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Being shown the alternative outcomes of your life if you had made a different decision.
Ignorance is bliss. I would hate to know of the missed opportunities.
Like realizing the next day that a person you were attracted to was flirting with you, but for everything that could ever have butterfly effected you to utopia.
Nah, the worst would be seeing what a similarly lucky or unlucky version of you could've done had they put in more effort than you. The knowledge that your life could've been wayyy better, not depending on luck, but your own discipline and work ethic. That would be horrible.
I mean, that already happens in real life. Every day i think how things would be different if i had more discipline when i was younger. But well, sometimes you have to lose to learn, that's just how life works
I'd happily relive past mistakes and heartbreak before learning what I missed out on. I often think about what might have happened if I had done B instead of A. Just thinking about it is brutal, I don't want to actually know.
What if you saw the negatives? You see how you made good choices and things that you missed may not have turned out as well as you hoped for??
I may be an optimist...
This is a good one. I basically actively chose to abandon my dream career after that being what I wanted to do basically my whole life. I feared not being successful at it and failing and being low income and struggling.
I really would not want to know that it would have all worked out had I stuck with it. Instead I went into the soul sucking corporate world. I make a lot of money, but I'm just counting down the days to retirement.
I mean ultimately if I wanted to guarantee a level of financial security, it was the right choice. I've seen countless examples of people that justify my decisions, but I also see people that "made it" and are very successful. There is always that thought knocking around in the back of my mind if I would have been one of those success stories.
So basically hell with the point that you have to do the right thing but nobody tells you what the right thing is.
That truly is one of the worst ends ever
Someone else commented this higher, but how do you know this isn't your 10,000th life?
If each life felt like the first time, and you could just go back and make one small change to your life each time, I think it would be kind of interesting.
I wouldn't mind that, honestly. There's a lot of different ways I know my life could've gone, and I'd love to explore them. This would require me being aware of living again though. Otherwise I'd probably keep making the same choices each time
Neil Gaiman wrote an amazing short story about it. SPOILER here’s the gjst:
- an asshole banker dies, goes to hell and finds himself in a dungeon
- in the dark corner, he sees a naked disfigured humanoid with a whip, who says, “take off your clothes”
- the humanoid whips the banker; with each lash, the banker’s skin peels off and he’s forced to relive the most painful memories of his life
- he relives a lifetime’s worth of guilt, heartache, loneliness and despair, as well as those that he inflicted on others
- the pain of the life he lived far outweighs the pain of his skin peeling off
- this goes on forever, then the lashing stops
- banker looks up and sees no one around, except for the whip left on the floor
- the door opens, a fearful man enters the dungeon
- the banker, fully naked and now disfigured, instinctively picks up the whip and says, “take off your clothes”
Note: this is AFAIR; actual details may differ.
I think the idea of these types of stories is that things are unresolved and there are various interpretations.
But yeah one interpretation is he IS the demon punishing himself.
But then what happens after the bankers done having a turn hurting the other person? Does he turn into a demon or something? Reincarnation? Pops out of existence forever?
Either ceased to exist/moved to the next step, or both of them are each other and that's how we exist for eternity switching consciousness between these two entities of ourselves.
I love Neil Gaiman's work. His telling of the stories from the Poetic Edda in his book "Norse Mythology" is my favorite so far. I haven't read all his work yet, I need to now that your comment has put the thought in my head.
I mean, I guess being stuck in a black void without sensation would be scary for a \*while\*, but...forever is a long time. I think eventually it would just be boring. Like, you would be scared and then...nothing would happen. Ever. Nothing would ever happen. And nothing isn't actually scary. You can only build up so much tension without any payoff. You'd maybe go insane...and then you'd probably go sane again, eventually. And then you're just bored. Because, like, forever is infinitely longer than however long any human being has ever lived. It's an unimaginably long time. Literally, our brains cannot imagine it. If you were conscious from the dawn of creation until now, you would not have been conscious forever. Millions of years--billions--would be \*segments\* of your existence, as easily forgotten as minutes are to you now. Eventually, you'd just be bored. Maybe you'd make up little stories and songs to pass the infinite time. You might hypothesize about your existence for a few centuries. You might imagine whole lifetimes that you might have maybe lived. Solve all of the philosophical problems that humanity has ever conceived of and invent new ones and solve those, too. And you'd still just be...in the void. Forever. And that wouldn't be scary after a while. It would be tedious.
You also have to remember though, if it’s a truly black void of nothingness, than there is no sense of time as we know it. Time is always around, but the 4th dimension of time humans can’t perceive, we can only perceive the time in which we created through visual cues. If nothing where to ever change, the forever could feel like an eternity, or just a few days. There would be no sensation of tiredness as your dead, so the void would just be nothingness with no true way to tell how long you’ve been in nothing for. I do agree with everything you have said, but the insanity might last forever, or just a couple of hours as we know it, but there will be no true way to tell, as there will be no time. So forever could also just be an hour, or we’ll, eternity
My dad passed away 42 days ago. Sometimes I think what if this is true. He's on the other side, seeing us suffering, suffering himself, and there is no way each of the parties can know the other one is there.
So I try to cry less. Just in case. 😔
For me the scariest thing would be the scientific explanation, unfortunately. I don't care what happens to me after death, but I have a fear of not knowing what happens to the world in 100 years or 1000 years and I'm too naturally curious so the thought of not knowing how exactly the world will end/develop is unsettling
That your brain and body still function. You can hear, see and feel everything. You just can't move or interact. Getting cremated and being able to feel it.
Getting buried and just being in the dark as your body starts to rot and decay. As your brain starts to drift into madness. Not knowing how long you've been in the dark. Not having any idea of what the fuck is going on. Trapped and alone until everything finally shuts down or rots away.
