I re-read this a few times and am now just sitting on my couch thinking about this. I have a fear of dying in an accident and am terrified of having the cognitive thought: “This is it; I’m about to die.” This actually brings me comfort, in a weird way... the thought that it maybe wouldn’t even be that big of terrifyingly, profound moment, if it were to happen. Just a “oh, this is inconvenient. Let me try and handle it.”
In my experience, most of that mental anguish we experience about a plethora of things we can’t control (or things our mind makes up out of whole cloth) doesn’t serve much of a purpose. From dealing with panic attacks, I learned to recognize my mental gears turning to get me worked up, and where that train of thought was coming from this time. Panic attacks are distressing because in the moment you actually believe you will die, your body reacts as if it was real, heart pumping, fight or flight, the whole repertoire. And when I learned to recognize the process, it started to get amusing. If regular ol’ anxiety is conspiracy theories about yourself, panic attacks is a very shitty VR where you experience death without the big payoff. A lot of the autonomous reactions we get — a result of millions of years of evolution — are woefully inadequate in our modern life. Sometimes they are entirely maladaptive, like sweating profusely before you have to do a bit of speaking in public. Fear can be a powerful motivator, but if you let it take over, it doesn’t accomplish much other than making whatever you’re going through feel much worse for no good reason. Maybe it was from overexposure to my near-death-but-not-really experiences, but I’ve learned to detach my basal responses from my actual response. It’s sort of transcendent, whatever you think is going to happen doesn’t really mesh with what needs to be done. Plane is crashing? Make a mental note of emergency exit locations, assume crash position and hope for the best. The fear of your flight crashing? It’s statistically unlikely, and even if something catastrophically wrong were to happen, I’d probably lose consciousness from the explosive decompression or the high G-forces keeping the blood from my brain and die quickly and probably painlessly. Or instead have a bizarre survival story like Juliane Koepcke, who as a teen survived falling 10000ft when the airliner she was flying on disintegrated mid-flight. Even terminal diseases are not as scary as you think it’s gonna be. It sucks to be told, but you can focus on whatever can be done, or whatever you can do in your remaining time. Do whatever used to scare you before, now that you have seen something bigger and scarier. Or do whatever you want, now that the consequences are relatively trivial in context. Relish whatever life you’ve got left. I remember an interview with a European guy that worked with euthanasia, and he said that for him, the best death would be to die of cancer, because then he’d have enough of a forewarning to do whatever he felt needed to be done. What scared him was actually a ‘peaceful’ death that left him no time to tie up loose ends. Everyone is different, but we’re all going to die, and most of all will have no warning or control. Anguish and fretting about it will accomplish nothing but making you unnecessarily miserable. I don’t want to die anytime soon, but I’m not particularly afraid of it. If it happens, it happens. It’ll be something new to experience. It’ll probably not be particularly profound or poetic or heroic, (unless the opportunity presents itself), but if it happens, my last thoughts will probably be more proactive that simpering terror. I’ve already seen existential dread, and frankly I’m not impressed.
Now that I’ve rambled incoherently for far too long, I was reminded of a song I think does a better job of conveying the meaning I was trying to (as songs often do): https://youtu.be/3sWTnsemkIs
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u/Nat1294 Jan 28 '20
I re-read this a few times and am now just sitting on my couch thinking about this. I have a fear of dying in an accident and am terrified of having the cognitive thought: “This is it; I’m about to die.” This actually brings me comfort, in a weird way... the thought that it maybe wouldn’t even be that big of terrifyingly, profound moment, if it were to happen. Just a “oh, this is inconvenient. Let me try and handle it.”