For me, it’s disappearing. That someday something will happen to me and no one will ever know what it was and where I am. That I will become one of those mysteries you see online and on TV shows. Whenever I think about it I feel nothing but dread.
Dementia.
My mother has dementia.
Every time I forget something I know I should know it terrifies me.
Get tested early. Your mother’s dementia may not have been found till late stage. We have treatments for the earlier stages
Thank you for that.
That’s a fear I have as well. I heard walnuts are good for brain health, but they taste like dry paste. I still eat them with some fermented foods and it helps. I also heard pizzle games are supposed to help keep your brain engaged.
Extinction. Our technology gives us the power of gods, but we still have the brains of hunter-gatherers optimised for living in tribes of less than 150 people. My own death doesn’t worry me, I’m not bothered by knowing I’ll be forgotten, but the possibility that there might not be anyone to carry on is what I think about at 3 AM when I can’t sleep.
The speed at which we are (not) acting on climate change. Our tolerance for neoliberals/capitalists absolutely wiping their arse with the whole planet.
Being eternally trapped in a mental prison. Imagine having a panic attack that never ends. I’m pretty sure that type of prolonged stress would cause a psychotic break where your psyche fractures and you become a despondent shell. You would become deathly afraid of everything, even the people you love, because of an unceasing paranoia. That basically sounds like hell to me.
I’m not really afraid of the idea of nothingness after death, because at least then I am released from the torment of living.
Micro-plastics
A hypothetical fear of course, one with my wife who I’ve been with for 15 years now.
One day, maybe hopefully 30-50 years in the future, my wife and I look back and think about how good our lives were. We raised happy and successful kids. We bought a house. We had dozens of pets. We celebrate the end of our life together. But she doesn’t make it.
And I have to spend the final years alone with memories of her. Two controllers. Two spoons. Two of everything for decades. Now just me.
And Never being able to explain to the rest of the world how amazing she was.
I’m so terrified that my wife will go before me…
But I also don’t want to let her down by going before her and making her live her own last days/weeks/years alone…
Love is so difficult
That what ultimately ends my time here, will be my own fault.
And spiders… Fuck spiders.
Letting down people I love somehow
Ask to be their pallbearer.
Fortunately I don’t know any scrum masters personally so they would not even get the experience of being let down last time by a dev. Exceot in a purely metaphorical sense I guess.
I don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s like I go through life just waiting for the other shoe to drop. When something shocking or remotely dangerous happens, my brain automatically assumes the worst is going to happen and I like go into survival mode. I get filled with such dread.
People, dying without ever been loved by a woman. Both of those are related.
The fact I won’t be able to retire. I don’t have the money because of financial abuse from my SO. I honestly don’t know what I’ll ever do. People in my city are living in tents in the park and I assume I will have to do that. I’ll have a good pension but it won’t be enough for the cost of living as it is now.
(Please don’t suggest I leave, as kind as you all are, I cannot afford it).
Lot of contenders really! And the only solution is to try not to think about it, these are things I can’t do a god damn thing about.
Heart disease
Brain aneurysms
The fact that just experiencing negative emotions degrades your health (that is so unfair); depressed because everything’s gone to shit? Mad because people keep fucking you over? You don’t live as long because of it.
Basically let’s just say all the ways the human body can fail you and isn’t equipped properly for the lives we lead. The food I’m “supposed” to eat disgusts me, and I could be on the verge of death at any given moment and not know it.
The fact that we’re less than a single ember in the history of the universe and all that astronomers believe is charted to happen after us is like, incomprehensibly massive cosmic events, lot of black holes.
The fact that some day I’m going to die and that’s just going to be it is chilling, the most I can hope to is try to be one of the “fortunate” ones that makes it to around 100 years of age; and even then I’ll probably be tired of it and physically/mentally degraded pretty severely by then. What’s it like after you die? It’s exactly the same as it was before you were born.
Oh yeah, black holes. You go near one of them and time slows down as you’re torn apart at the atomic level. Imagine falling into a meat grinder but it takes a thousand years, or a million. You’d be insane and dead.
The idea of suffering in silence while people either can’t see that you’re distressed or don’t care. This could apply to just being depressed and wishing you had friends, or like, actually having something bad happen to you where you’d be fine if you had another person around, but you don’t. Something like choking or falling off a ladder while living on your own.
Climate change and the fading light of earth’s biodiversity .
The rise of political folks who desire modern fascism.
Late stage capitalism and its tendency to basically make the entire world worse.
False vacuum would be a nice addition to your list
Sort of falls in with the “we are a single spark” thing, like, yup, there are 50 different ways the universe could just kind of end all of human history forever.
I’ve had health issues since I was a kid (all stemming from developing Crohn’s Disease symptoms before I was even a teenager), and a lot of them still haven’t been resolved (in part of reasons such as developing new conditions due to medications I took to treat another condition). One of the worst things I fear is that if I randomly end up leaving this world in a way that incurs an autopsy, the results will end with something like “Damn, this man had issues. If his doctors had known about X then he could’ve lived a much better life, the treatment is simple”.
I go through so much, and I’ve done countless research to try to track down possibilities that my doctors hadn’t considered (some of my research has in fact lead to me finding out new things that my doctors didn’t account for, even as of this year) - and I always have this terrifying doubt of “What if I had just chosen a different doctor, the next one on the list might’ve had this idea years ago and prevented some of this”. That line of thinking of “Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve” doesn’t help of course (as my friend likes to tell me “What if the sky were green?”) but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it more often than I’d like to.
That is awful, Celiac’s (and really any autoimmune disease) is no joke. I see a lot of parallels reflected in their post and I truly hate that for them so much - constantly struggling to find foods that you can tolerate, having numerous surgeries, seeing a million different doctors, being in and out of the hospital all the time to the point that its a second home, lab test after lab test that only result in more questions than answers, symptoms and other issues spiraling up due to complications of going through the condition - you name it.
I feel for them, every day feels like you’ve got the curse of Sisyphus. I feel like there has to be a solution for people like them and I, and its unfortunate that there is just so much about the body and its various systems that we don’t understand. I constantly struggle with the idea that we’ve come so far with the sciences, and yet it feels like in matters of human physiology like the GI, immune, and nervous system we’ve barely scratched the surface.
Honestly not to take away from your fear but it’s the light at the end of a tunnel. I can’t just walk into the ocean and leave my family and pets to fend for themselves, but when it eventually happens it’ll be a relief.
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t like the amount of power big corporations have. Nintendo is currently abusing their power to stifle their competition and potentially harm the future of gaming. Google recently proved that they have pretty much full control over the internet. Microsoft is ruining the entire PC market. I could name more but these are the first few that came to mind.