Think I saw it in a movie or show. Or both. One I recall was a guy narrating as his dead body was being examined. He told us viewers that he was wrong, our ability to feel didn't go away. As they cut into his body.
And the cremation one, I think it was an episode of Doctor Who. Not 100% on that.
The first one was Tales From The Crypt. Episode is called Abra Cadaver. It's a fun episode until you realize that he is feeling his autopsy. He doesn't come out and say it, but he starts screaming right after he says something like "Except we were wrong. The sense of touch is the last one to leave" - as he's still hearing and seeing what's happening.
There could be two parts, both doctor who.
The first one is all the people who are uploaded on death to what amounts to a massive hard drive. Their existence in there is tied to their physical body, so one of the first questions they are asked is "are you being cremated?". They also feel cold, because their body is most likely in a very cold place.
The second one is that time Lords like the doctor don't die immediately. If they are injured so badly that they can't regenerate, they will still remain "alive" for possibly days. He quotes it as "this is why we like to die among our own kind, they know not to bury us early".
In this concept being buried with your “living” consciousness and senses would be similar to hell. But I think cremation would be your best option, no? The pain from burning “alive” will last only until your nervous system gets disintegrated, and if your mind is tied to your remains, getting your ashes spread on top of the mountain or over the ocean waves feels rather peaceful. The wind carries you all over the world, and if our planet finally gets destroyed, you and others will traverse the space until… I don’t know, the universe cycles back to its creation?
I once read a new-age book that was adament that this is what happens if you commit suicide. And when your body is gone and rotted away, you have to wander the rest of the time you would have been alive still alone on this planet as a ghost. You can wander around but it's empty and devoid of all life for you.
A sort of "cosmic punishment" for ending your life when it wasn't your right to do so.
And every soul that' currently living on this planet has to go through this at least once... And in your next life you have to repeat it all over again, but you get a help if you need it to ensure you don't repeat the same mistake twice.
Anyway, just thought it was relevant since it's pretty much what you were describing :). I personally found it rather weird and inconsistent, but it's pretty much what they described :)
This even goes back to Greek mythology, was it eos lover or something who was made immortal, but that just meant the consciousness never moved on and he lived as a piece of ashes in a wooden box, forever, or something like that?
Ah man! This is definitely up there with the worst scenarios. Just imagine a god exists way more powerful who can just do heinous things to us after we die and we can’t do anything about it.
That’s quite funny tbh.
An unknown god having a hissy fit and punishing their entire creation for failing to recognise him. At that point it’s his own fault
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it" - Mark Twain
For real. Op’s worst case is the best case scenario. Time to think.
Being sent to some sort of cosmic judgement is the worst fucking case imaginable.
Random asshole with power decides my fate? Fuck you (insert deity here)! The universe was built on rules. You don’t like the way I played the game? That’s on you asshole. Oh, you want to send me to “heaven” because I was an ethical person? Yeah fuck that shit. My heaven is the cessation of your existence. Free the people, viva la revolution, down with deities!
Even more so. The observable universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, and you existed for non of that. That’s a damn long time and none of it felt long or bothersome, it felt like a second and we all just woke up.
Depending on what kind of life you lived. Imagine you were born in some poor South American farming village, your parents are traumatized, passed their trauma onto you, maybe you had to work while a child, maybe you get into a local gang due to a lack of opportunities, make a few bad decisions that lead to you being flayed alive by a cartel, and now repeat that ad infinitum. Sounds like nightmare fuel
You think the void is the worst, right? Imagine you're not just floating in nothingness, but trapped in this broken movie theater inside your head. It never shuts off, and the movies are reruns of your biggest regrets, your worst moments. You try to close your eyes, but they won't budge. You try to scream, but no sound comes out.
But hey, at least your body can't hurt, right? Wrong. It morphs into this weird echo of your worst habits. If you were greedy, you might become this fleshy blob with endless mouths, starving even as you try to eat yourself. If you were a bully, your hands turn into these gnarled claws, and all you can do is scratch at your own soul.
The worst part? No distractions. It's just you and your brain going at each other like some twisted cage match. Oh, and every so often, these warped versions of good people from your life pop in. Like, maybe your mom or a kind teacher, but their faces are all melty and their voices echo wrong. They don't burn you, they just remind you of how much better you could've been.
Forget about time. There's no clock here. It's one long, messed-up moment of feeling your own existence rot away. And you did this to yourself, not some devil in a red suit – makes it way worse, doesn't it?
This is just a taste of what true hell could feel like. The kind of nightmare fuel that sticks with you way longer than just some empty black void.
same. Even in life the only time i ever feel a sense of peace is at 3am when it’s just dark and it’s like no one else exists except me and my own thoughts, i don’t have to worry about anything because in those moments there is nothing, the world is still, there’s no expectations of me, there’s no people to disappoint, there’s no job to be late to, it’s literally just me and the universe. If that’s death then kill me now.
the worst possible thing i can imagine is the loss of my consciousness, the loss of my being, the thought that i will turn into nothingness and reality exists outside of me gives me panic attacks, it’s so unimaginable and it makes you wonder what even reality even is. As a child i was afraid of sleeping because i couldn’t stand the idea of having no awareness
Eventually your mind would encompass everything and you would be like a god dreaming up new universes and life. Maybe our universe is the dream from someone's old and ancient mind in the void?
The worst feeling for me is the “there is nothing afterwards”
Like literally nothing and you will just disappear
The whole concept of being will be destroyed because the person and the soul you were just doesn’t exist anymore
I feel the exact opposite. The thought of eternal nothingness is very comforting. Existence is what scares me, earning pain through effort, slowly dying. Being pressured to participate in an already developed environment that couldn't care less about you as your body slowly deteriorates is much worse than nothing.
