Death

Recently, I’ve had this on my mind a lot. Well, not recently, for a few months now. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m out of school, starting my proper adult life. But I’ve just been thinking about death, and what happens after you die. This isn’t some revolutionary thing, I don’t want to present it as that, more just my thoughts and feelings, since I feel like I need to get them out.

Death scares me a lot. I’m pretty sure it scares many other people in the world too. When I go to bed, and I close my eyes to sleep, I can’t help but have the thought in my mind that maybe death is like sleeping. Or death is like nothing. And it makes me wonder what nothing is. What is nothing?

Nothing scares me. Trying to comprehend what nothing is in a material world is scary. Trying to comprehend a lack of awareness and consciousness and self I guess scares me. Imagining my conscience disappearing and my corpse rotting into nothingness terrifies me so much. And all this makes me wonder: how do people cope with this thought?

I know there are things like religion for example. They typically set up what happens in the afterlife, and act as a reassurance and a guideline for how to live your life. However, I don’t believe in any religion, or really, even any god or higher being of any kind. And even if I tried to, it wouldn’t work because I know I’d be lying to myself just to alleviate the pain of acknowledging the inevitable.

I feel like anything I do is just a distraction from death. I know that’s a terrible mindset to have, but I feel like that’s the truth. Like all we do in our lives is just keeping ourselves from thinking about the fact that we will all die.

It doesn’t help that the world that we live in always seems to be clouded in negativity.

The World

I’m judging the world based on what I see, which is mostly on the internet and some people at school, or at work, or on Discord, so this is completely dependant on the people you surround yourself in (in my opinion, I’ll get to that later), but it always seems like people are just drowning in negativity.

In person, for example, when I go to church, all the messages are no longer about teaching the values of God, but rather about discussing how TERRIBLE the world is and how AWFUL America and the values of the everyday day people are and how gay people are GOING TO HELL and UBHFUYDSVUIYASDVFUYSDBIFUDYSVF IM TIRED OF IT, REALLY. I’m dragged to church by my parents every Sunday and I’m so drained by the preaching because it just feels like a negativity and doomer circlejerk than anything else, and I’m sick of it.

School is fine, I don’t think the people I associate myself with are negative. If anything, they probably know how to cope with the world better than I do.

Online, people are constantly starving for clout and attention, victimizing themselves, always trying to call others out, and in general, just being so negative. People can be so aggressive towards others online, and generally just have no patience. I know there are plenty of people online that are genuinely just horrible and don’t necessarily deserve patience, but I believe patience, even online, is an important virtue to have, not only for your own mental health, but for the health of others too. The amount of people online, especially on Twitter, that are so critical of others for hardly any good reason annoys me.

The Mindset

In the end, I think what makes the world good to live in is the mindset one adopts. If you constantly let what others think affect your day, or make yourself have doomer thoughts like “death is inevitable”, you will always feel horrible. What determines your view on life is your mindset. By thinking for yourself instead of letting the world determine what you think, you can be happier. And even for things beyond your control, like death, it’s okay to ignore them and live your life the way you want to, while it lasts. I suppose maybe there’s no shame in ignoring the inevitable. Well…. Actually, I don’t know about that. I don’t think it’s good to ignore it, but rather to confront it and to try to cope with it. I want to figure that out for myself. In that sense, it means I have to find my purpose for existing, which I feel like I have a grasp of, but I don’t know what makes me want to keep living and going. I’m not saying I’m suicidal at all, more just I don’t really know why I’m still doing what I’m doing, figuring out how to live my life, that kind of stuff.

Ending

I don’t know if this is cohesive at all. I don’t really mind whether it is or not. I just wanted to try to externalize my thoughts, and I wanted to try to put into words my current emotions and thoughts. Right now, I feel good emotionally, but I feel confused. I’m just figuring out things right now.

Oh yeah, and I just finished rewatching Evangelion, so maybe that’s why I’m like this lol.