There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither good nor evil, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the sun or the sky. But they don't have to. We care. There is light in the world and it is us."

That nothing matters is, in its own way, entirely liberating. Nothing matters, so do what you care about. Try not to make other people's experience worse, because you're not an asshole, but otherwise be free.

Alternatively, think of it like this: there was a vast ocean of time that passed before you were born, and you don't fear it. There will be a vast ocean of time after you are dead; don't fear that either.

Your continuity will be interrupted. If you've ever had a bad fever and lost time, or been blackout drunk, or gotten hit on the head, or whatever, you've already experienced interruptions of continuity. And you're only aware of them after you wake up and have to put it all back together. An interruption that you don't come back from is also one that you never actually have to deal with.

For me at least,I find that I don't fear death so much as I do resent it. "Ever since I first understood the weakness of my flesh" and all that. If I could trade my pathetic flesh prison for something eternal, I would. I am my mind, my thoughts, the continuity of my consciousness, not this decaying meat. I resent the idea that I will not get to experience all that I want to, but I don't really fear it.

What the hell else are you going to do?

When I was younger I thought about trying to study the science of aging to hopefully reverse it. But as soon as I got into the field I realized that a) barring some miracle breakthrough, the technology will not happen in my lifetime; and b) the circumstances of my birth would make it incredibly difficult and unlikely that I could ever aspire to work in such a field. Going to college at all was a stretch, and I eventually had to drop out to start working.

So anyway, that option off the table, there's no solution. You will die. Your options are to either let anxiety destroy any enjoyment you might get out of life, or just keep living anyway.

I… I’m going to die?

The how is easy. It's the default.

It sounds like you're struggling to find meaning in things and the good news is that's 100% normal and something everybody has to figure out.

A lot of people will grab a religion, this is an easy way to have meaning assigned to you by 3rd parties, but I don't personally recommend it.

In truth, the most beautiful thing about life is that it ends. Every moment you spend, whether it's holding a loved one or having explosive diarrhea, is truly unique and precious.

I don't believe in absolutes. There is no absolutely "correct" list of rights and wrongs. No magical force dictating what is meaningful or pointless.

My best advice is, anything that you enjoy doing is worth doing, so long as it doesn't detract from someone else's ability to do the same.

Doing nothing is a thing you can do too, but if you find yourself doing that for too long, or not enjoying anything, talk to your doctor. I don't suffer from clinical depression, but I have family who does, and when I left Christianity for atheism at 18 I found myself experiencing depression in a new way.

I got prescribed a simple anti-depressant. It curbed the lows (and a little bit the highs) and made my days easier so I could work through some shit. A year later I was off them and felt like myself and knew what that meant.

For my dad, depression is an on-going thing. He's learned what helps him and he has support when he needs it.

Take care of yourself, because even if you dont see that meaning now, sticking around is the only way we get a chance to find it.

You should really look into finding a therapist you can speak with about this. Or Buddhism. Or both.

Hey so this might not be the best place to get to the root of your fears. Have you considered talking to an expert?

• Admire the ephemerality of beauty itself and the limited lifespan of the universe

• Attempt to avoid suffering

• Yearn for death

• Go to therapy

• Cultivate a rich inner life which you appreciate moment-to-moment

It's tough! The thought of non-existence used to terrify me. For years I clung to religious beliefs, which also terrified me. Eternal torture for nonbelief? Even worse than non-existence! If the religion I was taught was wrong, which was right?

My brain would latch onto these questions and repeat in circles so I couldn't sleep. I learned to distract myself with made up bedtime stories. I picked up rituals like prayer that I held onto for long after I stopped believing. The ritual was soothing. Slowly, that fear faded and I don't pray anymore . I don't fear a hell now, so it's non-existence, like sleep, which doesn't feel as frightening as it used to. Since they's no reason and no purpose to anything, I don't have to sacrifice myself to fit some role. There's no great work I can do that will change this.

