To cope and take comfort from the fact everything is pointless and in 100 years we’ll be dust

🙁 I couldn’t imagine how it feels

Even as an adult, when your second parent dies you feel orphaned. It's an awful feeling.

You're looking at it from the point of view of a younger person, though, with the idea of your kids being young and still needing caring for, or looking after financially. By the time you pop off you'll hopefully be so old and frail that your adult children will be elderly themselves and they will be the ones doing the worrying, and caring for YOU.

There's an about-turn when you have elderly parents. Roles are reversed. And if your adult children are doing ok in life by the time you're on your death bed you'll probably just mark them off as a tick in the "sorted" box right at the end, as you'll be so focussed on yourself and getting through what must be the totally traumatic thought that your light is about to go out and there's not a thing you can do about it.

What a cheery thought for a Saturday night! 😏

Actually thinking about it, it's probably more any grandchildren that woudl be the people you'd miss knowing how their life panned out. When they go off to university, meet first serious girlfriends/boyfriends, go into their careers. My dad never got to see that and that's sad. He would have been proud.

It’s a scary thought leaving children in this world after we’ve gone, even if they are grown up

True. I didn't have kids (for many reasons) but one of them was the fact that you leave them behind on this planet and I find that so tragic. You never get to find out what will happen to them, how the rest of their life will go. And that's how it's "supposed" to be. I just find life so incredibly tragic. I couldn't have kids and then leave them alone on this planet and just forget about them.

I find the temporary nature of life reassuring. Who wants to live forever? The way the world is going, I'll be absolutely fine about my time being up. I won't be remembered by many people but I've done my best and had some interesting and painful experiences. These days I try to live in the moment and appreciate the small things. I hope to bow out gracefully.

Good point.
Good job I put a new bag in Henry the other day.

And yet come Monday morning we'll get up and do it all again ☹️

If we are all going to be dust, doesn't that mean there should be more hoovering rather than less?

A profound observation!

Memento mori is a very old philosophical concept. It certainly calms me down in times of stress, and it makes me more appreciative of what and who I do have, right now. I often go and give my kids a spontaneous hug at that point (which they just live being 14 and 17 yr old boys 🤣).

or as it’s written in the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff classic… 100 years from now, all new people!

I just go with 'realism' myself.

Why when you've only got one life, would you choose to spend most of it locked up in prison.
All those horrible creatures out there at the moment that are banged up forever, what's the point, it's no life. I would rather be dead.
Life is for living and enjoying. Not point living in a prison.

I think this is a good perspective in a way BUT I have episodes of depression and the thought that everything is empty/meaningless etc. tends to trigger me to feel complete apathy and fall into a dark place!

Yes, we'll all be dead in 100 years and all our worries long gone but being loving/kind/experiencing the fullness of life whilst we're here etc still matters!

What is important in life, really? When we are living and when we die

for the living part yes health is important, not so much when we die because we’ll be dead. When we are dead love doesn’t actually matter either

I remember visiting an old country graveyard and thinking that the graves were so old that no-one would be coming to tend to the graves and that no-one on the planet would even know who they were. It freaked me out a bit and made me even more decided in my head that a) cremation is far more preferable than burial after death.

i also thought how silly it is to try to attain all the physical things in life that people aim for because it shows you have “made it”. Just mountains of “stuff”. In the end it all has to go. Someone has to go through it all and sort it and have the burden of deciding what to do with it and the guilt of sending it to landfill. I think of my in-laws’ house and all the junk they have acquired over the years and absolutely shudder at the thought of helping DH to clear it out. DH says it’s just all cheap rubbish (it is) which no one wants so it will all be going in a skip. How sad and awful is that? All that money spent over the years on rubbish which got hoarded. All the stress it’s going to cause others at the end of their lives. And it sounds silly but that film Wall-E is always at the back of my mind when I think about the amount of manufactured stuff accumulating on our planet.

That was the point I realised that “stuff” is pointless. So from then on I’ve thought about every little thing that I buy. I never just buy on a whim. It has to be something I need.

when my working life has calmed down a bit or I’ve retired early I am to have a massive declutter and get rid of 90% of my physical belongings, and just simplify my life.

So, overall, it’s STUFF that I think is pointless on our individual lives . But our actions and words towards the people around us are not. How people FEEL influences their own decisions and actions and that’s how people really do make a difference in their day to day lives, even though their physical self and their belongings will be gone in 100 years.

You misunderstand. What is important in life, really? When we are living and when we die. None of that stuff the OP mentions actually matters in the great scheme of things. It doesn’t actually matter what you do for a living but when you reach the end and when you’re gone LOVE is all that matters. It is the whole point of life and leaves a lasting legacy for the next generations.

And I don’t just mean romantic love, to clarify for those who don’t seem to get it.

Being with the dying shows you that love is all that matters in the end - and beyond.

Why are people confusing 'ephemeral' with 'meaningless',? Just because something doesn't last or won't be remembered doesn't mean that it has no meaning.

I also find comfort in the knowledge that everything is meaningless. I’m not interested in family so never had children and not in contact with most of my relatives so the chances of me being remembered are remote anyway. And I don’t care. I decided a few years ago that we can only live in the moment and for today.

I'm another one who finds it strangely comforting that nothing matters ultimately.

I do think it matters how we treat others and who we support in that. Anything to make people's time on earth not miserable, violent, abusive, hungry, ill, etc. Because that time is all we have.

For myself, I try to enjoy the small moments of beauty and pleasure. My garden might have one bit that's lovely and the rest of it is an overgrown mass of jobs to do. But in that, there is life, so who cares? Nobody will ever remember.

Life is ultimately meaningless. I find it comforting. This is why people have religion, it's a way to cope. If you think about the fact that we're in space right now hurtling towards a black hole it's pretty scary. So we have stories to cope. The suffering in the world has threatened my mental stability before. So I have a story I tell myself that makes it bearable.

We're just here to find our own little meaning and take comfort in that. Mine is my children.

I extract the most pleasure from every day. That's my goal. Happiness.

Another similar example is that we would study Cleopatra as ancient Egyptian history (about 2000 years ago), but she should would have also have studied the great pyramid as ancient Egyptian history (about 2,500 years before she was born).

Yes, and there was roughly 80-90 million years between they were around. T-rex was around about 60-70 millions before us.

I have this entirely unscientifically backed theory that the world is infinite is both directions, just like the billions of universes scale upwards to become a multi verses, the also things get smaller and smaller, what an electron buzzing around a nucleus in a atom is actually made up of a billions of really tiny multiverses. They are all expanding like we observe in our universe but at a rate that is barely noticable in a billion years to us. I thinking of writing a book. Maybe in a billion years people will still remember Elbert Bumblebee's theory of infinite big and small things.

Well what good is love when you’re dead?