Ask HN: How do you deal with your mortality?
This is very long so it continues in comments below:<p>I am looking for some advice from someone smarter than me because about a month ago I got hit with intense crippling fear of death. It usually hits me in the evenings and started with just my thoughts wandering thinking about the lives of different people in different parts of the world. Eventually, these thoughts came back to me and my mortality. I started picturing the transition into nothingness. The fear of knowing that I am drawing my last breath. The different ways I could die. This started resulting in panic attack like symptoms that persist late into the night until I tire myself out and fall into short uneasy sleep. It got better for a week but is now getting worse again. I had this same crippling fear of death when I was 4-7 years old. After a while my mind focused on other things and at some point I discovered the concept of not worrying about death while alive because you aren’t dead and after you are dead you don’t know it. That was the thing that kept me not worrying for the past 12 years or so but whatever circumstances has led me to where I am today has shattered that as a comforting thought and actually made it into an actively upsetting one. What I am specifically afraid of is not being. I don’t want to not exist, to not experience life. I want to see the galaxy and the universe. I want to know what it’s like to be a professional athlete. An ship captain. A state leader. A chef. I don’t want this to end.