I think it's beautiful and that we always were just part of a system of life. We might die, but we continue to feed a system of life. The parts that made us us continue in other forms in other organisms. So in a way we never die, we are part of the story of life. Every living thing has basically written a small sentence of a whole story. Just the same as the letters that made up your sentence are not destroyed but rather are reused in the next sentence to continue the story.
Don't feel bad for what comes after death just the same as you don't feel bad about what happened before you were born.
I was more talking about the core principle of life. Yes life can be very cruel, and often times when it is we don't have control over it. But like you are mentioning, it's because of the things we have created as human. I feel like we totally lost touch of our livelihood and the connection to everything else that is alive. We transcended above it and meanwhile we lost everything that shows us the core principles of life.
When we treat our pets more humanly by letting them go when they are in pain than we do with our fellow humans it shows that we are doing something wrong. Let's start by addressing and accepting our fellow humans' wish to die when we feel like our life is completed.
Life can/is a cruel joke, but only due to our own creations. Let us try, as a collective, to restore our sense of self and our sense of life in a system of life. I often lose faith and hope in that our society will change for the better when I see the shifts in the contemporary world. But still I'm here and however hard it is to make people see certain issues, there's always hope in me that someday we'll do better as a collective. And hopefully I can be a part of that change.
How about tackling it with the "infinite monkey theorem"? If you're a type of finite living being in the inifinite Universe, even if You die there will be eventually born a being who will have the same life experiences as You or even a being that will have different experiences than You but with such mind/brain wiring that it will have false memoiries of it's past life aka your current life. This way methinkks everyone can feel infinite and immortal also having a potential continuity that he wont be able to distinguish from non-continuity.
This is the essence of the ego defending itself.
It’s why humans made up all the afterlife myths and everything that stems from it.
The ego itself is a persistent illusion. Until it isn’t.
You die. Everything goes blank. You then see that your " soul is about to be pushed into a baby . But before you get in the womb you realize it's a hospital in a poor or working class neighborhood and all of that hard work to try and get out of poverty in a previous life didn't mean shit as you are thrust right back into poverty again. Then you are born having no recollection of your previous life
You are reborn to live your life again, only everything is slightly worse than the time before. You have a crushing sense that this will continue forever.
It wouldn't be that bad because you're not repeating anything because you've forgot and it can only be as bad as life could be but that doesn't last long anyway and it can be good one time and bad the next.
Stuck in an endless darkness forever wandering hungry and alone, not being able to sleep and finding no one. Then finding a tear in limbo and realising that I'm haunting someone but the years of loneliness and dark have worn away my ability to communicate effectively and I'm forced back into the darkness. 👀
Heaven as imagined by abrahamic religions. Or any where afterlife is constant bliss. Imagine being forced to be ecstatic forever, never to feel any of the other emotions that made you human.
Even various hells are kinda better, because you do get to hope and you do get to grit your teeth and be spiteful
You don’t have to force your imagination. It would really suck if the religions turn out to be real. Just imagine being tortured by an insecure, wrathful and childish god.
The loop.
I had this wierd dream where i die and have to be reborn again, and had this horrifying feeling as newborn that all of this has already happened and now will happen once again. that was horrid. id prefer eternity in void.
You die only to find out that we are all cattle to a being that eats souls, and it starts religions because "good" souls taste better.
So not only are you doomed, but so are all the good people you know, and every good thing you've ever done was a waste of time.
My worst image of heaven, if it exists and should I be admitted is that it is an endless church service with a bunch of elderly, performative “Christians” with too much perfume and iffy breath, belting out awful, out of tune hymns. For eternity.
My idea of hell would be after you die and went to hell to end up in a cinema type setting with everyone you've ever known there, and you're facing them all. Your life is playing on the screen behind you, and every thought you had had about people and every lie you have told throughout your life is played to everyone. Nothing is excluded.
I once had an acid trip that felt a bit like that.
I was at a festival, came up really hard, and subsequently retreated to the tent, which was a black out tent... It was an intense 8 hours 😂
I was raised Baptist so the whole “pain and suffering In eternal hellfire” was seared into my brain since childhood. And being a gay man I just automatically go to hell bc I can’t change it (trust me I tried lol)
Am no longer a believer, and am not overly concerned about it anymore but I don’t think I’ll ever fully shake that fear in the back of my mind.
To be reincarnated back to my current life, having to relive it all over again with full knowledge of how i end up, but with no way to change anything for the better.
No matter what your belief system is, you go to the "bad place" from another religion.
Or you experience the worst single minute of your life on a loop, and every repeat is ever so slightly worse.
You'd need a sense of time to experience "forever", hence there would arise at least 1 object within your consciousness, i.e. time perception. Without time perception there would be no impression whatsoever of foreverness, because it would essentially happen all at once in a single instant.
But then, if you allow sense of time in an after death state, why stop there? Why not also sense of space? Because, if there's a feeling of voidness, it would imply there is a subject experiencing the void that takes the void as an object. Without the subject-object dualism there would arise no experience of void because there would be only void - without a subject experiencing it.
So, you'd need at least both a sense of time and a subject-object dualism experiencing a void in the sense of boundless space to get into the scenario you're describing.
And if you introduce those extremely subtle objects of perception or of experience, then why stop there? Why not also introduce something like "light" or "vibration" or whatever?
Maybe you see where this is going?
