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[StonedRider]

I'm 45 but still remember when my older brother told me life is finite. I was maybe 4-5 at the moment (he was 10 year older). It was a shock to me, I cried and felt somehow strange. I can induce that strange feeling again sometimes while thinking about it. Imagining whole world continues to exist, but without me, and it will happen eventually. Feeling of deep emptiness, feeling of inevitable. I must say, I rarely think about it, I'm quite happy person, but anyway.

What about you? Do you remember that moment in you life?

 

[p_xavier]

I have major death anxiety since I was 5. I couldn't sleep for weeks because sleeping was akin to dying.

 

[Tesseract]

around 4 to 7, i found out all stars die

everything else seemed inevitable and aight

 

[Mista]

Yeah, didn’t change anything. But I learned a new word today which is “finite”. Thank you

 

[Vyse1800]

For sure. There's no going back once you've stared into the abyss. I'm just happy to be here now.

 

[Soodanim]

I don't recall ever not being okay with the concept of death.

You're going to be dead for a lot longer than you'll be alive, so you might as well accept it.

 

[nkarafo]

I remember watching my grandfather and thinking one day i will be like him. And then i will die like other grandfathers and grandmothers. Nobody told me i figured it out myself because it made sense. Though i don't remember what age. And i do remember feeling devastated by the realisation.

 

[StonedRider]

Yeah, didn’t change anything. But I learned a new word today which is “finite”. Thank you

English is not my native language I hope I used this word the right way

 

[Foamy]

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

 

[StonedRider]

I remember watching my grandfather and thinking one day i will be like him. And then i will die like other grandfathers and grandmothers. Nobody told me i figured it out myself because it made sense. Though i don't remember what age. And i do remember feeling devastated by the realisation.

You witnessed death of other person and deducted it yourself? You were a genius child!

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

Silver bullets exist, you know...

 

[The Cockatrice]

Is life finite though? Can you actually prove there's nothing after we expire?

 

[Tesseract]

Is life finite though? Can you actually prove there's nothing after we expire?

no but it's basically an event horizon

 

[synchronicity]

I asked my mom when I was pre pre-school, "Is life just a dream?" Yeah, I've always known. The good news is that you die constantly without even being aware of it. The person you assume yourself to be is not the person that you were in the past nor the entity "you" will be in the future. The idea of the self appears, vanishes and changes on a continual basis throughout life, and yet your'e not troubled. Don't worry about "death" either. It's nothing.

 

[FreedomOfSpeech]

I watched a bunch of nature shows when I was a kid. Nature really is just a giant party of eating other animals.

So it was kinda a given. Never thought that life would be endless, for example.

 

[Nikana]

I was 6 or 7 and I dont remember how/why I found out but I remember it fucked me up. I cried in bathroom for like 2 hours. My sister made fun of me and I was just i shock she was ok with it.

 

[Mista]

English is not my native language I hope I used this word the right way

Neither mine and you used it perfectly.

 

[MaestroMike]

When my pet dogs died and Sunday school with Jesus dying for our sins. Mama is religious. Buuuut I kinda feel like we're just carriers of like a design, a DNA strand. Like my siblings and I look different, but we're the same inside we have the same blood from our parents. If I parish my siblings are still here to carry our family's lineage. To carry on the blood and our design. If my siblings have kids I feel like I'm their parent as well. Eventually our descendants will have blood from several different families, but a part of us is still going to be in the game. We are made of trillions of cells. We are multicellular and I feel like different parts of my brain is fighting with itself and communicating with each other. New cells are dying and being born within my body everyday. I started out as one cell weighing barely anything. I reached 165 at one point as an adult and killed off trillions of cells weighing 125 within 10 months. I've made trillions more weighing in the 180s. I can team up with a chick and I can pass on my DNA into her, send her the schematics and she can create a new being that has some of my genetics. Individuals definitely die but it's harder for families to die off. Those can live a long as$ time. Just gotta bang!

 

[Nymphae]

No but I remember one time in high school some friends of mine and I were out in the garage getting baked and shooting the shit and in my r/atheist days, I was explaining to one of the guys how there's just nothing after you die, a concpet he was sort of unfamiliar with. It literally made him throw up from thinking about it. I mean maybe some of it was the weed, but I distinctly remember basically talking this guy into puking by describing atheist heaven.

 

[Soodanim]

Really, we should have all figured it out when we watched The Lion King back in 1994 if we hadn't figured it out already.