I'm 40 and sitting here watching a friend play a videogame and petting my cat. I will hang out with my neice this week and play DnD on the weekend and the lack of meaning or purpose - this emptiness - relaxes me.

What I mean is - take it slow. Don't completely ignore the fear, but if it's too much, find distractions ro reduce the pain. You wont come to the same conclusions I did, but if you try to take it slow, you might get to your own peace eventually. Maybe you'll decide that doing good things brings you peace, or building a home you love or something.

Practice slowly breathing, find distractions that genuinely work for you, and think about these things at times when you're in an okay place - not the dead if night when they're huge. If that doesn't work or it's never small enough to handle, try therapy.

I hope you figure it out.

Tough question to answer without sounding either too callous or too hippy-dippy.

If you’re not enjoying life why would you fear death? Why are you clinging so hard to life that it prevents you from living?

I used to be pretty depressed. Now I’m just kinda depressed sometimes.

The only thing that works for me is doing things. Sometimes I like them. Sometimes I don’t. I try to do more of the ones I like. I try not to judge things I am going to do before I’m doing them.

I have fully internalized that I will die and I personally believe that’s the end. Might be wrong, don’t care either way. All you can do is deal with now. I don’t want to leave my family behind but I will someday. It will be sad for them. It makes me a little sad to think about. But it’s unavoidable. I could die tomorrow. I could die at 90. You don’t get to know when in most cases. So I try not to worry about what I can’t control.

If you’re young, things smooth out as you age.

The one thing I have to stress is that you will not overcome anything on the internet. You have to do stuff to have anything to talk about, at bare minimum. A lot of people today confuse having an opinion for having a personality. I’d rather hang out with someone who wants to talk about their passions than someone who wants to trash a movie or a celebrity or some other thing they wouldn’t like even if it was made specifically for them.

Death is inevitable. Nothing I do will avoid it, I can't escape it, and it will get me eventually. Thus, there's no point worrying about it. If I live my life in fear of death, I'll be just as dead as if I didn't.

I'm not religious, so as far as I know this is the only existence I'll ever have. I didn't exist for billions of years, I exist now, and then I won't exist for billions of years. In this brief window of consciousness, all I can do is live my life and try to experience it as much as possible. When I die, all I can hope for is that I was a good person who left the world in a better state than how I found it.

I won't lie and say death doesn't scare me. As I get closer, I'm sure it'll scare me even more. I don't want to die, so I'll take whatever steps I can to avoid it. But to allow it to preoccupy my thoughts does me no good.

I don't know your age, but I can assure you that you'll get used to the inevitability of death as life goes on.
Sure, there's nothing you can do about it and it's terrifying now, but you'll learn to just not care about it.
The universe is everything, everywhere and always, and you'll just come back as another sentient being, because that's how the system proves it's working. It's all an eternal cycle.
Everything will be fine.

Death is not something to be feared. Suffering makes sense to fear, sure, but death? I was watching a silly TV show last night and they quoted a Chinese proverb. "All of life is a walking dream. All of death is a coming home."

Death is a great rest awaiting you at the end of life, my friend. It is not a punishment, and maybe even somewhat of a reward. You can relax and feel safe with one of life's few certainties. We all die; it brings us together.

Have a good one.

Why do we eat when we know we're going to turn it into shit? Food is delicious and we can take pleasure in preparation and sharing it with others.

I've never understood this question. Why would the fact I'm going to die stop me from moving or setting goals?

It would be a bit weird to say no to a party or catching up with some friends just because it would only be for a few hours. This is the same idea but at a bigger scale

"One day, you'll leave this world behind
So live a life you will remember" - Avicii

Find someone to love who makes you happy, try to find something you can tolerate that will pay the bills, and look for activities or communities that keep you active and help connect you with others.

Death is an inevitability, and wasting your life because you're too busy worrying about something you can't control or prevent does nothing but make you miserable. Find someone/something that makes you happy and helps you get through the days. Having a real human connection makes the process easier, even when you have to face the death of someone you care for.