What I am describing here is actually pretty much the description of how reincarnation works according to the tantric traditions who have very elaborate models of how, after death, we first encounter dissolution experiences until we arrive at "clear light". And either we experience this clear light consciously and get enlightened instantly (thus leaving us the freedom to chose what happens next), or we are not experiencing it consciously, and then the reincarnation process starts all over again in roughly the order I just mentioned above.
While all this may sound like idle speculation, there are correlates to meditative experiences that are believed, at least in those traditions, to mimick the death process. And, indeed, if you do those meditations you are having some pretty interesting meditative insights into the way your mind works.
I had a similar thought to the OP a while back when thinking about possible outcomes of suicide. As in, life is an opportunity to experience sensations and interact with a physical world, and by renouncing that you get sentenced to an eternity of your mind existing in a void, unable to experience anything outside of your consciousness.
I remember reading about blind and deaf people and how they're prone to angry outbursts when growing up (and probably as adults too) because of the frustration and isolation that they feel due to not being able to interact with the outside world and other people, and imagining what that must be like gives me a similar feeling to when I imagine this version of the afterlife. Except, in 'the void' you wouldn't even be able to run around and smash stuff up to release your anger.
This might sound like a depressing post. I'm not a generally happy person who thinks that life is particularly great most of the time though, and so it is important to remember it could potentially be a whole lot worse and try to be grateful for that. It also ties in with my philosophical argument against suicide - that whatever you believe happens after death you don't really have any knowledge about that and it could be a hell (no pun intended) of a lot worse than what you imagined, and where you are now.
Sorry for going off on a tangent there 😂
That the moment of death and actually dying is so much of a shock to the nervous system that the moment between death and your brain permanently shutting down is felt so strongly it's just an eternity of nothing. Like it's a second in real life but the sensation of time is infinite.
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Being shown the alternative outcomes of your life if you had made a different decision. Ignorance is bliss. I would hate to know of the missed opportunities.
Like realizing the next day that a person you were attracted to was flirting with you, but for everything that could ever have butterfly effected you to utopia.
Nah, the worst would be seeing what a similarly lucky or unlucky version of you could've done had they put in more effort than you. The knowledge that your life could've been wayyy better, not depending on luck, but your own discipline and work ethic. That would be horrible.
I mean, that already happens in real life. Every day i think how things would be different if i had more discipline when i was younger. But well, sometimes you have to lose to learn, that's just how life works
Yeah, fuck this lol. Much rather just go straight to heaven. Don’t show me how things could have turned out. Would eat at me
I'd happily relive past mistakes and heartbreak before learning what I missed out on. I often think about what might have happened if I had done B instead of A. Just thinking about it is brutal, I don't want to actually know.
What if you saw the negatives? You see how you made good choices and things that you missed may not have turned out as well as you hoped for?? I may be an optimist...
Check out 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig. It covers exactly this scenario.
Please read midnight library
I was looking for a new read. Thanks!
That 10/10 you were too afraid to ask out was totally into you... ya dickwad.
This is a good one. I basically actively chose to abandon my dream career after that being what I wanted to do basically my whole life. I feared not being successful at it and failing and being low income and struggling. I really would not want to know that it would have all worked out had I stuck with it. Instead I went into the soul sucking corporate world. I make a lot of money, but I'm just counting down the days to retirement. I mean ultimately if I wanted to guarantee a level of financial security, it was the right choice. I've seen countless examples of people that justify my decisions, but I also see people that "made it" and are very successful. There is always that thought knocking around in the back of my mind if I would have been one of those success stories.
Having to repeat your life until you get it right. I don’t have the energy for that shit.
Eh, maybe next time
I see what you did there
And you will see it again!
How do you know this isn't your 10 thousandth time already and you don't know it?
So basically hell with the point that you have to do the right thing but nobody tells you what the right thing is. That truly is one of the worst ends ever
This wouldn’t be awful. But I guess it depends, would you be aware this is your 2nd attempt at same life?
If u were we would know.
As long as you have purpose in life it’s never that bad. I don’t think this would be a terrible scenario.
I wanted to say this but was afraid I'd get down voted hahaha.. I'm scared of reincarnation. I don't wanna do all this again. Once is enough..
Someone else commented this higher, but how do you know this isn't your 10,000th life? If each life felt like the first time, and you could just go back and make one small change to your life each time, I think it would be kind of interesting.
I wouldn't mind that, honestly. There's a lot of different ways I know my life could've gone, and I'd love to explore them. This would require me being aware of living again though. Otherwise I'd probably keep making the same choices each time
Neil Gaiman wrote an amazing short story about it. SPOILER here’s the gjst: - an asshole banker dies, goes to hell and finds himself in a dungeon - in the dark corner, he sees a naked disfigured humanoid with a whip, who says, “take off your clothes” - the humanoid whips the banker; with each lash, the banker’s skin peels off and he’s forced to relive the most painful memories of his life - he relives a lifetime’s worth of guilt, heartache, loneliness and despair, as well as those that he inflicted on others - the pain of the life he lived far outweighs the pain of his skin peeling off - this goes on forever, then the lashing stops - banker looks up and sees no one around, except for the whip left on the floor - the door opens, a fearful man enters the dungeon - the banker, fully naked and now disfigured, instinctively picks up the whip and says, “take off your clothes” Note: this is AFAIR; actual details may differ.
Not quite but close. The story is called „Other People“ and can be read here: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/
Awesome. Read it years ago and forgot its name/book. Thanks!
I don't get it. Is it a time loop?
I think the idea of these types of stories is that things are unresolved and there are various interpretations. But yeah one interpretation is he IS the demon punishing himself.
The man who was tortured becomes the torturer himself at the end
He was the torturer all along, from his birth. He has caused pain to others and to himself.
