#existentialism help

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

We Are Stardust.

This is a phrase that gets tossed around here in my tags, and on posts, but what does it mean?

It is meant literally.

Stardust, when a star goes supernova and explodes, provides the basic elements in the human body – oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium, to be precise on what an exploding provides. The materials we are made of, came from a supernova – perhaps even several supernovas.

The universe as we know it, is estimated to be about 14 billion years old. This isn’t the age of Earth – Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old. That puts it into some perspective, doesn’t it?

Earth needed stars to go supernova to bring itself together. Now, I don’t have all the answers to why our universe even exists, or how stars even came into being – I just know that they did, and their deaths brought about other life. Our life, to be precise.

Science posits that when things began, only the lightest elements such as hydrogen and helium were in existence. These gases came together, and began to combust with their interactions together in space. These nuclear reactions began to create more elements, and they supposedly did so quickly, as the stars back then were estimated to be much larger than our sun, and larger stars burn through energy and fuel quicker.

Thus, putting out new elements quicker, and beginning the interactions of these new elements, into new forms as they come together, and explode together, leading to planets, and then, life.

It’s a simplistic way of explaining it.

Yet it’s fascinating.

I know stars do not have sentience, but imagine being a star, and knowing your death will create life for hundreds upon hundreds of differing creatures! Imagine knowing you will be part of a planet!

Obviously, stars didn’t know this. Stars don’t have to deal with death anxiety and rationalize their death as something great. They just combust.

We humans don’t have the luxury to just combust and never think about death and what it means, but we do have the ability to recognize that we, too, will give life to so much more with our death. Some of us will even give life through our life, by having children. Others of us will care for life, in the forms of pets, adopted children, elderly friends and family, or our communities.

Yet from our bodies, we can still help create life.

It seems majestic when a star does it – a grand explosion that spews elements out in all directions.

Why can we not translate that majesty to our own deaths? Sure, we’re not spewing elements everywhere, but some of us will have the elements seep into the ground and feed an area. Others will become ashes, and will scatter elements to the wind! Still more will be food for fishes, and carried about through currents and waves.

Our death can also be fucking majestic.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

Let’s do a thought experiment for today.

Let’s think about life without death, ignoring the overpopulation issues that immediately come to mind.

Let’s think of the stories we’d tell in a life without death – not just for you, but for everyone. Let’s think of what punishment would look like, in a life without death. Let’s think of what having families would be like, relationships would look like, and the lived experience, without death.

So many of the stories I like involve death in them, that it is hard to consider what they would look like. I suppose they would focus more on relationship dramas, and without death as a catalyst, it would be more break ups, more getting together again after centuries, more great-great-great-great grandchildren. There may be more stories of issues to adapt to new technologies as a theme, rather than as background comedy.

In The Lion King, Mufasa would never die. Of course, neither would Mufasa’s father, or his grandfather, or anyone else. Mufasa would never be king, unless he was the FIRST – and IMAGINE! We would know the FIRSTS! We would know human history from the beginning, without interruption or loss!

I think adapting to technology and the changing world would become the theme of stories. I think nostalgia for the past would be a theme. Relationships and relationship drama would be a theme. Stories would be layered in generations.

In a world without death, I think isolation would be punishment. Isolation not for days, or even years, but centuries. I think it would be torture as well.

Family reunions would be huge, grand events. I wonder if they would involve everyone? I suppose that depends on how humans arose, and how related everyone is. Debates on family and kin, and what counts, would certainly be an issue philosophers tackle more often than not. After how many generations do we stop calling someone family? I hate to say it, but I imagine skin color would also remain an issue for bloodline and family considerations – humans can still be terrible and elitist.

Gender would also likely still remain a problem, too. Sexualities.

What would religion look like, with no afterlife? With an eternal earth, an eternal life?

Would people still hope for an escape, invent escapes? Would death be created in fiction, as the “worst fear”, even though it doesn’t exist – the way teleportation, currently, doesn’t exist?

Would we invent death?

And why do I ask you to think about this in the first place?

To make you realize that, even when you aren’t looking at the morbid, death still permeates everything about life. Even when it’s not in focus.

Because imagining life without death, is a fun thought process, if difficult.

After all, this ignored things like overpopulation and overcrowding.

This assumed no death at all, not even through dismemberment.

Imagine living through a dismemberment.

Imagine what “solutions” may come into existence for problems like overcrowding and overpopulation if we can live through dismemberment. If we can live through being turned into ashes by fire.

Or don’t, because that’s kind of terrifying.

My point, I suppose, is to remind us all of why death remains a necessity, of all that we “owe” to death, even if we, personally, don’t want to die.

I still don’t.