 

[DrJohnGalt]

Your body dies but your conscious energy moves on. So physically speaking life is finite, but death is just the beginning. I'm looking forward to it!

 

[Kadayi]

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

 

[Airola]

I asked my mom when I was pre pre-school, "Is life just a dream?" Yeah, I've always known. The good news is that you die constantly without even being aware of it. The person you assume yourself to be is not the person that you were in the past nor the entity "you" will be in the future. The idea of the self appears, vanishes and changes on a continual basis throughout life, and yet your'e not troubled. Don't worry about "death" either. It's nothing.

But it will be you who is eventually going to experience your last breath. Unless of course you get lucky and die while sleeping or get shot to your head by a sniper or something else without you noticing it. Very likely though you either experience the inability to do anything about your heart stopping or your inability to breathe, or be in an accident where you get to anticipate for the incoming death for those very long feeling few seconds. It will be you who is going to feel and experience that. No matter what you think about your past moments in life being not experienced by you, the fact remains that the last experience of your last form of self will be experienced by your last form of consciousness. And chances are it will be a terrifying and painful experience.

 

[synchronicity]

But it will be you who is eventually going to experience your last breath. Unless of course you get lucky and die while sleeping or get shot to your head by a sniper or something else without you noticing it. Very likely though you either experience the inability to do anything about your heart stopping or your inability to breathe, or be in an accident where you get to anticipate for the incoming death for those very long feeling few seconds. It will be you who is going to feel and experience that. No matter what you think about your past moments in life being not experienced by you, the fact remains that the last experience of your last form of self will be experienced by your last form of consciousness. And chances are it will be a terrifying and painful experience.

The mind experiences what it experiences for sure. Identification with the mind as the self is just another thought. There are endless thoughts. To attach a label to those ideas as being *me* is yet another thought. Who is going to die? An idea of a person, a thought will cease, but that doesn't have anything to do with me.

 

[Airola]

The mind experiences what it experiences for sure. Identification with the mind as the self is just another thought. There are endless thoughts. To attach a label to those ideas as being *me* is yet another thought. Who is going to die? An idea of a person, a thought will cease, but that doesn't have anything to do with me.

The one that remembers the past even though he thinks he is not the same person that's in those memories will be the one who will die. Right at that moment that person might remember this discussion too.

 

[Ionian]

I remember as a kid I had to go to church every bloody week, no choice. So I knew death was inevitable.

Asked my father "are there video games in heaven?" and he said "no".

Crushed my tiny little heart. (was very young)

However now I'd ask to be sent back to purgatory or hell indefinitely if there were.

 

[synchronicity]

The one that remembers the past even though he thinks he is not the same person that's in those memories will be the one who will die. Right at that moment that person might remember this discussion too.

I am already dead because I don't imagine myself to be a thought.

 

[NecrosaroIII]

I was 7. I was watching a documentary about Venus and how it has super green house gas. How it might have been similar to earth before than bit not now. And it warned earth might have a similar fate.

 

[Kamina]

I guess it is not as bad if you believe in an afterlife. Then again, this brings other types of worries with it.

 

[MastAndo]

I was about 5 or 6 years old and I watched some PBS special on dinosaurs that ended with them being obliterated by an asteroid, which was news to me. Dinos were life to little me, but these massive, majestic creatures being taken out by something completely out of their control made me realize that death must be inevitable for every living thing. It was a lot for my baby brain to handle.

 

[epicnemesis]

I think about it every time general anesthesia is discussed. But it’s usually in the context of afterlife.

General anesthesia is fucking weird.

 

[TheMan]

Not really. But being 37 and suffering from chronic disease, it's something that I've been thinking about from time to time. I've had some significant health scares in the past and managed to bounce back, but I was young then. Will I bounce back again the next time? I dunno. I have this sinking feeling I'll be lucky to make it to 60 which I guess could be worse, but that means I've lived well over half my life already.

 

[O-N-E]

It's weird you guys are able to pinpoint these memories. I don't have a specific one. I mean we were taught some lessons from the bible in Kindergarten and there were deaths there. The flood is a pretty intense lesson on life / death.

Also, as a child you interact with animals, insects and experiment. They're alive and then you kill them. I think you can put two and two from there.

 

[GAMETA]

I remember I cried and made my mother promise she'd live for 200 years, lol.

I remember being afraid of sleeping and not waking up the next day, too... but that was long ago, I was probably 5 or 6 I think...