Depends what specifically you're talking about when you say "dying."

Do you mean the process of it? Or do you mean what comes after?

For what comes after: Think about all the time before you were born and the big bang. That's what it'll feel like. Ever had a nap for 5 seconds, only to wake up and realise you've been asleep for an hour? Picture the deepest sleep possible. The remaining time between the second you die and the heat death of the universe will pass in an instant. It really is nothing to be afraid of.

If you're worried about the actual process, just realise that you live in the absolute best time in terms of medical treatment, pain management, and scientific break through. I don't know how old you are, but I'm willing to bet you've got decades in you still. It'll suck when it happens, but the longer you live, the less it'll suck. The chances of going badly (from a medical thing anyway) decrease every day. So stay active, eat well, and look after your body.

But don't let that interfere with living your life.

This Kurtzgesagt video was instrumental in helping me to chill out and just get on with it:

Optimistic Nihilism

ETA: The way you talk about life:

just keep on moving forward, keep setting goals, keep making progress

Stop. There is nothing wrong with standing still for a minute and catching your breath. My advice to you is to stop looking forward for a second and just focus on existing right now.

Once you feel comfortable in the day to day, then you can look a little further ahead.

Psalm 34:19

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted, And helps those crushed in spirit.

❤

Dying isn't scary. You fade out into a deeply comfortable darkness of nothing where life stuff all feels very far away and increasingly unimportant and the peaceful emptiness of nonexistence is the final thing you know.

I've nearly died a few times now. If anything I'm more annoyed at being brought back than anything else, at least if I had died I wouldn't have had to deal with the men strangling me or how shit my life and the world we all live in is.

The world is shallow and hollow. Humans are mostly awful and all the systems and industry we have created for ourselves are corrupt and fuelled by greed and cruelty. We are so shit as a species we're literally ending all life on earth with our pollution and inability to be kind to each other and the natural world around us.

Once the ice caps melt, the Blue Ocean Event will happen and the earth cooks in its own fumes as the oceans release shit tons of methane and then evaporate. A few more years as hot as 2023 and the ice caps could be melted as soon as 2027.

What keeps me going is that I'm too lazy to kill myself. Humanity is going to be wiped out by our own hand in the next century anyway, so provided you don't procreate, I think you're ok to indulge yourself in things you enjoy to try to make the rest of your existence as comfortable as possible.

I think the older you get, the more you realize to just cherish every day you have. One day I'll die and I won't have to struggle and fight anymore, but I also won't be able to do the things I like and spend time with those I enjoy being around. Knowing I'll eventually die gives my life meaning as I don't know how long I have, just that I'm here now and every day needs to count.

"There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither good nor evil, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the sun or the sky. But they don't have to. We care. There is light in the world and it is us."

You need to enjoy life whenever you can. And by that I mean be present in the moment and enjoy weather when its nice, enjoy your food when its good, enjoy interaction with companions when its nice, enjoy things you set out to do that you have control of and if you are not enjoying it then change activities (applies to media, hobbies, etc.). Someday you will die. Someday we all will die. So we must enjoy what we can of life while we can. Especially the simple things.

This is probably a question as old as humanity, and I don't think we've found a better answer than the one provided in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

“What you seek you shall never find.
For when the Gods made man,
They kept immortality to themselves.
Fill your belly.
Day and night make merry.
Let Days be full of joy.
Love the child who holds your hand.
Let your wife delight in your embrace.
For these alone are the concerns of man.”

No one lives forever, not even in the memories of those they leave behind. It is a rare few whose names echo throughout history. You can, if you want, strive to make yours one of those names, but at what cost? It might be better to live your life, take what pleasures you can, love someone who returns your love, and try not to hurt anybody along the way.

i am not dying. thr cure for aging is in animal trials

“Its the not the Destination, It's the journey.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Just do what you enjoy, and remember take things at your own pace.