But I’m going to remain grateful I got to live at all and practice on reflecting on that gratitude, even when the terror lingers. I’ll be grateful even for the stories and fictional accounts of death that makes stories so moving. I’ll be grateful there was space for me on this planet, grateful for mystery in history, and even grateful for mystery in death. There’s no mystery for what will happen to my body, but there is some mystery in how my mind will take it – I can hope that I never truly know it ends.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

A comment I see come up often is this desire to “not be born” among some of those suffering from thanatophobia.

I don’t personally feel this, but as a former suicidal person, I do understand it from my earlier years in life when I didn’t want to live, but there was also this frustration of not wanting to hurt some of the people around me. Things would have been better if I hadn’t been born, not only to escape the debilitating pain of living, but also to prevent others from suffering the grief at my loss.

Mostly, it was never to have ever known the pain that existence was.

Nowadays, I’m totally okay with the pain of existence and would like it to continue, even facing down non-existence.

Still, I get it.

Never knowing pain, never causing pain to others, never feeling this fear…it would solve a lot of problems. Of course, that would also mean never knowing the highs of life that make you fear its loss. In this way, I find that having the fear is evidence of how much I’m enjoying my life. I wanted to end my life when I had no enjoyment in it, and could see no hope. Now, I see hope – not to be immortal, or to ever escape this fear, but to hopefully have many more years full of experiences.

To live, as much as I can, and enjoy it, as much as I can. That’s going to mean some hiccups that include this fear, when it overcomes me. It’ll include pain, of both the physical and emotional sort. It’ll also include pleasures, of both sorts. I’m not a dualist in thinking, I don’t personally believe we NEED pain to enjoy pleasure, we don’t NEED to be sad to know happiness – but that is how life tends to be, and so I know that working through the hard times are going to mean eventually getting to the good times.

Now that my greatest fear is non-existence, I don’t really have any desire to hasten that. I also don’t wish that I’d never been born. Sure, it means I don’t have the fear…but it also means I don’t have anything.

Getting over that thought can be hard. As a former suicidal individual who failed my attempts, I know that. I can’t tell you when it will get easier. I can only tell you to try and look at the good parts of life and experience, and to know that if you never existed, you wouldn’t know all of these things.

Maybe the movie Soul would also help, just a little – it explores someone who doesn’t want to be born, after all.  

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

I’ve had a bad run lately of my thoughts not being focused on death and dying, exactly, but of being purposeless.

I’m not certain if this is better or worse from what they were before (which was all about the experience of non-existence which can’t actually be experienced and oh lord). Generally speaking, I am completely okay with having no purpose. My only purpose is to live, and I want to live happily – so my main personal purpose is to be content and find contentment in each day, or at the very least find the silver lining in that there will be better days to come.

Yet, at night, I’ve found myself stricken with the thought of not doing enough. That every day is the same thing (it isn’t). That there is nothing I am going to be known for when I pass, which is true of 99% of people in this world, and if we add decimals, it probably looks even starker than that.

Of course, there are ways I could be doing more. I could sleep less, though I have finally started to get that under control by tucking in and laying down usually by 10pm. I could volunteer more on weekends, do more jobs on weekends, find a hobby that profits – do something!

But even if I do something else, I would be missing out on the things I currently do. Like, there are video games to beat, there are plans to make (I’ve been in the process of organizing and planning my trip to Disney), there is energy I wouldn’t have because I’d probably burn myself out and then end up sleeping more and spend more time sick, and time I wouldn’t have for my occasional spontaneous things with my loved ones – breakfast, local trip to new places, things of that nature.

I think plenty of this is societal pressure in the United States. We are conditioned in this society to “not be useless”, in a manner of speaking – that even our leisure time should be spent profiting, somehow. We are also conditioned to work hard for the so-called “American Dream”. However, even without that additional pressure, I know that humanity has searched for a Reason for life, a Meaning for life.

Casting aside that anchor, and saying my only reason is to be Happy, is what I have done.

That doesn’t mean I’m rid of all the problems of it, as can be seen. There is still an impulse to do more, to be more, that is at odds with my desire to simply be happy. That I don’t even know what more I want to do, or should do, is likely another frustration.

My weekdays are packed with work, exercise, and settling down. You’d think that would be enough, but of course, work doesn’t fulfill anything meaningful. My work is meaningful, I help a lot of people through it, but it’s meaningful in the way a bank teller’s job is meaningful. We absolutely help people, and we keep their assets safe. Sometimes what we can do for them is life-changing, or needed.

It’s not like helping endangered animals or plants, though.

It’s not quite like saving lives.

I suppose in typing all of this, I am explaining that understanding things logically, as always, doesn’t always handle the emotional aspects of it. It doesn’t immediately fix the societal pressures, or perhaps the innate desire to have a Greater Purpose. It may fix it eventually, that’s yet to be discovered, but you can’t expect everything to get better, just because you understand it.

