*bawled

How the **** do people deal with the crushing anxiety imposed by the inevitability of death? This **** gives me panic attacks, and sometimes I wonder why I even bother living at all when it will all be over one day. Of course I wouldn't end it, since you can't have sex, party, eat chocolate and go hiking when you're dead, but those things sometimes lose their fun when I know I'll be dead one day, nomsayin'?

It makes it easier when you accept there is nothing you can do about it and that it happens to us all. And also death means no more worrying, everything I worry about will be gone :)

There is no reason for me to think that I will know about it when I can't remember before I was born so I reckon it will be like that.

The thing that I find most frightening is being terminally ill. Or being beheaded by ISIS or a drug cartel in Mexico. Them last few seconds before the knife starts slicing <<<<<<<<

Eh. Like MLM said, there was a time before you were born, and in that time were you sad or in pain? Death is simply going back to that time, from wence the cosmos' womb you left, and your mother's womb entered. You treat death like it's a stranger, some intruder that wants to steal everything that you have. But you've met it before, and fared none the worse for the meeting. It's the soil from which you grew. Meet it again as a friend, not an enemy. You owe it that much.

Let me quote the Geto Boys "people say try to chill g, **** that **** there's a ****** trying to kill me"

Have you ever crossed a deep chasm on a narrow bridge? The trick to not getting giddy or scared is to keep your head level and don't look down! That's how I like to live, with death of course being the chasm.

I was surprised at how contentious this thread became, given that everyone is entitled to their own opinion about death, parenthood and pets.
Regarding death, I'm up the colder/intellectual end of the emotional spectrum, along with (I think) Frownland and OccultH. What sends me more towards the heartfelt/passionate end of the spectrum is not so much death, as human pain and suffering. That's what's really sad imo.

Me and my siblings were a group of four. Two of us had kids and two didn't, but there has never been the least suggestion between us that one choice was somehow superior to the other. We just respected each other's right to choose, and that's how it should be in this thread, frankly. Plus, of course, with the world population going off the scale, no-one should feel bullied into having a kid if they're not comfortable with the idea.

http://www.worldpopulationbalance.or...line-large.gif

(See that last, exponetial red line? If you look very closely you can just make out my son in there. Let's all wish him luck please! )

Oh please, you're not interesting enough to get killed by somebody. If that mindset is what you have to tell yourself to make your impending death by autoerotic asphyxiation seem like anything other than the last gasps of a man who was too afraid of death to live, then so be it.

I was using the geto boy's potential murder as a metaphor for our inevitable death. In Cormac McCarthy's The Road death takes on an extra heaviness because all of humanity is dying. The real terror is when you realize the conversations between the boy and the old man would be just as applicable even if the rest of humanity wasn't dying out as well. The point of the Geto Boys' quote is that accepting death is easier said than done. In the song, the narrator is insane and the person chasing him turns out to be himself.

I like how you didn't deny the autoerotic asphyxiation part, though.