How can one fear what is not known or even knowable? That’s an oddity of human thought that I have no answer for, in any respect.
What I live for?
There is nothing to live “for”, I live because of my children, they are both my mortality and my immortality. I fear their death, but my own is meaningless; my only purpose for continuance is that they do well, I’m just a sometimes useful tool to their ends.
Wasn’t it Buddha who believed that to spend one’s time concerned about what would happen to them after they died was pointless because there is no way for us to know what’s going to happen to us? I believe it was something like finding out then rather than worrying about it now.
I’m not an atheist, but I still don’t claim to know what’s going to happen to me when I die. I cope with this by concentrating on living, and I live for myself.
I zoom out (as I call it), i.e., I appreciate the relative insignificance of my life. When you realise how little your life matters in the grand scheme, you realise how insignificant your death is. It’s a surprising comfort, atcherly.
Experience.
If you’re anything like me, in that you remember so few dreams you’d swear you don’t have them, you pretty much head into a dark place where you cease to exist whenever you go to sleep. What is existence but your ability to perceive your environment? I’m not consciously doing anything as I sleep and since I can’t remember subconsciously doing anything, it becomes irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, I may as well not exist during those hours. I see death as much the same way. I suppose you could say I “die” every night?
lol, ditto!
I’ve never heard it put quite that way.
Further…if that’s what death is like, then those moments before death…man, those are going to be just euphorically golden if my state before dropping off into sleep is any comparison!
A person that is always concerned about questions and answers about death is already dead. All you can do is think about it. Thoughts are something dead, they have no life. A living creature never asks questions about death because it is too busy living.
For a while in this form.
Maybe you are thinking of Confucius?
Though I could see Buddha saying similar things in some of his more skeptical passages.
Yes, I believe you’re right, and I feel like a total moron for some reason 
Well, there we have it!
Great minds think alike 
I was thinking the same thing.
I discovered this little gem of reasoning within my first year of high school. You’re quite right. It is rather comforting, especially during those high stress years of equivalency exams and college preparation. Perhaps it attributed to my complete academic apathy, but it was comforting nonetheless.
A slight augmentation of that is this:
To know that “this” will pass and “that” will become “this”.
This method, rather than zooming out to small view (which I did around the same time as you Meaty), was something I did a bit after that and found more rewarding as it doesn’t lose focus on yourself or your value to yourself, but it removes the instanced experience you are in by projecting time that hasn’t occurred yet into your mind and allowing you to trick your mind into seeing the present as the past for consideration.
It’s essentially mental time travel, instead of space travel, with an interest in looking back on the moment currently under experience.
The point is to realize that this moment will become but a memory and memories are vague things that time seems to slip right over, rather that stick to, like the present can.
In relation to the topic, this allows you to accept time moving forward, as you can move forward to dying fairly easily in imaginative time and pre-cope with the ideas of such by moving beyond that point of death and looking back on it…kind of.
You can move up to death, which hasn’t happened yet, look back at the consideration of dying (which you have now), then move back from the moment of death to your current consideration of dying, but hold the perspective you imagined having at the event of death but now at this moment of considering death.
In imagination, this is like moving forward and coming back with a piece of your future mind in exercise.
For instance, when I did this for the first time; I found I didn’t care that I was dying; I was very happy about my life and only wished it could keep going, but was comforted in the acceptance that everything has it’s time to give it value and that my time had been good.
Upon, “returning”, I was able to adopt this perspective in life; that my life is good and to enjoy it as it is in it’s time for the value that this time limit provides.
Why fear death…? I mean, if it’s quick and unexpected, you won’t really have time to get a good fear going, and if it’s slow and protracted, then by the time it comes you’ll welcome it like an old friend.
You guys are weird.
Like Mas, I fear the deaths of others, or rather, life without them.
That’s a pretty interesting mental exercise, Stumps. I may try that myself, but I don’t think I can put my current self into my future self’s mental state, as it were, simply because…I don’t yet know what that will be. It should prove to be interesting, nonetheless.
There’s a trick to this.
Don’t try to imagine what you will be; simply apply your sense of character as you “feel” yourself, and always have, forward in time.
You will always “feel” the same to yourself; regardless of which time you are in, in your mind.
You can’t possibly imagine what you will be directly in the future; you can only imagine your character in sense, what you “feel” like.
To understand my meaning here…for instance; you can always imagine what sorrow will feel like for you in the future; though you cannot be certain what will cause it.
The same principle applies.
Although this may seem a small addition to the already abounding responses that have been provided, I think I’d like to interject a bit of my own response to asked questions - well, insofar as anything I’ve derived from this world so far can be considered “my own.” Many philosophies on death have spoken on this matter on myriad levels: “once I’ve lived like the Gods, no more is needed” -Freidrich Holderlin; The discussions and pedagogy of the renowned philosopher and teacher, Shelley Kagen. at Yale, and his ideas of the Lesser forms of life and the justification/vindication of suicide; “As ever when one unweaves a rainbow, it does not become less wonderful” Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion; “When you learn how to die, you learn how to live” Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie. These aphorisms by which certain people live are, as one could surmise, separate from religion in terms of their profundity and effectuality. Even with respect to the statement about the Gods is separate in effect and drive in life, which is why I brought it up. To live like that which man has made to be what he considers greatness is, for some, enough for a lifetime- independently of any deity’s presence.
