For me, it’s disappearing. That someday something will happen to me and no one will ever know what it was and where I am. That I will become one of those mysteries you see online and on TV shows. Whenever I think about it I feel nothing but dread.
My biggest fear is that my office chair might break in such a way that the hydraulic piston breaks through the seat and punctures my colon.
Gotta get an ass guard, like Thor has
That’s niche.
Well thanks a lot, that’s now my fear too.
You are welcome!
I want to both upvote and downvote this comment… I chose upvote.
And I thank you.
Dementia
Alzheimer/Dementia is one of those few situations where I really can’t blame someone for going out on their own terms. The idea of being trapped inside your own effectively disintegrating mind is terrifying.
The same thought for your physical body also seems reasonable to me. Or just for intolerable pain.
This or some kind of psychosis… Mental health, neurocognitive abnormalities scare the shit out of me. That its very possible it can happen to me.
Dementia.
My mother has dementia.
Every time I forget something I know I should know it terrifies me.
Get tested early. Your mother’s dementia may not have been found till late stage. We have treatments for the earlier stages
Thank you for that.
That’s a fear I have as well. I heard walnuts are good for brain health, but they taste like dry paste. I still eat them with some fermented foods and it helps. I also heard pizzle games are supposed to help keep your brain engaged.
Extinction. Our technology gives us the power of gods, but we still have the brains of hunter-gatherers optimised for living in tribes of less than 150 people. My own death doesn’t worry me, I’m not bothered by knowing I’ll be forgotten, but the possibility that there might not be anyone to carry on is what I think about at 3 AM when I can’t sleep.
Having to work for another 20 years.
Haha only 20?
Look at the millionaire that only has to work 20 more years
Your fear of disappearing resonates the worst for me in regards to my daughter (4) doing so. It makes me want to vomit to think of her just gone, at the mercy of someone or something else, with no way to know where she is or how to save her. It rips my heart in half that so many parents throughout time have lived this exact nightmare and never received answers. I find some relief that I live in a very safe part of the world where child abductions rarely (if ever) happen, but there are a number of other ways your little girl can just vanish.
I wouldn’t say this perpetually weighs on my conscience, but every time I remember it can happen, it really fucks with my head.
That’s just parenting, mate. It makes you worry about all the details you never worried about before and it makes your hair turn grey and gives you sleepless nights. But all in all it’s all worth it somehow.
Being eternally trapped in a mental prison. Imagine having a panic attack that never ends. I’m pretty sure that type of prolonged stress would cause a psychotic break where your psyche fractures and you become a despondent shell. You would become deathly afraid of everything, even the people you love, because of an unceasing paranoia. That basically sounds like hell to me.
I’m not really afraid of the idea of nothingness after death, because at least then I am released from the torment of living.
I’m afraid I’ll live my whole life in fear like I’m doing now, that I’ll never experience love, that one day I’ll wake up old and alone, in misery and just waiting to die but too afraid end it.
That last part I get. I want to face death calmly and rationale and if living is painful or such would like the accessibility and option and will to take a painless option.
Letting down people I love somehow
Ask to be their pallbearer.
The idea of living as if my life hadn’t really started yet and then one day realizing I’m old and I wasted my life.
I’ve had health issues since I was a kid (all stemming from developing Crohn’s Disease symptoms before I was even a teenager), and a lot of them still haven’t been resolved (in part of reasons such as developing new conditions due to medications I took to treat another condition). One of the worst things I fear is that if I randomly end up leaving this world in a way that incurs an autopsy, the results will end with something like “Damn, this man had issues. If his doctors had known about X then he could’ve lived a much better life, the treatment is simple”.
I go through so much, and I’ve done countless research to try to track down possibilities that my doctors hadn’t considered (some of my research has in fact lead to me finding out new things that my doctors didn’t account for, even as of this year) - and I always have this terrifying doubt of “What if I had just chosen a different doctor, the next one on the list might’ve had this idea years ago and prevented some of this”. That line of thinking of “Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve” doesn’t help of course (as my friend likes to tell me “What if the sky were green?”) but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it more often than I’d like to.
Micro-plastics
The speed at which we are (not) acting on climate change. Our tolerance for neoliberals/capitalists absolutely wiping their arse with the whole planet.
Something similar. Not necessarily the fear of death or a painful death, but the very real possibility that once the light goes off, you disappear for good.
I won’t get into religion or anything like that, but it all feels…very inefficient. IMO, reincarnation always seemed cool, because it’s essentially the reuse of consciousness in another being. I also remember reading a cool story years ago where it turned out that everyone was actually the same person, and in death you reincarnated as the next person, with the ultimate goal of having lived every life to ever live and becoming god. The idea that someone could live for even a very brief moment, and that energy is just gone is just so wasteful that the universe just seems cruel for it to even be a possibility.
Death by violent means
