My friend invites me to her party.

I have two options. I can tell her no, because as fun as the party will be, I can’t handle the fact that it’s going to end a few hours after I get there. Or, I can go and have fun, despite knowing that it’s going to end.

Whenever I’m anxious about something in my life, I take a deep breath and remind myself “none of this matters.”

The idea of the universe’s indifference can be crushing, and it can be liberating.

I can’t help you, but I can tell you that if you hold out for a couple of decades, you’ll eventually stop worrying about it.

One day, you’ll realize that you wake up in pain and suffer through most of the day; that you are constantly annoyed that young people think they’re the first and only people to discover or experience things that you’ve seen people discover and experience countless times - but you are also hopelessly jaded and desperately envious of their naivety and ability to be passionate about something other than injustice. That despite fighting for decades to improve the world, and believing in some cosmic karma, you see evil people succeed over, and over, and have a deep recognition that the world is fucked and getting more fucked with every dollar. When this time comes, the Void will become appealing: a rest and relief from pain and suffering. One day, you will realize that you no longer lay awake at night anxiously fretting about not being alive, but are rather looking forward to it.

Hang in there, man.

Personally I find it’s easy to not fret about it because I can’t control it. Also, I didn’t mind not existing before I was born so I won’t mind not existing when my time is up.

Having this conversation with a friend once, he told me what helped him.

Do you remember anything from before you were born? The hundreds of thousands of years before your existence? Did you spend it experiencing nothing all before you finally were born and began to experience something? Of course not.

You’ve already done a millennia of non-existence. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t scary. You’re not something that started and will eventually cease to exist. You are something that didn’t exist, and then eventually, you did. Sure, you’ll go back there one day, but that’s just it: you’re not going to a new place. You’ve been there before, and it was fine, just as it will be when you’re there again.

Thousands of years from now, someone is going to invent the chronovisor, a device with the ability to tap into the properties of light to look into the Earth’s past in the same way people today can look out into the universe and see what it was like in the past. And they’re going to see you. They’re looking at you right now. Everything you do probably matters to them. Give them an eyecatching show.

Man, I can’t wait until the day I don’t exist anymore. My existential crisis is that I’m currently forced into existing.

Made a movie about it with a toy company’s money.

Remember that the way you are right now doesn’t have to be your ending, and you can grow beyond your roots and find your humanity again.

Postmodernist cynicism had it’s time in the sun, but now it’s time for a New Sincerity: So what if you live in a world where nothing matters, when you’ve always had the capability to choose what matters to you?

Eventually you learn - not just rationally, but also behaviourally - that insignificance gives you a sort of freedom. Even if not solving the most important questions in the universe, you still got to live your life. Your pleasure might be meaningless, but so is your suffering - so you’re free to choose one, another, both, or neither.

Kind of off-topic, but regarding QM: what you’re saying is the Copenhagen interpretation. I tend to side more with Einstein in this, the moon doesn’t “magically” stop existing once you stop looking at it; it’s just that the difference between “it exists” and “it doesn’t exist” becomes insignificant from your subjective PoV.

I just avoid thinking about it. There’s other stuff to do. Find a hobby.

I spent a lot of time as a child thinking about this.

I came to the conclusion that there’s not much I can do about it, so I’ll enjoy life while I can, although I am going to enlist in cryonics just in case.

It wont be the first time I didnt exist

The greatest gift is that this life eventually ends.

I agree with many here in that I expect not to be any more inconvenienced by death than I was before I was born.

A thought that I appreciate that others haven’t mentioned is: The atoms that currently happen to think they’re me have previously thought they were a fish or a raccoon or a different person, or whatever, and they will, eventually, again.

Since my life is probably just ripples on a pond, I am motivated to, ideally, make an interesting, pleasant splash. I hope I’m remembered fondly for the brief time (cosmically) that I’m remembered at all.

I also hope (perhaps against reason) that humanity (and whatever replaces us) are growing more compassionate, so that whatever interesting form my current atoms might join next may also have a decent time, and have a chance to leave more pleasant memories in others.

(And hey, maybe there’s an afterlife. If so, maybe whoever runs it isn’t one of the assholes that the con artists tell us to expect. Or if they are one of those assholes we’ve been promised, maybe they can be distracted and assassinated. I plan to be ready to roll with it, just in case.)

Come to the conclusion that you already havent existed for the previous at least 13.7 million years. Now you exist and after that you won’t exist again.