Remember how the 13.8 billion years before your birth were? No, you don't. It's going to be the same after your death.
Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#12Remember how the 13.8 billion years before your birth were? No, you don't. It's going to be the same after your death.
I don’t remember it but I am aware of it. After death there is no awareness.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#13I am well aware that with the state of the world and the winter’s short days are clearly affecting my reactions to these thoughts. I know that and am taking steps to try to fix my brain chemistry. I have an appointment with my primary care coming up where I plan to discuss changes to my medications that might help make me not panic. But ultimately I am not after simply being calm as I get older and closer to death. T…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#14Stand in front of the ocean alone at night. Look at the horizon. Look at the starry sky. And soak in the realization that you will never know or experience everything. This world is way too big for our human brains. The vastness of the sea itself is already unimaginable. And once you look to the stars, you realize that you will never experience every cubic meter of the universe with the same intensity as the grains o…
You describe perfectly the experience I had at one point many years ago. I don’t want to experience every cubic meter of the universe. And I lived my life for at least the past decade with the idea that I will chart my own path of what I want to experience and largely succeeded so far. But what I am after is fundamentally different than experiencing the whole universe as individual pieces. It’s more that I don’t want…
> It’s more that I don’t want to be limited.
To me these are two sides of the same coin. If two of your distant grandchildren each get married at the same time, you won't get to see both. There are physical limits governing our lives. One of those involves mortality, but many others impose similarly restrictive limitations.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#15Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#16I am well aware that with the state of the world and the winter’s short days are clearly affecting my reactions to these thoughts. I know that and am taking steps to try to fix my brain chemistry. I have an appointment with my primary care coming up where I plan to discuss changes to my medications that might help make me not panic. But ultimately I am not after simply being calm as I get older and closer to death. T…
> cannot accept a system that requires blind belief or that has some obvious logical flaws.
There's a lot of religions out there. Many of them are bunk, and many are not much better than the local chess club. But there are some potent practices out there, it's not all about "blind belief". This crisis you describe is precisely the "religious" impulse (or whatever you want to call it). For some people they end up climbing mountains and that does it for them. It's all the same impulse, is what I am trying to say. And you don't have to believe in some kind of santa clause god to get the juice. Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#17[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#18I think it could be worth exploring your spiritual beliefs. A couple years ago I decided to give this a shot and for about 6 months I actively explored questions like:
- Do I believe in god?
- Does the universe exist?
- What is my purpose in life?
I did not, and do not, have definitive answers but going through the rabbit holes trying to answer these questions have led me to adopting specific axioms which I use to help justify my place in this world.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#19There is no perfect answer for this. Philosophers have been seeking to answer this since the beginning of time and we will all continue to do so until the end of time.
Personally, I try to make a regular habit of thinking about my mortality. Visualizing my friends and family after I'm gone, and seeing how the world keeps on ticking. It helps me limit my own self-importance in the world but also helps free my mind to focus on the things I really care about.
Like you, I would love to be able to many lifetimes where I get to try all those other paths in the road I didn't end up taking. And perhaps we will, maybe reincarnation is a thing. Or maybe the birth and death of the universe is cyclical and we get to try this all over and over. Sadly we can never know this.
If you haven't seen the show "The Good Place", it has some interesting takes on mortality and what it would be like to live forever.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
#20I only concern myself over the things I can control.
I follow the scientists that are working on reversing the age of cells. Currently the human trials are only working on specific body parts, but in a few years it may be applied body wide assuming no major issues come up. The most promising work I am following right now is by Dr. David Sinclair and his team at Harvard. [1] There are many teams in numerous countries working on this and similar techniques.
In the mean time, I avoid things that cause premature aging and do what I can to reverse damage from the western diet I had eaten for so many years.