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.
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 :(
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.
Micro-plastics
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That what ultimately ends my time here, will be my own fault.
And spiders… Fuck spiders.
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.
That is awful, Celiac’s (and really any autoimmune disease) is no joke. I see a lot of parallels reflected in their post and I truly hate that for them so much - constantly struggling to find foods that you can tolerate, having numerous surgeries, seeing a million different doctors, being in and out of the hospital all the time to the point that its a second home, lab test after lab test that only result in more questions than answers, symptoms and other issues spiraling up due to complications of going through the condition - you name it.
I feel for them, every day feels like you’ve got the curse of Sisyphus. I feel like there has to be a solution for people like them and I, and its unfortunate that there is just so much about the body and its various systems that we don’t understand. I constantly struggle with the idea that we’ve come so far with the sciences, and yet it feels like in matters of human physiology like the GI, immune, and nervous system we’ve barely scratched the surface.
