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.
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.
Yeah I think its weird that it’s considered more morally sound to make them waste away in agony then let them willingly end their suffering through controlled means.
Like, if they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it. Wouldn’t it be better to make sure they do it in the cleanest way possible?
I live it everyday. Others around me see and deal with it. Very frustrating. Sometimes you know its happening and sometimes your just not functioning normal anymore. Its like being a shell of your former self.
This for me. Would love a peaceful death with next to know one ever knowing who I was but with me completely knowing who I was until the last moment (well ideally in sleep so that last part is a little malleable)
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.
I once met a guy who was stuck in a drug enduced psychosis when I was 12 or something. It shook me pretty badly. I’m not opposed to drugs at all, but I’ve always had an irrational fear of halucigenic drugs since.
Lots of people make almost full recoveries from psychosis. Not so much from dementia.
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.
Well thanks a lot, that’s now my fear too.
You are welcome!
Oh… oh no… Damn it, I will never sit in an office chair the same ever again without thinking about this.
Gotta get an ass guard, like Thor has
I want to both upvote and downvote this comment… I chose upvote.
And I thank you.
Have you seen the Mythbusters episode?
I don’t remember it. But there’s enough metal hardware under the seat that I’m sure it’s basically impossible to break that way.
That’s niche.
The speed at which we are (not) acting on climate change. Our tolerance for neoliberals/capitalists absolutely wiping their arse with the whole planet.
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.
Having to work for another 20 years.
Haha only 20?
Checks calendar, “oh shit.”
Look at the millionaire that only has to work 20 more years
I have another 40 :(
Micro-plastics
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.
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.
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.
There is no changing the future or past actions. The only time you can change anything is this very moment. If you focus on what you may or may not have tomorrow, you aren’t living today.
A hypothetical fear of course, one with my wife who I’ve been with for 15 years now.
One day, maybe hopefully 30-50 years in the future, my wife and I look back and think about how good our lives were. We raised happy and successful kids. We bought a house. We had dozens of pets. We celebrate the end of our life together. But she doesn’t make it.
And I have to spend the final years alone with memories of her. Two controllers. Two spoons. Two of everything for decades. Now just me.
And Never being able to explain to the rest of the world how amazing she was.
I’m so terrified that my wife will go before me…
But I also don’t want to let her down by going before her and making her live her own last days/weeks/years alone…
Love is so difficult
I was in this crystal clear cliffside cove and could see in front of me maybe 10 m or so but the Rock only went out about 5 and then just plunged into the abyss. and after exploring the coastline I swim out about 10 ft past the rocks and realized that I could see nothing but the deepest blue I’d ever seen.
literally anything could be just a few body lengths away watching me were sensing me, it was almost overwhelming.
I felt this visceral terror, that I’ve felt before in the middle of reading a Lovecraft story.
very much looking into the eye of something unknowable.
Oh fuck no! Dark water is a big fear of mine. I like swimming, scuba diving, snorkeling BUT those dark patches in the water make me truly feel paralyzed and electrified at the same time brbrbrbr. One time I went to the Yucatan penninsula to swim in a couple of cenotes and boy did it make my body shiver! Let alone the meaning of cenotes in mayan cosmogony and what not but the pure sheer terror that that black water gave me was like nothing else.
Letting down people I love somehow
Ask to be their pallbearer.
Fortunately I don’t know any scrum masters personally so they would not even get the experience of being let down last time by a dev. Exceot in a purely metaphorical sense I guess.
Everything. Everything scares me. If I stop and think about anything in particular, I slowly realize how frightening that thing really is.
Cat. Sits with its ass on your face while you sleep.
Dog. Eats its own vomit and greets others by sniffing their ass, then tries to lick you.
shivers
I have lived with cats, none has ever sat on my face.
There, there… I’m sure some cat will sit on your face someday.
That what ultimately ends my time here, will be my own fault.
And spiders… Fuck spiders.
Lot of contenders really! And the only solution is to try not to think about it, these are things I can’t do a god damn thing about.
Heart disease
Brain aneurysms
The fact that just experiencing negative emotions degrades your health (that is so unfair); depressed because everything’s gone to shit? Mad because people keep fucking you over? You don’t live as long because of it.
Basically let’s just say all the ways the human body can fail you and isn’t equipped properly for the lives we lead. The food I’m “supposed” to eat disgusts me, and I could be on the verge of death at any given moment and not know it.
The fact that we’re less than a single ember in the history of the universe and all that astronomers believe is charted to happen after us is like, incomprehensibly massive cosmic events, lot of black holes.
The fact that some day I’m going to die and that’s just going to be it is chilling, the most I can hope to is try to be one of the “fortunate” ones that makes it to around 100 years of age; and even then I’ll probably be tired of it and physically/mentally degraded pretty severely by then. What’s it like after you die? It’s exactly the same as it was before you were born.
Oh yeah, black holes. You go near one of them and time slows down as you’re torn apart at the atomic level. Imagine falling into a meat grinder but it takes a thousand years, or a million. You’d be insane and dead.
The idea of suffering in silence while people either can’t see that you’re distressed or don’t care. This could apply to just being depressed and wishing you had friends, or like, actually having something bad happen to you where you’d be fine if you had another person around, but you don’t. Something like choking or falling off a ladder while living on your own.
Climate change and the fading light of earth’s biodiversity .
The rise of political folks who desire modern fascism.
Late stage capitalism and its tendency to basically make the entire world worse.
False vacuum would be a nice addition to your list
Sort of falls in with the “we are a single spark” thing, like, yup, there are 50 different ways the universe could just kind of end all of human history forever.