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

 

[teezzy]

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

 

[Mistake]

Domestic abuse teaches you that pretty quickly. After that I grew up with books like Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mysteries of the Unexplained. School had stuff like mummifying chickens and stenciling gravestones. Suffice to say, death has been a large part of my life.

How I turned out the way I did, I have no idea. While this proverb doesn’t apply to every situation, it’s something I’ve always kind of followed though.
“A smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise one learns from the mistakes of others.”

 

[DESTROYA]

I grew up on farmland so a pretty young age, life and death the circle of life and I was OK with it.

 

[Calcium]

I was browsing NeoGAF and I saw a thread that informed me. Thanks, asshole.

 

[WhiskeyDiver]

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

You like to think so, but then one session of Adam West Batman's Batusi dance moves and a dash of Anti-Vampire spray, and boom. You get knocked out by a haymaker from a 30 year old in yellow spandex that has been Batman's "protege" for 20 years right onto a knife. Embarrassment and a death you were certain you were immune to 20 seconds ago.

Coming to terms with life being finite in duration didn't make me come to a revelation that I should do something extremely tedious like cherish every moment possible or impossible like never get angry with those I love. It mainly helped me realize that I should work on fucking up less.

 

[appaws]

Growing up in a fairly traditional Catholic parish, it was never really hidden from us. Discussion about dying and sin and redemption were pretty constant...especially while the oldsters among priests and nuns were still pre-V2. Starting in the 90s that was all jettisoned and the real God was replaced with a happy, peppy Protestant god.

I like Stonewall Jackson’s thoughts on death:

Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. Captain, that is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.

 

[timeflais]

 

[Dark Star]

I don't have an exact memory, but death is something that has intrigued me since I was like 4-5 years old. Like watching a documentary on TV about the gigantic asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Or even watching Disney movies like Snow White or Lion King with very clear death scenes lol.

Growing up I always had that existential itch, like constantly aware that we're all going to die pretty soon in comparison to the grand scheme of things, and most of it is way beyond our physical power and mental comprehension. Kids these days probably have it even worse with COVID-19 on the news every waking hour.

I think my grandma passing away when I was in the 6th grade really put things into perspective. It's a moment of clarity when you lose people you actually know IRL. Like everything clicks in your human understanding of how fragile and finite life is. When you're a kid, you think you're invincible, like a superhero. You think your parents will be here forever. It's brutal when you realize it's all going to end in less than a 100 years.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

We were born from matter that created the Heavens and one day, we shall return.

 

[StonedRider]

I asked my mom when I was pre pre-school, "Is life just a dream?" Yeah, I've always known. The good news is that you die constantly without even being aware of it. The person you assume yourself to be is not the person that you were in the past nor the entity "you" will be in the future. The idea of the self appears, vanishes and changes on a continual basis throughout life, and yet your'e not troubled. Don't worry about "death" either. It's nothing.

That's exactly what happening if time is quantized, but there is no any evidence of it yet.

Your body dies but your conscious energy moves on. So physically speaking life is finite, but death is just the beginning. I'm looking forward to it!

It's a good concept and I embrace it fully.

Also, as a person who grew in completely atheistic environment, it's very interesting and revealing to hear experience of people who faced religion from childhood.

 

[Catphish]

I was indoctrinated into the Catholic religion at an early age (5), so the concept of heaven made the idea of death palatable. It was only when I grew older and deeply questioned the teachings of Catholicism that I became afraid of death.

Now, at age 47, the five most important people in my life as a child, including my mother and stepfather, have died, so the idea of dying is a lot less scary, because I'll be going wherever they've gone. The only real fear I have of death now is knowing that I'll be leaving my daughter behind. That breaks my fucking heart and causes all kinds of anxiety.

 

[Prison Mike]

Sorry can't relate. We vampires are immortal.

 

[LisaMariaMartin]

Yeah and I really don't give a shit. Been depressed most of my life and thanks to my cultural background I never got the chance to talk to a therapist about anything. At least I'll never feel like shit again once I'm gone.

 

[Oberstein]

Wait, what? I want to see the end of the story. What's going to happen to mankind, are we going to live on another planet?! Hey, I want to know!

 

[StonedRider]

Wait, what? I want to see the end of the story. What's going to happen to mankind, are we going to live on another planet?! Hey, I want to know!

I'm sorry, but the end of the story is the heat death of the Universe.

 

[GeorgPrime]

After i know that we have the great woke depression.... iam happy it is.