Ask Lemmy

Even though I am an arachnophobe, I also just can't stand insects in general. They're unholy creatures that I wouldn't mind if we removed without destroying the world. The worst part is I'm pretty sure my fear of insects comes from an early childhood cub scouts(?) day camp(?) trip where I opened a tarp on a wooden tent frame and saw a bunch of ants, so it's an early, somehow traumatic, childhood experience.

People, dying without ever been loved by a woman. Both of those are related.

The fact I won't be able to retire. I don't have the money because of financial abuse from my SO. I honestly don't know what I'll ever do. People in my city are living in tents in the park and I assume I will have to do that. I'll have a good pension but it won't be enough for the cost of living as it is now.

(Please don't suggest I leave, as kind as you all are, I cannot afford it).

I don't really know how to describe it, but it's like I go through life just waiting for the other shoe to drop. When something shocking or remotely dangerous happens, my brain automatically assumes the worst is going to happen and I like go into survival mode. I get filled with such dread.

Willful Ignorance

Extinction. Our technology gives us the power of gods, but we still have the brains of hunter-gatherers optimised for living in tribes of less than 150 people. My own death doesn't worry me, I'm not bothered by knowing I'll be forgotten, but the possibility that there might not be anyone to carry on is what I think about at 3 AM when I can't sleep.

That what ultimately ends my time here, will be my own fault.

And spiders... Fuck spiders.

My earbuds exploding while I'm using them

Dementia.

My mother has dementia.

Every time I forget something I know I should know it terrifies me.

Being eternally trapped in a mental prison. Imagine having a panic attack that never ends. I'm pretty sure that type of prolonged stress would cause a psychotic break where your psyche fractures and you become a despondent shell. You would become deathly afraid of everything, even the people you love, because of an unceasing paranoia. That basically sounds like hell to me.

I'm not really afraid of the idea of nothingness after death, because at least then I am released from the torment of living.

I can agree with Archer on this one: brain aneurysms and saltwater crocodiles.

Lot of contenders really! And the only solution is to try not to think about it, these are things I can't do a god damn thing about.

Heart disease

Brain aneurysms

The fact that just experiencing negative emotions degrades your health (that is so unfair); depressed because everything's gone to shit? Mad because people keep fucking you over? You don't live as long because of it.

Basically let's just say all the ways the human body can fail you and isn't equipped properly for the lives we lead. The food I'm "supposed" to eat disgusts me, and I could be on the verge of death at any given moment and not know it.

The fact that we're less than a single ember in the history of the universe and all that astronomers believe is charted to happen after us is like, incomprehensibly massive cosmic events, lot of black holes.

The fact that some day I'm going to die and that's just going to be it is chilling, the most I can hope to is try to be one of the "fortunate" ones that makes it to around 100 years of age; and even then I'll probably be tired of it and physically/mentally degraded pretty severely by then. What's it like after you die? It's exactly the same as it was before you were born.

Oh yeah, black holes. You go near one of them and time slows down as you're torn apart at the atomic level. Imagine falling into a meat grinder but it takes a thousand years, or a million. You'd be insane and dead.

The idea of suffering in silence while people either can't see that you're distressed or don't care. This could apply to just being depressed and wishing you had friends, or like, actually having something bad happen to you where you'd be fine if you had another person around, but you don't. Something like choking or falling off a ladder while living on your own.

Climate change and the fading light of earth's biodiversity .

The rise of political folks who desire modern fascism.

Late stage capitalism and its tendency to basically make the entire world worse.

Alzheimer’s, and the fact that my mother’s genes put me at terrible risk of developing it. The idea of my mind slowly fracturing while my body continues to live is utterly terrifying to me, and I have actively thought about buying a gun to take care of the problem should it ever appear. Problem is, I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it if it does.

I want to die awake. Preferably a gunshot to the head. That bad things happen to good people even death, life isn't fair but you play the hand your dealt, and while not in vain, life has little meaning when thinking of times massive scale. Like the poem of Ozymandiaz.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Micro-plastics

Seeing how rapidly and how fervently the public, one's own family even, can be turned into puppets of powerful interests. All it takes is the right messaging. The right conditioning. Television was just child's play. Today we've got "smart" phones, baby!

The speed at which we are (not) acting on climate change. Our tolerance for neoliberals/capitalists absolutely wiping their arse with the whole planet.

I've had health issues since I was a kid (all stemming from developing Crohn's Disease symptoms before I was even a teenager), and a lot of them still haven't been resolved (in part of reasons such as developing new conditions due to medications I took to treat another condition). One of the worst things I fear is that if I randomly end up leaving this world in a way that incurs an autopsy, the results will end with something like "Damn, this man had issues. If his doctors had known about X then he could've lived a much better life, the treatment is simple".

I go through so much, and I've done countless research to try to track down possibilities that my doctors hadn't considered (some of my research has in fact lead to me finding out new things that my doctors didn't account for, even as of this year) - and I always have this terrifying doubt of "What if I had just chosen a different doctor, the next one on the list might've had this idea years ago and prevented some of this". That line of thinking of "Could've, should've, would've" doesn't help of course (as my friend likes to tell me "What if the sky were green?") but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it more often than I'd like to.

Honestly not to take away from your fear but it's the light at the end of a tunnel. I can't just walk into the ocean and leave my family and pets to fend for themselves, but when it eventually happens it'll be a relief.

A hypothetical fear of course, one with my wife who I've been with for 15 years now.

One day, maybe hopefully 30-50 years in the future, my wife and I look back and think about how good our lives were. We raised happy and successful kids. We bought a house. We had dozens of pets. We celebrate the end of our life together. But she doesn't make it.

And I have to spend the final years alone with memories of her. Two controllers. Two spoons. Two of everything for decades. Now just me.

And Never being able to explain to the rest of the world how amazing she was.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't like the amount of power big corporations have. Nintendo is currently abusing their power to stifle their competition and potentially harm the future of gaming. Google recently proved that they have pretty much full control over the internet. Microsoft is ruining the entire PC market. I could name more but these are the first few that came to mind.

Letting down people I love somehow

Something similar. Not necessarily the fear of death or a painful death, but the very real possibility that once the light goes off, you disappear for good.

I won't get into religion or anything like that, but it all feels...very inefficient. IMO, reincarnation always seemed cool, because it's essentially the reuse of consciousness in another being. I also remember reading a cool story years ago where it turned out that everyone was actually the same person, and in death you reincarnated as the next person, with the ultimate goal of having lived every life to ever live and becoming god. The idea that someone could live for even a very brief moment, and that energy is just gone is just so wasteful that the universe just seems cruel for it to even be a possibility.