**The Mental Health Thread**

[VincentHanna]

It will to you.

 

[Lysander]

I think he means after you die.

 

[SixTwoSix]

My whole depressive/anxiety episode in 2017 was kicked off on the back of my sons birth and by extension, the very real realisation that one day, i'm going to die. We all know it, it's horrible and everything we do is pointless, as cliché as it sounds, it's about living in the moment. It's a taboo subject that most won't broach or feel comfortable talking about, some have religion as a safety blanket, a false idea that somehow we go on.

My therapist hit the nail on the head quite well in one session, she asked me how painful and awful was it before i was born, I said "i don't know, i wasn't here", death is the same, we won't know we're dead, one day, we'll just stop being here. Best we can do is make the best of the time we are here, again trite and cliché but it's not wrong.

Losing my mum at the start of the year put me back into the same state to a degree, however the speed in which she went from being here to being gone made me really appreciate what i've got. I've got life and i'm not going to take it for granted, we get nothing back without putting something in, yes the odds are stacked, you've just got to play to your strengths.

 

[Lysander]

My therapist hit the nail on the head quite well in one session, she asked me how painful and awful was it before i was born, I said "i don't know, i wasn't here", death is the same, we won't know we're dead, one day, we'll just stop being here. Best we can do is make the best of the time we are here, again trite and cliché but it's not wrong.

Absolutely. Alan Watts did a great talk on this, and about how when you die, nothing matters because you have no consciousness with which to observe the lack of yourself.

If you went to sleep, into unconsciousness for always and always, it wouldn’t be at all like going into the dark; it wouldn’t be at all like being buried alive. As a matter of fact, it would be as if you had never existed at all! Not only you, but everything else as well. You would be in that state, as if you had never been. And, of course, there would be no problems, there would be no one to regret the loss of anything. You couldn’t even call it a tragedy because there would be no one to experience it as a tragedy. It would be a simple – nothing at all. Forever and for never. Because, not only would you have no future, you would also have no past and no present.

At this point you are probably thinking, “Let’s talk about something else.” But I’m not content with that, because this makes me think of two other things. First of all, the state of nothingness makes me think that the only thing in my experience close to nothingness is the way my head looks to my eye, and then behind my eye there isn’t a black spot, there isn’t even a hazy spot. There’s nothing at all! I’m not aware of my head, as it were, as a black hole in the middle of all this luminous experience. It doesn’t even have very clear edges. The field of vision is an oval, and behind this oval of vision there is nothing at all. Of course, if I use my fingers and touch I can feel something behind my eyes; if I use the sense of sight alone there is just nothing there at all. Nevertheless, out of that blankness, I see.

The second thing it makes me think of is when I’m dead I am as if I never had been born.

https://deathcafe.com/blog/318/

 

[SixTwoSix]

Absolutely. Alan Watts did a great talk on this, and about how when you die, nothing matters because you have no consciousness with which to observe the lack of yourself.

https://deathcafe.com/blog/318/

Thanks for the link, bookmarked and will read more thoroughly when not at work. I still get very dark nihilistic thoughts about life/death but i'm able to process them now rather than finding a distraction as I did previously.

 

[Lysander]

Thanks for the link, bookmarked and will read more thoroughly when not at work. I still get very dark nihilistic thoughts about life/death but i'm able to process them now rather than finding a distraction as I did previously.

What kind of thoughts?

People are scared of death, but in many cases they're scared of the process of dying rather than death, because after death you cannot observe that you no longer exist. You are pre-lamenting your future lack of existence.

EDIT: @SixTwoSix you may like to look at that site in a little more detail.

 

[FoxEye]

It will to you.

In 1000 years time (probably much sooner) nobody will remember any of us. Except maybe doing some ancestry search, lol.

It literally doesn't matter how successful you are. It's all hubris. It's all vanity. Much of it is people striving for things they were told they needed. Or people buying BMWs just so other people won't look down on them. Because the thought of being looked down on terrifies the living daylights out of them. Which itself is vanity.

 

[Lysander]

In 1000 years time (probably much sooner) nobody will remember any of us. Except maybe doing some ancestry search, lol.

It literally doesn't matter how successful you are. It's all hubris. It's all vanity. Much of it is people striving for things they were told they needed. Or people buying BMWs just so other people won't look down on them. Because the thought of being looked down on terrifies the living daylights out of them. Which itself is vanity.

What is the purpose of existence, in your opinion? Or what would be the definition of a worthwhile life?

 

[SixTwoSix]

What kind of thoughts?

People are scared of death, but in many cases they're scared of the process of dying rather than death, because after death you cannot observe that you no longer exist. You are pre-lamenting your future lack of existence.

General sadness that this is all we get, in the great expanse of time, the things that will come to be that we won't experience, it's hard to put into words. I don't mind the grind, the lack of impact we each individually have in the grand scheme of things. It's more of a personal selfishness and sadness that there is so much in the universe that we've not even scratched the surface i'll never see.

