You just replace that anxiety with a different fear.

I don’t fear oblivion, I fear it will keep me waiting. Not existing is a silent matter, living past your due as a broken, diseased husk or a person is a torture to you and those you cherish.

Death is a promise of rest, there’s no need to fear it. I’m a bit sad that I won’t get to witness most of the things I want to witness, but so be it.

Absurdism - How to party at the end of meaning:

https://youtu.be/Jv79l1b-eoI

Remember what it was like before you were born? It's like that

How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?

I struggle with what happens before that. That's the only relief I have, knowing that this shit parade will one day end and not matter at all.

How do you deal with a existential crisis?

I bring in the heavy guns... that's right, the Ghost Busters.

""My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice." - Newt Scamander

Existential Crises Have an End.

How would you deal with an indeterminate life?

What if you just continued to exist without end, watching everything you love disappear? Family, friends, trends, places, things. Everything is ephemeral, including you. But if you weren't, what purpose would your life serve? If you had no end? What meaning is there in existing indefinitely? Would you seize the day? Make every day count? Would you just exist without putting any effort in? Would you turn in circles asking yourself why you, what for, to what end if you have none? What would you look like, if you had an infinite amount of time to puzzle over the question you're asking yourself now?

For me, the situation didn't change. So what if I've got an infinite lifespan? The "Big Questions" are practically the same. When I look at how mind-boggling the universe is compared to me, how huge; how intricate; how minuscule the pieces are; and how (in)significant I am, it's easy to get lost in between. Then I'll take a deep breath, see the beauty of everyday mundanity, and remind myself: I don't need to go looking for the big picture. For me, I should be the big picture.

There is an ominous, unknown, and imagined cloud, which exists only in your mind. You may go about fearing it, and make the time before the actual storm more miserable. Alternatively, and possibly preferably, you can laugh, cry, and spend your time doing what's best for you and those around you. Not a purpose, just a mindset. And that's my big picture. My tapestry. The story I tell is guaranteed to end, be forgotten. But my decisions, I am bound to live with... for a lifetime. Until the end of my tapestry. Focus less on what is outside your tapestry, unless you like it. You can decide some of the things that enter your tapestry, if you are conscious and purposeful about obtaining it.

Perhaps a more practical answer is: When you are doing something, do it. Reserve your focus for what you want to focus on.

You have a finite amount of time in front of you, right now. Question for question, what are you going to do with that time?

All this time I thought that an existential crisis was having a crisis about the fact that you exist, not about the fact that you will not exist in the future.

I actually had comfortable morning. I thank you for yet another fun experience of existential crisis.

So much happened before you opened your eyes for the first time, so much will happen after you close them for the last time.

quantum mechanics literally revealed that the world is not loaded when you are not looking

I don't know where you got that info, but that is not at all what quantum mechanics says. If you want a deep dive into what quantum mechanics actually says, here's a good video series from PBS by a real physics professor that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wxG5KMAFik&list=PLsPUh22kYmNCGaVGuGfKfJl-6RdHiCjo1&index=1

As weird as it sounds, imagine actually existing forever in a way that keeps accumulating memories, experiences, and from the accumulation, redundancy, boredom, and ennui. Imagine the slow inevitable change of anything like heaven becoming more and more of its own hell on the relentless stretch into infinity.

An end point gives substance to the time before that end point, and even the end isn't truly an end because your matter and energy remain a part of the cosmos.

What works for me may not work for you. I've found comfort and freedom from my existential dread on Epicurus' Four Remedies (tetrapharmakos), especially the second one. These are:

Don't fear gods;
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get;
What is terrible is easy to endure.

In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus writes:

Get used to believing that death is nothing to us. For all good and bad consists in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. Hence, a correct knowledge of the fact that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life a matter for contentment, not by adding a limitless time [to life] but by removing the longing for immortality. For there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life. Thus, he is a fool who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when present but because it is painful when it is still to come. For that which while present causes no distress causes unnecessary pain when merely anticipated. So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.

The gist of this passage is that worrying about death is misguided. Death is not a state of being. As such, our sense of self only exists while we're alive. In this Principle Doctrines, Epicurus says:

Death is nothing to us. For what has been dissolved has no sense-experience, and what has no sense-experience is nothing to us.

To be you have to experience. And death marks when we no longer have any sense-experience. This understanding of death is like a dreamless night from which we never awake, says Socrates in Plato's Apology. Seen in this light, Epicurus is right that it is a bit foolish to suffer in life from fearing a state of being where there won't be anybody to suffer whatsoever. The existential dread is precisely this misguided fear.

Once you recognize the truth of this statement, just like magic, poof, that existential dread disappears. Of course, if you have a religious view that postulates life after death, with all the subsequent very human drama entailed by that belief, you're now dealing with a different kind of fear. And that fear is precisely what Epicurus addresses in his first remedy, Don't fear gods. His reasoning is also clear cut here.

By definition a God is perfect. It's immortal and has no needs. Because of this, any god has no worries. As such, gods, by definition, don't care about us. Caring about us implies they have some sort of need, thus rendering them less godlike.

This ties with the second remedy. The cherry on top is to simply remember this: just as we never worry with the time before we were born, it's also silly to worry about the time after we are gone.

1. gratitude is very important

Not just existentially for a chance at being, but just muster as much of it as you can for the people around you, for every kindness shared with you, and for the beauty you get to experience. Even for bad shit that teaches you a lesson you can say thank you. It's literally free.