It doesn't makes sense, after all, to spend more time thinking about death than actually living, does it?

I'm not concerned about stuff I can't control.

Honestly knowing that one day I'll die is the only thing getting me through life.

For most people, setting and achieving goals is a serotonin boost.

I'm more of a bigger picture kind of person. My entire purpose in life is to make humanity move forward and hopefully a little better than it was. If I died tonight in my sleep it would be unfortunate in a lot of my better laid plans would never happen but all the stuff that I've done at this point all the people's lives that I've impacted they would still hopefully be somewhat better for that.

In the time scale of a true existential crisis, as far as we can tell humanity is doomed anyway. So I'm here too collect my share of serotonin and raise some kids who will hopefully collect their serotonin. And all of us together are here to make sure that other people get to collect their serotonin. We're little cogs in the giant machine of humanity.

Life is to live in the happy moments and ignore the dull and crappy stuff that's in between. If you're not getting those happy moments seek help they're out there for you. You just need some help from a professional to better be able to experience them.

I agree with most of the posters here that if God does not exist then your life has no objective meaning. As the biologist Richard Dawkins infamously stated,

"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

And as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus have suggested, in a godless universe, life is absurd, and if life is absurd then so are moral values.

I also do agree with the others here that, in a world without moral values, a world without right or wrong, you do have a certain sense of freedom. In this freedom, there is no real difference between a Josef Mengele or Florence Nightingale because, in the end, there is no one to judge their actions as truly right or wrong, good or evil. And In such a world, there is no good reason not to live totally for one's own self as Ayn Rand or a Satanist.

Most people see through all of that however. Most people deep down believe in objective right and wrongs and goods and evils, even if some say they don't. They truly do believe that there are things that we ought to do and ought not to do. Most people believe, for instance, that it is truly and objectively wrong to torture small children for fun. That it is evil to do so.

If atheism is true, then you have every right to despair. As Bertrand Russel states, it is on the "foundation of unyielding despair" of a meaningless existence that one must build the "soul's habitation."

But we know intuitively that there are objective morals and values, which is why we act like they do exist even if we say that they don't, and most of us also intuitively know that life has intrinsic value. If there are truly objective morals and values then there is good reason to suggest that there is a universal moral lawgiver who transcends humanity. If this transcendent being has given us moral oughts, then this suggests that there is some sort of purpose and value to our lives. That our lives are not only meaningful in the immediate now, but for all time.

You have purpose. You have value. You do have intrinsic worth. You do not have to build your life on a foundation of unyielding despair. Instead, you can build that life on a foundation of hope and joy knowing that your life has intentionality. You were not just a cosmic accident. You were meant to exist.

I keep myself busy and try to live in the moment. Of course, within limits, so I don't lose track of plans/the future. If you don't have much free time, there won't be too much time to ruminate on things like dying.

But tbh, I've never really cared about my own death anyway.

The answer changes depending on if I know when I'll die.

Currently, without future insight, I'm living like I'll die in my 60's. Live life slow, but not slow enough to let it run away, and enjoy the moment rather than thinking about the future too hard.

If I know when I'll die? I'm gonna live so fucking hard to do as much as I possibly can, make as big of an impression, and know when to disappear. Because, fear of death isn't something you should have normally unless you know you might die shortly. Otherwise, it's just a road that leads to nihilism and depression.

The real question is why the fuck are you so scared of dying without a reason to be scared? Just assume in your mind that you will live forever and that personal death isn't going to happen. It helps me move along.

A habit I learned from Reddit is to keep a gratitude journal. One of my daily tasks is to update it with one thing from that day that I'm grateful for. It can be a big thing; it can be a very small thing like having a tasty muffin that morning. I update it even if my day was miserable and I struggle to think of something.

I've become a lot more mindful of things I'm grateful for (so I can update the journal). When I'm grateful, I worry less about sad things like death.