After all, understanding that death may be the end of all of our experiences, really doesn’t fix the fear of it, does it?

So if you’re still struggling with parts of this, even things you think you shouldn’t be struggling with, know that you’re not alone in that and it isn’t abnormal, either. We can understand things and situations, and not be okay with them.

I may feel better if I had a job I felt was more fulfilling. I might not – or I might not forever. I might come to think that this is okay, but I could still be doing more. There’s always that more we could be doing, and I don’t think that’s a drive that will ever leave me.

It might never leave you, either.

That doesn’t need it’s a drive that has to be given much thought or focus. It can be, and if you want to find ways to give your life more purpose, then do so! But do so sanely, in consideration of what time and energy you have to share.

Being here is enough.

Anything else is just icing on the cake.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

There was a comment on one of the videos of Claire Luvcat, as she acknowledged her struggle with her cat, Toto, that made me think about death anxiety a bit, and another way we can spin it. Those of us who are caretakers, whether of children, parents, pets, or loved ones, know too well the fear of not doing enough, or accidentally causing more harm than good. We fret about what we could have done better, what we should have known, and we fret about things completely out of our control as if we could have fixed it.

I’ve only had to care for cats, and one who went through renal failure.

I watched my dad care for his father.

I’m sure, sometimes, he beat himself up over letting his dad have a few Vienna sausages, as a treat, because of how loaded with sodium they were – he didn’t do it often, not at all, but he did because it was what his dad wanted, and what kind of life is it if, at the end, we’re trying to prologue it by avoiding all our old loves.

Everyone knew it was the end, it wasn’t a question of years, but of weeks, and days.

Still, we fret over every second, with the possibility of losing all the good that life is in those fretting seconds, trying to grab every second without enjoying them.

It is not our job to make others immortal.

It is our job to give them the best life we can.

This can, and this should, extend to yourself. It should also extend to everyone around you, at least the wish, and the hope, even when we can’t follow through on every action to make every life better – that’s simply too much.

Try to remember this, when you find yourself fretting over seconds, denying yourself, or worrying about things far out of your control. You can’t make yourself or your loved ones immortal – but you can be present. You can be loving, and you can be kind. You can weigh needs and wants.

And you can have a bit of Vienna sausage (or your preference) as a treat. Personally, I’ll take a bit of cheesecake.  

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

I don’t quite have an exposure hierarchy completed yet.

I’m working on it. It’s hard, because fear of death can move into so many things. It becomes a bit like agoraphobia, which isn’t accurate, exactly – but it’s not entirely inaccurate.

So much of the phobia tends to revolve around events or things that could cause death. Plenty of them are in the house (going down stairs, eating, choking on food, home invasion), but the vast majority are “out there” (car wreck, plane crash, someone shooting up the place I’m shopping at, drive-by, getting hit by a car), and others involve situations that don’t matter where I’m at (sudden heart attack or other health issue), that it’s hard to create a way to begin to confront this.

I think it’s good to help divide the fear, to overcome it.

There are some “obvious” things: confronting personal death by preparing it. This involves creating a will, setting someone up to handle your affairs when you pass, get life insurance, determine what you want to have happen to your body, and things of that nature.

There is then looking into death “in general”: look into how death is ritualized, look into how death is handled in different cultures, learn about the process of decay, learn about the various options for your body, learn about those who work in death (morticians, death doulas, some lawyers, cemetery owners and groundskeepers, hospice, etc.), and learn about the science around keeping someone alive, too.

There is then facing death in an impersonal situation: facing it in movies, books, video games, series and shows, poems, art, documentaries – facing it in ways where the death isn’t your own, or your loved ones.

There is also confronting it with your loved ones, about their death: learning what they want, learning what they feel, and learning how you can make it easier, too.

Then, there is confronting it without dying: hospice volunteering or hospice work, reading hospice stories and blogs, reading someone’s “end of life” journals (I’ll try to put together a list in the future), visiting cemeteries or sites where the dead are lain, or perhaps even speaking to veterinarians or learning about dying pets if that’s a bit easier to confront.

Finally, activities that bring up the fear: these may be entirely other fears that kind of get wrapped up in this one, like the fear of flying, the fear of going out, fear of going to the doctor, and things of that nature – tangible fears that cause this more intangible one.

You may want to consider these as separate ladders, or separate hierarchies – 6 different hierarchies. You may want to consider them all together, and then organize based on that, or organize based on individual aspects. For instance, my fear of flying is quite high, but my fear of going to the doctor is significantly lower than doing something like volunteering in a hospice.

