Dealing with inevitability

I don’t believe in God/a god, but I hate the thought that when we die, life just leaves our body and then “that’s it”.

Having been born into religion, of course I believed in a god as a kid. I thought, oh, Heaven, eternal bliss, blablabla, and so on. But as I got older and realized that that could not possibly be true, came this thought that the same ‘nothingness’ will follow death as what “was” before I was born.

This realization started giving me… attacks. I don’t know if this is a panic attack, or an anxiety attack.

Just last night, too, I was sitting by myself, playing video games (Forza on Xbox), and just straight out of the blue, like a freight train, this thought mowed me down. “You’re gonna die one day, the same way a fly dies when you swat it. You’re not even gonna realize what happened. You “are” and then all of a sudden you “aren’t”, that’s gonna be the case.”

And every time this happens, my stomach curls up as if someone punched me in the solar plexus, and I let out a quiet “Noo!”, I get dizzy/lightheaded for a moment and feel this surge of hotness, I guess. Like somebody’s just poured some warm, hot-ish liquid on my head and it just covers me like a hot shower.

And then I always go, “No, that CAN’T be!” But then I get this feeling of defeat and my brain goes “Dude, there’s nothing you can do to prevent that from happening.”

I really do wanna believe that there actually IS something after we die, like we don’t just vanish into the nothingness, like I really hope that there is something that I cannot quite comprehend just yet. But as much as I want that to be true, I know that’s just wishful thinking.

I’m not gonna get into details, but no matter how you twist things, and how much of a room (chance) you allow for the unknowable in your mind, everything other than “we die like ants and then we’re gone forever” would have to rely on some supernatural bullshit to even be possible… and I’m not a big believer in anything, but I do believe in Occam’s Razor. (Just on the off chance someone reads this and doesn’t know what Occam’s Razor is: if there are more than one possible explanations for the same thing, it’s usually the simpler one that is true.

Anyway, I’m just gonna circle back to these attacks.

It happens every so often. There are periods when it doesn’t happen for months, but then it does, and then it happens every day for a while.

These attacks, however, are on a new level now. Lately, whenever it happens, I also have thoughts about people I love dying. Like how I’m gonna be able to deal with it. My mom, my dad, my aunts and uncles, my siblings, their spouses, my cousins, etc. Damn, I don’t wanna die before everybody else, but I also don’t wanna deal with losing those people.

I feel like my brain’s moving towards a more and more entropic state as I get older. I feel like everything just gets more and more fucked up and I don’t see a way how I could improve upon any of those things.

I feel like life’s just getting worse and worse, draining, tiring, exhausting…

But I also don’t want existence to end.

But it is going to.

Inevitably.

Fuck.