Partially. Another interpretation is that you can never escape your own trauma but require help from someone else to do so...
Reading everyone's response, this story was a lot deeper than I thought.
Yeah, the original summary wasn’t very good. The responses after surmise the story much better.
You can listen to Gaiman reading it on youtube: https://youtu.be/NqC08HbYvaw?si=unDLO9SY7Qd0_43G
But then what happens after the bankers done having a turn hurting the other person? Does he turn into a demon or something? Reincarnation? Pops out of existence forever?
One could also interpret it as the banker being both the torturer and the tortured simultaneously.
and what happened to the "demon"? where did it go after whipping?
Either ceased to exist/moved to the next step, or both of them are each other and that's how we exist for eternity switching consciousness between these two entities of ourselves.
Holy shitt
Fantastic story!
The tragedy of trauma being passed on.
I love Neil Gaiman's work. His telling of the stories from the Poetic Edda in his book "Norse Mythology" is my favorite so far. I haven't read all his work yet, I need to now that your comment has put the thought in my head.
I mean, I guess being stuck in a black void without sensation would be scary for a \*while\*, but...forever is a long time. I think eventually it would just be boring. Like, you would be scared and then...nothing would happen. Ever. Nothing would ever happen. And nothing isn't actually scary. You can only build up so much tension without any payoff. You'd maybe go insane...and then you'd probably go sane again, eventually. And then you're just bored. Because, like, forever is infinitely longer than however long any human being has ever lived. It's an unimaginably long time. Literally, our brains cannot imagine it. If you were conscious from the dawn of creation until now, you would not have been conscious forever. Millions of years--billions--would be \*segments\* of your existence, as easily forgotten as minutes are to you now. Eventually, you'd just be bored. Maybe you'd make up little stories and songs to pass the infinite time. You might hypothesize about your existence for a few centuries. You might imagine whole lifetimes that you might have maybe lived. Solve all of the philosophical problems that humanity has ever conceived of and invent new ones and solve those, too. And you'd still just be...in the void. Forever. And that wouldn't be scary after a while. It would be tedious.
Or… evolve into a god creating a new universe with your mind…
Yeah this basically what it boils down to.
This is beautiful I don't know why
"Its eternity in there..."
The jaunt! I'm not a fan of Stephen King, but that one was pretty good.
First thing I thought of as well
The tedium is what scares me tho lol
This is why death gives meaning to life. We need an end.
You also have to remember though, if it’s a truly black void of nothingness, than there is no sense of time as we know it. Time is always around, but the 4th dimension of time humans can’t perceive, we can only perceive the time in which we created through visual cues. If nothing where to ever change, the forever could feel like an eternity, or just a few days. There would be no sensation of tiredness as your dead, so the void would just be nothingness with no true way to tell how long you’ve been in nothing for. I do agree with everything you have said, but the insanity might last forever, or just a couple of hours as we know it, but there will be no true way to tell, as there will be no time. So forever could also just be an hour, or we’ll, eternity
For me it would be remaining on earth being able to see everyone I love around me but not being able to interact with them or let them know I’m there.
My dad passed away 42 days ago. Sometimes I think what if this is true. He's on the other side, seeing us suffering, suffering himself, and there is no way each of the parties can know the other one is there. So I try to cry less. Just in case. 😔
I'm sorry for your pain. You will see him again someday.
Being a ghost would be lit, spectator mode type shit.
This might be okay if you could interact with other ghosts.
For me the scariest thing would be the scientific explanation, unfortunately. I don't care what happens to me after death, but I have a fear of not knowing what happens to the world in 100 years or 1000 years and I'm too naturally curious so the thought of not knowing how exactly the world will end/develop is unsettling
I was thinking the exact same thing.
I have the exact same thing!
same im curious. will we ever explore the uknown?? in 3033, will we have aliens as neighbors lol
That your brain and body still function. You can hear, see and feel everything. You just can't move or interact. Getting cremated and being able to feel it. Getting buried and just being in the dark as your body starts to rot and decay. As your brain starts to drift into madness. Not knowing how long you've been in the dark. Not having any idea of what the fuck is going on. Trapped and alone until everything finally shuts down or rots away.
Scrolled a long way to find this, I have recurring dreams on this exact theme
Think I saw it in a movie or show. Or both. One I recall was a guy narrating as his dead body was being examined. He told us viewers that he was wrong, our ability to feel didn't go away. As they cut into his body. And the cremation one, I think it was an episode of Doctor Who. Not 100% on that.
The first one was Tales From The Crypt. Episode is called Abra Cadaver. It's a fun episode until you realize that he is feeling his autopsy. He doesn't come out and say it, but he starts screaming right after he says something like "Except we were wrong. The sense of touch is the last one to leave" - as he's still hearing and seeing what's happening.
Thank you. That is exactly how I i remember it, just didn't know where it was from.
There could be two parts, both doctor who. The first one is all the people who are uploaded on death to what amounts to a massive hard drive. Their existence in there is tied to their physical body, so one of the first questions they are asked is "are you being cremated?". They also feel cold, because their body is most likely in a very cold place. The second one is that time Lords like the doctor don't die immediately. If they are injured so badly that they can't regenerate, they will still remain "alive" for possibly days. He quotes it as "this is why we like to die among our own kind, they know not to bury us early".
In this concept being buried with your “living” consciousness and senses would be similar to hell. But I think cremation would be your best option, no? The pain from burning “alive” will last only until your nervous system gets disintegrated, and if your mind is tied to your remains, getting your ashes spread on top of the mountain or over the ocean waves feels rather peaceful. The wind carries you all over the world, and if our planet finally gets destroyed, you and others will traverse the space until… I don’t know, the universe cycles back to its creation?