This is just a way to start organizing it, and begin to look at the individual aspects of it. I’m still determining what way may be best for me.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

Here’s another consideration, for those of us with the overactive minds before we go to sleep: write it down.

Like what some people do for dreams, start writing the thoughts down with the promise to look at them when you wake up. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the thoughts that were worrying you will seem foolish in the waking light, and you’ll be able to “deal with them” by finding them amusing.

It’s more likely you’ll find these are things you should consider looking into. Perhaps it’s a health concern that you keep recalling at night, but not recalling in the morning. Now would be the time to look into it, let your health team know, and get it taken care of.

Or perhaps it’s some aspect of your will that needs handled so you can be at peace with how things will be divided.

Maybe it’s something you need to mention in therapy.

The problem with thoughts right before sleep, is that they’re often forgotten, and then they can’t be dealt with. They’ll just keep reoccurring when you enter that state, and you’ll forget again, or not deal with them, when you are capable of dealing with them.

So let’s try this practice for thanatophobia: when it strikes as you’re going to sleep, jot down your thoughts, and make a promise to look it over when you’ve slept. You may find some insightful things to help you get a handle on your anxiety.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

Okay, so ya’ll want to know what a self-care list looks like? I guess I have to show you what a self-care list looks like!

I will divide this up over the week into themes, notably Routine Self Care, Emotional Self Care, Physical Self Care, Social Self Care, Personal Self Care, and Practical Self Care. Some of these may bleed into each other, and what I classify as Emotional you may classify as Personal. This is just to help give you an idea of what this kind of thing could look like, to better help you sort out how you may want to make your own lists.

So for day one, I’m going to include what my “Routine” Self Care looks like, which you’ve had a bit of a look at already by seeing how my daily life is.

These are the major points:

Exercise (Physical)

Meal Plan/Follow Meal Plan (Practical)

Shower (Physical)

Go To Work (Practical)

Take Medicine (Physical/Personal/Practical)

Meditate (Emotional)

Partake in Hobbies in downtime (Personal/Emotional)

Take Breaks and Lunches from Work (Practical)

Converse with friends throughout the day (social)

Check in with family (social)

Budgeting (Practical)

Grocery and Food Run (Practical/Social; I know the people now)

General Shopping (Weekly comic run, sometimes other things come up -- Practical/Social)

Obviously, every day varies a little bit, but this is my standard day. Some of you may be wondering, how is Work self-care?

Work is a practical form of self-care because I do not have the finances to live without going to work. It thus makes sure my finances are in order, and allows me to save money to do things that I’d like. It IS self care, because if I stopped doing it, so many parts of my life would fall apart. By going to work, I am caring for myself. Obviously, I would love to win the lottery and never have to work a day in my life again.

I’d also love not to have to take medicine every day that helps with my chronic pain. I’d love not to need to exercise, for that matter, or monitor my diet. I do it, because I care about myself, and these contribute to taking care of myself, and that’s why I’m putting them here.

I also find it’s better to think of work in this light, rather than to see it as negative and adverse to my life. Since I cannot change the entire structure of the society I live in overnight, I can work on how I view it instead. I don’t mean this to be toxic positivity – my work environment is not detrimental to my health.

If yours is, I hope you can find an environment that is healthier for you. I hope you can find something that enriches your life far more than it lessens your life, as I have done with my job.

As you can see, though – my daily self care routines have a bit of everything sprinkled in, from social to physical. I am huge into holistic health, and taking care of all parts of you, so that should be no surprise.

This is my routine on a good day. What I will include in the other days, are “self care” that is not routine, and is usually meant to help with an imbalance in some way. For example, you’ll see here that I have my meal plan mentioned as a practical need – it could also be considered physical for the actual eating of it.

There is a sub-genre of self-care that I consider “comfort food”. Though food itself is a physical need, comfort food helps with an emotional imbalance, and so when I talk about that, it will be under the emotional heading, rather than physical, because it is not addressing a physical need, despite being a physical action. Ordinarily, food is addressing a physical need, and that is where it belongs in normal circumstances.

In abnormal circumstances, food may bleed into other categories based on use.

Acknowledging this is a good step to understanding how you use things, and thus, when to use things. That’s what we’ll see in the non-routine things.

Taking care of yourself in a routine fashion is self-care, and as you can see, not all of it is lying around eating bon-bons. Good self-care treats all of you, and that may mean doing things that are hard, or even undesirable, at times, for the overall health. Do I want to exercise every day? No. Do I enjoy the results of exercising over the results of not exercising? Fuck yes.

Having a routine, also helps me immensely with death anxiety. I am a creature of habit, and spontaneity can throw me off – as the year 2020 seriously did, so if you are like me, organizing yourself in such a way, and knowing what these things do for you, is good!