There is a lot more, more nuanced feelings about it, I don't know how to convey it in words, never been overly articulate. I'm not scared of death itself, i'm just terrified of the absolute nothing after death and unable to do or experience anything else.

I remember being about 4 or 5 trying to imagine nothing, used to just see darkness, then it occurred to me, darkness is a thing, so it wouldn't be dark, so imagined light but light is a thing...and so on. That spiraled into thoughts of death at an early age, I read a lot of kids Q&A science books as a child and never had any religious belief. Then I kind of forgot all about it almost all my life unitl 30 odd years later when my son was born.

 

[Ayahuasca]

What is the purpose of existence, in your opinion?

I don't think anyone can really answer that, we'll likely never find out what was before the big bang or if there's some eternal creator.

Currently, we exist because the right scenarios occurred to form life and the planet was stable enough for millions of years of evolution. Regarding purpose, that mostly depends on the time and conditions you were born in. A caveman's purpose was just to survive and procreate, people's purpose nowadays in developed countries is largely decided by the society they grow up in and what they are told are the right things to do. In certain places in Africa or nations like North Korea, the purpose of 99% of the population is to find/grow enough food to survive.

It's all well and good thinking death is okay as it's just the same as before we were born but we hadn't experienced consciousness beforehand. So death is a little different as it's likely eternal nothingness with no consciousness ever again.

 

[Lysander]

I don't think anyone can really answer that, we'll likely never find out what was before the big bang or if there's some eternal creator.

Currently, we exist because the right scenarios occurred to form life and the planet was stable enough for millions of years of evolution. Regarding purpose, that mostly depends on the time and conditions you were born in. A caveman's purpose was just to survive and procreate, people's purpose nowadays in developed countries is largely decided by the society they grow up in and what they are told are the right things to do. In certain places in Africa or nations like North Korea, the purpose of 99% of the population is to find/grow enough food to survive.

It's all well and good thinking death is okay as it's just the same as before we were born but we hadn't experienced consciousness beforehand. So death is a little different as it's likely eternal nothingness with no consciousness ever again.

Oh, I just meant in the opinion of @FoxEye - without contradicting him, because whatever his opinion on the matter is it will be correct to him. Obviously the topic has been debated by philosophers for millennia, so it is subjective for each person.

General sadness that this is all we get, in the great expanse of time, the things that will come to be that we won't experience, it's hard to put into words. I don't mind the grind, the lack of impact we each individually have in the grand scheme of things. It's more of a personal selfishness and sadness that there is so much in the universe that we've not even scratched the surface i'll never see.

There is a lot more, more nuanced feelings about it, I don't know how to convey it in words, never been overly articulate. I'm not scared of death itself, i'm just terrified of the absolute nothing after death and unable to do or experience anything else.

I remember being about 4 or 5 trying to imagine nothing, used to just see darkness, then it occurred to me, darkness is a thing, so it wouldn't be dark, so imagined light but light is a thing...and so on. That spiraled into thoughts of death at an early age, I read a lot of kids Q&A science books as a child and never had any religious belief. Then I kind of forgot all about it almost all my life unitl 30 odd years later when my son was born.

Will see if I can find the audio of that Watts talk, I think it would be very useful to you. Work just got busy so will come back later on this topic.

 

[FoxEye]

What is the purpose of existence, in your opinion? Or what would be the definition of a worthwhile life?

Purpose of existence? Can't see one, in all honesty.

Worthwhile life? I don't think I'd use such a term. In general we are a force of destruction and an environmental catastrophe. Even so-called "good people" are massively contributing to the impending global disaster to come. Which is inevitable, imho. We've got a few more years of burying our heads in the sand, then all hell is going to break lose and society as we know it will probably end.

 

[Lysander]

Purpose of existence? Can't see one, in all honesty.

Worthwhile life? I don't think I'd use such a term. In general we are a force of destruction and an environmental catastrophe. Even so-called "good people" are massively contributing to the impending global disaster to come. Which is inevitable, imho. We've got a few more years of burying our heads in the sand, then all hell is going to break lose and society as we know it will probably end.

This is quite nihilistic. Have you read any Nietzsche?

 

[FoxEye]

This is quite nihilistic. Have you read any Nietzsche?

Nope.

 

[SixTwoSix]

Will see if I can find the audio of that Watts talk, I think it would be very useful to you. Work just got busy so will come back later on this topic.

Would appreciate that, i've dipped in and out of various schools of thought since my breakdown, nothing tends to stick very long though.

 

[BallistixOnZ490]

What is the purpose of existence, in your opinion? Or what would be the definition of a worthwhile life?

Eat, sleep, excrete?

Does any other species other than Humans care about much more than that?

Nothing in this world and none of its people are worth any of my time or effort.

 

[VincentHanna]

Why are you typing messages to us then?

 

[dlockers]

Eat, sleep, excrete?

Does any other species other than Humans care about much more than that?

Nothing in this world and none of its people are worth any of my time or effort.

Beavers build dams?

 

[FoxEye]

Why are you typing messages to us then?

For his own amusement.

 

[BallistixOnZ490]

Why are you typing messages to us then?

For his own amusement.

^