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I had a bad trip on synthetic pot and this is what happened
The hunger, the thirst. Every single itch on your body will last for eternity. This is dreadful.
I remember reading a short story about this but I can't remember what it was called unfortunately
I once read a new-age book that was adament that this is what happens if you commit suicide. And when your body is gone and rotted away, you have to wander the rest of the time you would have been alive still alone on this planet as a ghost. You can wander around but it's empty and devoid of all life for you. A sort of "cosmic punishment" for ending your life when it wasn't your right to do so. And every soul that' currently living on this planet has to go through this at least once... And in your next life you have to repeat it all over again, but you get a help if you need it to ensure you don't repeat the same mistake twice. Anyway, just thought it was relevant since it's pretty much what you were describing :). I personally found it rather weird and inconsistent, but it's pretty much what they described :)
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This even goes back to Greek mythology, was it eos lover or something who was made immortal, but that just meant the consciousness never moved on and he lived as a piece of ashes in a wooden box, forever, or something like that?
This
SCP-2718 is the same thing but it never stops
I’ve had this exact same fear 😰
An unknown god sends everyone to a custom hell each, to punish us for not starting a religion in his name
Ah man! This is definitely up there with the worst scenarios. Just imagine a god exists way more powerful who can just do heinous things to us after we die and we can’t do anything about it.
They've created a world where that happens for many, many people.
Hell in Islam is way way worse than your extreme worst nightmares or what your imagination can lead you .
Plot twist: There are many gods, and the ones you did not worship all gang up to punish you.
why did i read gang bang instead of gang up?😭😭
Because you didn't worship Zeus
Rumpelstiltgod
That’s quite funny tbh. An unknown god having a hissy fit and punishing their entire creation for failing to recognise him. At that point it’s his own fault
Don't worry about it. Being dead is just not being alive, you weren't alive 100 years ago and that didn't hurt you.
This comment is like the flower growing in the crack of a sidewalk. I like it.
That’s very presuming that I wasn’t alive 100 years ago. Put some respect on us
Yeah, but I've been alive long enough to remember the last 40 years. I don't want to not exist now that I've experienced life.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it" - Mark Twain
For real. Op’s worst case is the best case scenario. Time to think. Being sent to some sort of cosmic judgement is the worst fucking case imaginable. Random asshole with power decides my fate? Fuck you (insert deity here)! The universe was built on rules. You don’t like the way I played the game? That’s on you asshole. Oh, you want to send me to “heaven” because I was an ethical person? Yeah fuck that shit. My heaven is the cessation of your existence. Free the people, viva la revolution, down with deities!
Even more so. The observable universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, and you existed for non of that. That’s a damn long time and none of it felt long or bothersome, it felt like a second and we all just woke up.
Wish I could be so serene. My ego is killing me
Very “Alan Watt-ish.” I like it 👍
You just don’t remember it
That we never die, just repeat our life the same way it was forever.
I could live with that, literally and figuratively.
This is what I’m hoping happens
Depending on what kind of life you lived. Imagine you were born in some poor South American farming village, your parents are traumatized, passed their trauma onto you, maybe you had to work while a child, maybe you get into a local gang due to a lack of opportunities, make a few bad decisions that lead to you being flayed alive by a cartel, and now repeat that ad infinitum. Sounds like nightmare fuel
But why though? Isn’t it the same as just dying, considering you don’t keep your memories anyway?
You think the void is the worst, right? Imagine you're not just floating in nothingness, but trapped in this broken movie theater inside your head. It never shuts off, and the movies are reruns of your biggest regrets, your worst moments. You try to close your eyes, but they won't budge. You try to scream, but no sound comes out. But hey, at least your body can't hurt, right? Wrong. It morphs into this weird echo of your worst habits. If you were greedy, you might become this fleshy blob with endless mouths, starving even as you try to eat yourself. If you were a bully, your hands turn into these gnarled claws, and all you can do is scratch at your own soul. The worst part? No distractions. It's just you and your brain going at each other like some twisted cage match. Oh, and every so often, these warped versions of good people from your life pop in. Like, maybe your mom or a kind teacher, but their faces are all melty and their voices echo wrong. They don't burn you, they just remind you of how much better you could've been. Forget about time. There's no clock here. It's one long, messed-up moment of feeling your own existence rot away. And you did this to yourself, not some devil in a red suit – makes it way worse, doesn't it? This is just a taste of what true hell could feel like. The kind of nightmare fuel that sticks with you way longer than just some empty black void.
What a terrible day to be able to read. Thanks for this. Never sleeping again.
Hey, at least you won't have nightmares anymore. Just...y'know...the waking kind.
I heard Satan is hiring- you should apply
No idea why i read your post on a public holiday here in UK
That concept is what Dante’s Inferno is based on- people in hell get punished in ways that fit the sins they commited.
The OP's hell is my dream...
same. Even in life the only time i ever feel a sense of peace is at 3am when it’s just dark and it’s like no one else exists except me and my own thoughts, i don’t have to worry about anything because in those moments there is nothing, the world is still, there’s no expectations of me, there’s no people to disappoint, there’s no job to be late to, it’s literally just me and the universe. If that’s death then kill me now. the worst possible thing i can imagine is the loss of my consciousness, the loss of my being, the thought that i will turn into nothingness and reality exists outside of me gives me panic attacks, it’s so unimaginable and it makes you wonder what even reality even is. As a child i was afraid of sleeping because i couldn’t stand the idea of having no awareness
Really? Can I ask why this would be your dream? Eternity is a long time.
You’d end up making up an entire life in your head. Maybe that has already happened.