I’m a very nice guy, so I’ve heard lol, and a lot of people have asked me a similar question of why I am so nice even though I had no religion to “keep me in check” so to speak. I used to be Christian, but came to my own conclusions about things; moreover, my reason in saying this is that soon after I was detached from any sanctity or religiousness, I had a revelation. “I was Christian because I was a good person, I wasn’t a good person because I was Christian.” This idea can be paralleled to the desire to live. I cherished life because I had an opportunity to make the most of it, as I’ve done just fine without any religion to adhere to, not that that’s any sort of burden. My family, in entirety, is comprised of solely Christians. And I don’t love them any less because of it; although, sadly I’m not to sure I can say the same about them toward me.
Nietzsche has in one of his writings “on truth and lies” I believe which delineates the lives of two men. One follows intuition, and one follows his rational. The man of intuition is opposed to abstraction, living his life in mysticism in a perpetual search of happiness, while the rational man seeks out “truth” in vain and is never in great joy. This may seem to be that mysticism would have the votes, but this entails so much fluctuation between happiness and moroseness that it eventually levels out with that of the scientist or rational man who is never over-joyed. See, I think we truly do live in a world of our own making, and that “knowing” was long ago made up by some people, in all of their arrogance and insatiableness, who needed a means by which they could live and communicate. All concepts, words, ideas are mere fragmentation of a greater whole, which is incomprehensible to the two metaphors which Nietzsche brings up in his writing: 1- visual; 2 auditory.
My reason in bringing this up is to say, in the midst of these thoughts, I have really no choice but to think of life as futile and pointless, which I do lol. But… pointless, with its usual negative connotation, does not always bespeak negativity. Do you ever walk outside to look at the moon in the middle of the night because it is such a beautiful night? Do you ever fall in love and cherish another person illogically among all others out there? Do you ever wish that you could speak to someone who has long ago passed away so that you could be with them for just one last time? All these things are pointless, futile in the grand scheme of things, yet we still do them. Why? Well, because that’s living. See, when things are given, they are often taken for granted, but I don’t think anything was given to me. It just happened for me So I better do my best to cherish all the time that I have while I have it. I could almost start crying from the thought of it, and I’m not an emotional guy, believe me.
Ya know, I was just outside looking at the stars in the giant sky of mass and energy, looking at the different constellations and clouds, thinking about when I was a child, and where I’ll be in 50 years. A plane flew over-head. I wished I knew everyone on that plane as well as everyone else in the world. My new life has made me love humanity. I’ll always understand why people fight, but to be okay with it is an entirely different story. I’m an atheist and I am cool, to such an extent that a complete loser can be cool lol. But yeah, it makes me happy to be here with you and anyone else who reads this. We people rock, end of story.
I hope this provides a better understanding of where atheists, or at least I, obtain drive in life. I have no pride, seeing as how, like Nietzsche says, I think all we comprehend is fabrication and the word which would properly define the greater whole simply could not exist, seeing as how all words are fragments of the whole. How could one take pride in that which was only his contrivance in the first place? It’s like putting a stick in a place, going away, then coming back and commending yourself for having found it lol. I have no one to live for other than myself, and other people who have questions about life. It may seem sick to some “acculturated” or “conformed” minds, but the idea of my death, to me, is the most beautiful thing in the world. Life is sort of like a book or a letter. You read or write quicker when you get to the end but you don’t want it to end, so you write more and more until the end inevitably comes, and when it does, a masterpiece is born. Or in some cases… maybe not lol.
If you have any further questions I’d be glad to answer them
You mean because your death is insignificant to the goings on of the universe that makes it insignificant to you, too? I’m pretty sure your mom’s death is as insignificant as your death to the universe. Is her death therefore as insignificant to you as your own death?
Not to sound cold-hearted or anything, but yes my mother’s death is of little consequence. It isn’t that I hate or despise her, but rather that I learned a long time ago that death is inevitable and accepted that everyone I know will die, perhaps many of them before I do. When you get past that, death just doesn’t matter anymore, regardless of who’s death your talking about.
I understand death on a larger scale of things doesn’t matter, but why would you take what matters on a larger scale as your standard for what matters to you? I have to ask now, what does matter to you? I think this is the nihilism that Nietzsche was talking about in the section about the value of truth. Nature laid bare has no value. Nothing in nature is significant. Should we therefore have no values as well? Should we, because nature doesn’t value our lives, not value our own lives? What kind of species could survive with this view of things? It seems any species that values an ideal, in this case truth, above it’s own survival is doomed to extinction.