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According to you, what happens when you die?

Half of the time I look forward to my death, it doesn't scare me since I don't see the real point of my life, what scares me is if my agony would be slow and painful.

But then what? I just stop existing and it's like I fell asleep? Do I see light? Darkness? Nothing? What is nothing?

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  • "What happens when you die" - I assume you mean after you die (not during), and to your consciousness, your awareness rather than your body.

    The same as before you came to be. Not like you fell asleep; you're gone.

  • I believe it's very similar to falling asleep, and you may even tap into a dreamlike state of consciousness depending on your circumstances. Eventually, your self awareness stops and fades into nothingness. What you see if anything at all, and what your perception of time is or how self aware of the situation you are will depend a lot on the circumstances of the death and your individual make up, the same way not everyone dreams the same way or even remembers dreaming at all.

  • If my partner is still alive, then she would be very sad. Likewise my older siblings. God, I hope my parents aren't alive to see it - that would suck for them. My best bud would also be pretty torn up (we've lived within a few blocks of each other for most of the last three decades, and get together at least once a week). There's also an old ex who if they're still around, I can count on a great eulogy from them. Makes me wish I could stick around just to see that.

    Unless it's a particularly horrible death, I don't think anyone would be dangerously sad. I'm insured to the hilt, so there should be enough to go around to cover expenses, including my partner's current level of comfort.

    From my perspective, it's likely to be a big nothing (I would be very surprised otherwise). But I've never really put much stock in individual consciousness: sure I may be stuck to this one perspective because of how brains work, so it's the only consciousness I can truly know, but it's not the only one. The others (like other other people) will keep going after this one ends. The biggest changes are going to be in the social and legal dimensions of my former life.

  • I have two sets of beliefs here. There's what I rationally believe based on what I know, and there's the story I'll be telling myself for comfort if I know the end is soon (and I think benefits me in day to day life too)

    The experience of death and if anything comes after is inherently kind of unknowable and if there was a truth to know I don't think human minds could comprehend it. Even if the answer is nothing, I can't comprehend experiencing nothing. When consciousness lapses we only have what we experience before and after to contrast it to. So I have to live life with the understanding that I will die and I can't know what that will be like until it happens.

    That being said, we really don't know anything about how consciousness is connected to our physical forms, and we don't know that experience ends after death, either. Especially when you consider time may not be linear in the way we perceive it. The closest thing I have to a belief would be some form of reincarnation, where consciousness would resume in another life in another time. Maybe every life is the same consciousness reborn an uncountable number of times. I can't say I believe this per se, more that it's just as possible as any other theory, and it'd be a comfortable delusion to pass on with. it helps me feel closer to others too.

    I guess my main point is go play Outer Wilds (and its DLC) if you haven't gotten to it yet. It helped me grapple with a lot of this and even if I'm still scared of the end, I no longer find it overwhelmingly distressing.

  • If you believe your self, your awareness, your consciousness are manifestations of neurons firing in a brain, then as soon as those stop, you cease to be.

    I believe that those neurons are a sort of radio signal, and that the self as I know it is a kind of wave transmitted from some time/place. When the body dies and the brain dies with it, I believe that connection is gone, and that signal is lost, but that the time/place from which the signal originated still exists. This doesn't indicate that I, the self, still am somehow alive or exist in some other way, the specific manifestation of myself as who I an is gone in this case, but I do take some solace in the fact that the signal that propagated the awareness of my own being still goes on.

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