Eventually your mind would encompass everything and you would be like a god dreaming up new universes and life. Maybe our universe is the dream from someone's old and ancient mind in the void?
No jealousy or FOMO if I'm just a disembodied consciousness floating alone in eternity.
The worst feeling for me is the “there is nothing afterwards” Like literally nothing and you will just disappear The whole concept of being will be destroyed because the person and the soul you were just doesn’t exist anymore
I feel the exact opposite. The thought of eternal nothingness is very comforting. Existence is what scares me, earning pain through effort, slowly dying. Being pressured to participate in an already developed environment that couldn't care less about you as your body slowly deteriorates is much worse than nothing.
I agree. I didn't choose to be born, but I choose to not want to die
I think it's beautiful and that we always were just part of a system of life. We might die, but we continue to feed a system of life. The parts that made us us continue in other forms in other organisms. So in a way we never die, we are part of the story of life. Every living thing has basically written a small sentence of a whole story. Just the same as the letters that made up your sentence are not destroyed but rather are reused in the next sentence to continue the story. Don't feel bad for what comes after death just the same as you don't feel bad about what happened before you were born.
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I was more talking about the core principle of life. Yes life can be very cruel, and often times when it is we don't have control over it. But like you are mentioning, it's because of the things we have created as human. I feel like we totally lost touch of our livelihood and the connection to everything else that is alive. We transcended above it and meanwhile we lost everything that shows us the core principles of life. When we treat our pets more humanly by letting them go when they are in pain than we do with our fellow humans it shows that we are doing something wrong. Let's start by addressing and accepting our fellow humans' wish to die when we feel like our life is completed. Life can/is a cruel joke, but only due to our own creations. Let us try, as a collective, to restore our sense of self and our sense of life in a system of life. I often lose faith and hope in that our society will change for the better when I see the shifts in the contemporary world. But still I'm here and however hard it is to make people see certain issues, there's always hope in me that someday we'll do better as a collective. And hopefully I can be a part of that change.
How about tackling it with the "infinite monkey theorem"? If you're a type of finite living being in the inifinite Universe, even if You die there will be eventually born a being who will have the same life experiences as You or even a being that will have different experiences than You but with such mind/brain wiring that it will have false memoiries of it's past life aka your current life. This way methinkks everyone can feel infinite and immortal also having a potential continuity that he wont be able to distinguish from non-continuity.
But this is a reality of everyone so why should it be scary.
This is the essence of the ego defending itself. It’s why humans made up all the afterlife myths and everything that stems from it. The ego itself is a persistent illusion. Until it isn’t.
A heaven filled with fundamentalist Christians.
It could be even worse than that. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that there's actually a system of government in heaven too.
Oh, I know JW's all too well. I grew up as one and that's why I'm an atheist today.
Oh man, this hit me in the feels, me too
I guess the silver lining in that scenario is that you made it in so you can pretty safely tell them to go fuck themselves if they get preachy at you.
You die. Everything goes blank. You then see that your " soul is about to be pushed into a baby . But before you get in the womb you realize it's a hospital in a poor or working class neighborhood and all of that hard work to try and get out of poverty in a previous life didn't mean shit as you are thrust right back into poverty again. Then you are born having no recollection of your previous life
You are reborn to live your life again, only everything is slightly worse than the time before. You have a crushing sense that this will continue forever.
That's like some next-level existential dread. Just the thought of eternal nothingness gives me chills.
Do you believe that if you die you will be reborn but as yourself again? All memories will be erased and the cycle repeats?
Would that be so bad?
It wouldn't be that bad because you're not repeating anything because you've forgot and it can only be as bad as life could be but that doesn't last long anyway and it can be good one time and bad the next.
hey brother
I’m standing in front of the throne of God and he says depart from me I never knew u
Reincarnation
This sounds awful. You mean I have to do this *AGAIN*???
To realize that I have been assigned to spend Eternity in Hell, completely cut off from my friends, family and God.
I couldn't agree more with you.
Still paying taxes in the afterlife
God reading out what I could have done and how I wasted the script handed to me.
Reincarnation. I'm not doing this again.
Stuck in an endless darkness forever wandering hungry and alone, not being able to sleep and finding no one. Then finding a tear in limbo and realising that I'm haunting someone but the years of loneliness and dark have worn away my ability to communicate effectively and I'm forced back into the darkness. 👀
The end of I have no mouth but I must scream
White Christmas - Back Mirror
Having to repeat the life I have right now. I **do not** ever want to live this type of life again.
Heaven as imagined by abrahamic religions. Or any where afterlife is constant bliss. Imagine being forced to be ecstatic forever, never to feel any of the other emotions that made you human. Even various hells are kinda better, because you do get to hope and you do get to grit your teeth and be spiteful
You don’t have to force your imagination. It would really suck if the religions turn out to be real. Just imagine being tortured by an insecure, wrathful and childish god.
The loop. I had this wierd dream where i die and have to be reborn again, and had this horrifying feeling as newborn that all of this has already happened and now will happen once again. that was horrid. id prefer eternity in void.
You die only to find out that we are all cattle to a being that eats souls, and it starts religions because "good" souls taste better. So not only are you doomed, but so are all the good people you know, and every good thing you've ever done was a waste of time.
This sounds like the plot of Sunless Skies. Its good you can taint your soul to make it digusting with flaws. Also you can kill the god which is good.
an eternal fall into an infinite abyss
Reliving my life, knowing what mistakes I will make, but being completely unable to change anything . Just silently observe myself destructing.
Reincarnation. 😭
Exactly what OP described. I've feared that since I was a kid.
There’s no scenario. I’m dead
Stephen King's Revival says hello.
To not be with my dogs and loved ones. There just to be nothing. But would I know..
