i’m struggling existentially

[octaviathorn]

hi, i’m 16f (turning 17 in a few months, yay me!) and for years i’ve been struggling with concepts of my religion, identity, and future.

i’m scared of dying. i know it’s inevitable, but i can’t imagine earth without me or my friends and family in it. i don’t want to not exist. i don’t want to be forgotten, or dead. i’m scared of what comes after. what if it’s just black?

i’ve been doing some reading, commonly during school hours instead of doing my work, because it’s frightening to think about how minuscule we are.

i’m a junior in high school, so a common question is “what are you going to do after graduation?” i don’t know!!!

i haven’t known for a long time. there’s so many things to do and so little time to do them. i want to do everything. i want to experience everything. i want to consume it. i want to experience what it’s like to be.

this isn’t anxiety about graduating. i worry about things outside of high school. i have so many thoughts about life and our existence.

i feel so down all the time because of these thoughts. i don’t wanna be alone. i don’t want to die. i love life and i want to live it forever.

[KierC]

Hey Octavia,

Happy early birthday! I hope 17 is a wonderful year for you. I’m sorry to hear that these existential thoughts have got you down, though. You’re very much not alone here, and I’d like to offer some thoughts that I hope might help. <3

Your concern about dying is one of the deepest and most primal concerns we get to have as people. I think a lot of what people do, feel, say, and think in life is in part motivated by a “death drive,” a fear of death and specifically the uncertainty of it. I also think, as survival-oriented beings, it’s a very natural drive to want to “fix” or “solve” the uncertainty of death, and perhaps to evade it altogether. Know what I mean?

The big problem with that, as you know, is that it’s really hard to predict what’ll happen and what our lives will be. We can spend so much time worrying about what’ll happen and when, and trying to alter it, that we forget a really beautiful part of living IS that uncertainty. When I struggle with thoughts of life and death like this, I try to take a step back and give thanks to the feeling I’m having, because it is a pretty cool and sweet thing to be consumed by life, to fear its end, and to not know where it’s going. Sometimes, seeing a fear of loss and identifying it as a sign that you really care about something, and that you really love something, can bring down the heaviness of those existential thoughts. Not everyone feels this way, I just have found it personally helpful so I thought I’d share.

My best advice here is to discover or create a way of thinking about this that makes you feel good. There’s a huge world out there filled with people tackling the same questions as you, and everyone does it in unique ways that make sense to them. Some people like to embrace uncertainty without trying to “solve” it, some people try to find a balance between uncertainty and fact, some people try to make *meaning* of the uncertainty (similar to logotherapy if you’re curious), and some people create narratives about the world and about life that, regardless of its scientific or historical truth, feels right and good for them (like religion, to some extent).

You mention that you’ve been doing some readings on this. Have you come across anything that you feel good about, or that gives you some peace with all this uncertainty?

[octaviathorn]

I know the end of the universe isn’t until like billions of years from now, but death could happen at any moment and it’s so scary.

I checked it just now because I’m crying thinking about death and what might come after.

I don’t really know what to feel
good about. I love my life, my friends, my family, my pets, and my stuff. I’m scared of the day it all goes away.

[Latha]

Hi Octaviathorn,

I'm sorry to hear that you are feeling so distressed. You are right, death is scary and it can be hard to manage fears about it--I do believe you are trying your best.

We are not the most qualified to help with your questions, since our main focus here is sex education--my colleague Char has suggested that we might be more able to help you think about your fears in context of your existing relationships. But I do want to offer you a few resources about death and loss that I thought were interesting. You are allowed to disagree with them, but I am hoping that reading about how other people have thought about these subjects will give you some insight or a way to move forward with these fears.

• What's Death Positivity and How Can It Help Us? A Conversation with Sarah Chavez (from our site)

• How to not fear your death | Psyche

• How to get more comfortable with death | Psyche