2. helping others

If your own shit is fucked, you might get a little humility, space, and grace by thinking about others. Check in on your friends, find an opportunity to volunteer, donate if it's in the cards for you.

3. hydrate and get enough sleep

When in doubt, these two might help

4. spend some time in nature

It should feel good to do this, so I wouldn't prescribe an amount of time, but at least 30 minutes of touching grass

After you have those four settled, I think it's worthwhile to start thinking about how you put your life together. In my mind, if you reach for things that resonate with you and you pursue it by doing things that you enjoy, you'll maximize your enjoyment, miss out on things that aren't for you, and meet the right people along the way. The consequences of your actions aren't permanent for you, sure, but if you live authentically and kindly, you'll affect others positively so that they'll have a better trip hurdling through space. Being as joyful as possible will have costed you nothing to help and, on the contrary, gotten you as close as possible to having your struggles be worthwhile.

I suppose I just spend less time thinking and more time feeling - smoking life like a loose cigarette from God on a balcony overlooking meaningless and the void. Alan Watts has a very romantic view of being the universe observing itself that never quite landed for me, but you should check out his lectures. They're very entertaining while being existential. Eckhart Tolle is a and is a little more self-helpy, but is still a fantastic source of knowledge about ceasing to create your own unhappiness.

I choose to not die.

Have you tried therapy?

I sit inside a dark closet and listen to whale song. I also sometimes say that the awareness of our inevitable death is the only reason for why we enjoy life. While I'm still here, I want to leave my mark in this world, and that's why I make art. I can't avoid death, so I taught myself how to embrace it.

Mushrooms and/or LSD.

The fear of death is kind of an evolutional necessity. Otherwise our species wouldn't have survived. Without the fear of death we probably wouldn't be here. In some ways it's a crucial companion of existence. idk why, but seeing it as a condition of existence helps me put it in perspective. Like being alive is great and I guess this is the price I have to pay. Most of the time it's worth it.

I've heard you get used to the thought with age. Not much thinking going on if you are stuck in it. I do revisit the same thing from time to time, and sometimes it seems true that as time passes the perspectives change a bit.

You are wired to think that you currently exist and that you should keep doing that at all costs, but those beliefs cannot be explained or comprehended in terms of logic, so for all purposes they are false, and acknowledging that has been useful to me.

Anyway, if your existential crises are very short and intense, accompanied by intense fear and feelings of impending doom, feelings that you can't breathe, then they probably have a physical component to them. It is very important that you understand the difference between regular intrusive thoughts of death and panic attacks that express themselves as feelings and thoughts of death that you might already have interiorized. The former can be managed, the latter cannot, and are usually self-reinforcing and need a combined therapy.

If you think you might be having the latter (I did for a couple of months), avoid alcohol for a while, and talk to a doctor; you may be advised to take a low dose short-acting anxiolytic drug whenever you feel like you're going to have one (I started with 0.5 mg lorazepam sublingual, then switched to 0.25 mg).

A bit of clarification about the quantum might help calm your nerves: to observe something means something such as light must interact with the particle you try to observe, and that very interaction changes the result of the observation. It collapses the wave function, and what you observe is just one of the possible outcomes. It's not as crazy as you may think, but it's very understandable that it may at first seem magical.

I researched the heck out of it.

Key moments along the way was reading Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and realizing that the idea of The Matrix wasn't just a neat idea but actually somewhat probable.

That led into a few years of intense reading of physics papers and forums to better understand physical underpinnings.

Eventually I realized that physics - while oddly overlapping with emerging trends in virtual world building - was inherently ambiguous enough I wasn't going to get a clear answer.

Around 2019 it struck me that physical underpinnings weren't the only place there might be an indication as to what was up, and reflected on the fact that the vast majority of virtual worlds I've seen have had 4th wall breaking acknowledgements of their creation buried in their lore.

So I revisited our collective theology through that lens and in only a few weeks found something that seemed to fit the bill, which I've researched quite a bit over the years since.

At this point, I'd wager continued existence after death at around 90%.

I have a very hard time seeing an original spontaneous reality that has quantum mechanics exhibiting everything from sync conflicts to lazy evaluation with a 2,000 year old text/tradition claiming we're a recreation of a long dead spontaneous humanity inside a non-physical replica of the earlier universe created by an intelligence eventually brought forth by that original humanity within light, and that the proof for this was in the study of motion and rest - specifically the ability to detect an indivisible point within things.

In the time since first stumbling across that text/tradition in 2019 a number of my concerns have managed to be addressed, from doubting sufficiently advanced AI was plausible to my objection that neural networks of electricity aren't literally light.

While it's possible that such a specific tradition buried into our lore in a document rediscovered after millennia the same time as when the world's first Turing complete computer was finished in Dec 1945 is a coincidence just as the fundamentals of our universe behaving similar to how we design virtual worlds for state tracking around free agent interactions could also be a coincidence - I find this to be diminishingly probable with each passing week.

That said, while it resolves the existential dread around death (the whole promise of the ancient text is that understanding what it says means knowing you won't taste death), it brings up a whole host of additional existential crises in its place (the text also promises that understanding it will lead to being disturbed).

TL;DR Maybe juggling existential crises is a necessary component of indulging in the self-awareness of one's own existence.

Camus!

The Book of Ecclesiastes might be helpful here. "Everything is meaningless!"

Its conclusion is to find stuff you enjoy doing and do it because you enjoy doing it.