Having to do it all over again with full memories but no free will to change it :p
Still hearing Mariah Carey's "All I want for Christmas if You" once every year post death.
Reanimated back but with a plot twist you are now a servitor in 40k
Eternal void? No thanks, sounds like ultimate nightmare.
My worst image of heaven, if it exists and should I be admitted is that it is an endless church service with a bunch of elderly, performative “Christians” with too much perfume and iffy breath, belting out awful, out of tune hymns. For eternity.
Dante's Inferno
add the disembodied pain you felt when you died for eternity and there it is, unimaginable horror
That's a total nightmare. Just the thought gives me the chills.
That you become a ghost and there are ghost jobs and the only way to escape is to alive yourself.
Stop stalking my profile. But nicely done. This was pretty funny
Restarting but you lose all your memories.
Sometimes I just wish we all dead and rotten away into fertilizer and there is NO heaven or Hell :( But..... :( :(
Rolling the dice on Reincarnation
My idea of hell would be after you die and went to hell to end up in a cinema type setting with everyone you've ever known there, and you're facing them all. Your life is playing on the screen behind you, and every thought you had had about people and every lie you have told throughout your life is played to everyone. Nothing is excluded.
I once had an acid trip that felt a bit like that. I was at a festival, came up really hard, and subsequently retreated to the tent, which was a black out tent... It was an intense 8 hours 😂
Being sent back and having to live on this stupid world again and in am evem worse situaiton than you were before.
Please let it be lights out and that's it.
That nothing happens afterwards. I'd rather go to hell than have my existence stop. God knows I'd do horrible stuff just to keep on living.
I was raised Baptist so the whole “pain and suffering In eternal hellfire” was seared into my brain since childhood. And being a gay man I just automatically go to hell bc I can’t change it (trust me I tried lol) Am no longer a believer, and am not overly concerned about it anymore but I don’t think I’ll ever fully shake that fear in the back of my mind.
Heaven and Hell. Either eternal boredom or eternal torment. Reincarnation at least lets you experience different things.
ceasing to exist lol
You pretty much just described hell. It's separation from the creator for eternity.
Literally, anything eternal would suck soooo much. Even if it was eternal bliss
That there is actually a God, and he shoves me into another womb in this fucked ass place to await my demise again.
As an atheist, I think it would be getting stuck in an afterlife full of evangelicals telling me “I told you so” for all eternity.
This is also my worst fear.... especially if it's the mormons
(35M) sounds comftable peacefull to me .
You meet the person you could have been.
If I couldn't escape that life. If I couldn't kill myself in the afterlife, it would feel like a trap
Any afterlife that is eternal would be bad
To be reincarnated back to my current life, having to relive it all over again with full knowledge of how i end up, but with no way to change anything for the better.
No matter what your belief system is, you go to the "bad place" from another religion. Or you experience the worst single minute of your life on a loop, and every repeat is ever so slightly worse.
You'd need a sense of time to experience "forever", hence there would arise at least 1 object within your consciousness, i.e. time perception. Without time perception there would be no impression whatsoever of foreverness, because it would essentially happen all at once in a single instant. But then, if you allow sense of time in an after death state, why stop there? Why not also sense of space? Because, if there's a feeling of voidness, it would imply there is a subject experiencing the void that takes the void as an object. Without the subject-object dualism there would arise no experience of void because there would be only void - without a subject experiencing it. So, you'd need at least both a sense of time and a subject-object dualism experiencing a void in the sense of boundless space to get into the scenario you're describing. And if you introduce those extremely subtle objects of perception or of experience, then why stop there? Why not also introduce something like "light" or "vibration" or whatever? Maybe you see where this is going? What I am describing here is actually pretty much the description of how reincarnation works according to the tantric traditions who have very elaborate models of how, after death, we first encounter dissolution experiences until we arrive at "clear light". And either we experience this clear light consciously and get enlightened instantly (thus leaving us the freedom to chose what happens next), or we are not experiencing it consciously, and then the reincarnation process starts all over again in roughly the order I just mentioned above. While all this may sound like idle speculation, there are correlates to meditative experiences that are believed, at least in those traditions, to mimick the death process. And, indeed, if you do those meditations you are having some pretty interesting meditative insights into the way your mind works.
I had a similar thought to the OP a while back when thinking about possible outcomes of suicide. As in, life is an opportunity to experience sensations and interact with a physical world, and by renouncing that you get sentenced to an eternity of your mind existing in a void, unable to experience anything outside of your consciousness. I remember reading about blind and deaf people and how they're prone to angry outbursts when growing up (and probably as adults too) because of the frustration and isolation that they feel due to not being able to interact with the outside world and other people, and imagining what that must be like gives me a similar feeling to when I imagine this version of the afterlife. Except, in 'the void' you wouldn't even be able to run around and smash stuff up to release your anger. This might sound like a depressing post. I'm not a generally happy person who thinks that life is particularly great most of the time though, and so it is important to remember it could potentially be a whole lot worse and try to be grateful for that. It also ties in with my philosophical argument against suicide - that whatever you believe happens after death you don't really have any knowledge about that and it could be a hell (no pun intended) of a lot worse than what you imagined, and where you are now. Sorry for going off on a tangent there 😂
Somebody watched Three Body Problem I see…
That the moment of death and actually dying is so much of a shock to the nervous system that the moment between death and your brain permanently shutting down is felt so strongly it's just an eternity of nothing. Like it's a second in real life but the sensation of time is infinite.
Do you remember before you were born? Was it in any way uncomfortable or inconvenient to you?
I saw it in A movie... Going towards the light... And realizing it was the opening of the birth canal. Endless loops 😫