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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To just not be able to believe it

148 replies

CutToChase · 30/10/2020 20:26

Okay so maybe I had too much wine.
But I'm sitting here thinking I can't believe that me, and all the people I know, my family, the people I love and also just everyone around the world, all those lives that exist and everybody's individual quests... One day none of us who exist right now will exist. All our big feelings and hopes, and all these different bright personalities... We will just disappear, like none of us ever really mattered.

I just cant get my head around it. It seems so unfair.
I'm also listening to this song which is really upping the emotion: m.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=LESFuoW-T7I

OP posts:
Chickychickydodah · 30/10/2020 20:42

When I see you smile by Bad English makes my all fuzzy and melancholic.

Fucket · 30/10/2020 20:43

Yes essentially, I guess if you’re an important figure likely to be remembered and quoted for thousands of years to come, you’ll probably be remembered for much longer.

pallisers · 30/10/2020 20:43

They say you die twice ... the first time when you die and the second time when the last person who remembers you dies.

I think nearly all art - especially poetry and literature is trying to grapple with our mortality. Here's a poem to cheer you up OP :)

Aubade
BY PHILIP LARKIN
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

—The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

CutToChase · 30/10/2020 20:47

@PeskyRooks
I just listened but that song is too perky for me right now. I'm looking for stuff thats really soaring right now!

OP posts:
BashfulClam · 30/10/2020 20:49

The veil is thinning between the worlds maybe you are hearing a voice from the past!

user1274157963247 · 30/10/2020 20:49

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.

“I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care”

user1274157963247 · 30/10/2020 20:50

That was an inscription found on some Roman graves.

TDogsInHats · 30/10/2020 20:51

Shockto the poem, thank you I'd not come across it before.

CutToChase · 30/10/2020 20:51

@pallisers
Thank you for sharing that. That vast moth-eaten musical brocade... I wont forget that

OP posts:
Griefmonster · 30/10/2020 20:52

@CutToChase I'm intrigued by your use of the word "unfair" in your OP. Why unfair?

Where does the concept of "fair" come in to the state of "being".

I am completely at peace with the death of our physical presence. As others have said, our energy and atoms will all be recycled for as long as time exists (if physics has got it more or less right). And our earthly possessions will be clogging up the planet or space for millennia anyway....

Meh

PeskyRooks · 30/10/2020 20:53

I mean the Red Box Lean on me, not the r&b one that used to be on a cat food advert!

Jericoo · 30/10/2020 20:54

OP having an existential crisis before the watershed even hits

clearedfortakeoff · 30/10/2020 20:54

@TheClitterati

Every single item in your home, every previous or mundane item you've ever owned will end up in landfill or burnt and released into the atmosphere.

X every single household on entire planet.

Blows my mind.

Me too.

You know how porcelain vases get dug up.from 1000 years ago and now sit in a museum. But ... there are centuries of personal stuff generation after generation. Where does it all go? That's a lot of stuff!!?

Inkpaperstars · 30/10/2020 20:55

I can believe it. I am sure the song would upset me though so I can't face clicking at the moment.

Staffy1 · 30/10/2020 20:57

It's quite comforting in a way to think, stuff it, it's not going to matter in the long run when you are going through something unpleasant or have what seems like an insurmountable problem. We'll all be gone eventually, so why worry too much about things now.

Inextremis · 30/10/2020 20:57

I think the same thing from time to time, OP - but I also think (and bear with me here, it's not the easiest thing to explain) - that time is just the way we experience existence - what was will always be, and what will be, already exists - like the whole of existence just 'is' and our consciousness travels, via time, through it. So nothing really goes away, it's still there, just we can't see it from where we are.

I think this when entirely sober, too :D

Eckhart · 30/10/2020 21:01

I don't drink. And I find it enormously liberating that we will all be gone one day not too far from now. We can do whatever we like, really: it doesn't matter very much!

-runs naked down the street throwing Werther's Originals at people-

ThirstyGhost · 30/10/2020 21:01

You're not unreasonable, just pissed.

73kittycat73 · 30/10/2020 21:02

@BashfulClam

The veil is thinning between the worlds maybe you are hearing a voice from the past!
Hi, I've read that sentiment elsewhere. Genuinely curious as to what you mean by it? Would love to know.
BelsizeNameChange · 30/10/2020 21:03

Try ‘Dust in the Wind’ by Kansas. I’m getting that vibe from this thread.

GraveyardKerfuffle · 30/10/2020 21:05

Bloody hell Pallisers that's devastating! Trust Larkin. I've never read that one before and may never dare again so thank you.

Wobblywibblywoo · 30/10/2020 21:05

@BashfulClam I too would like to know about the veil thinning

CutToChase · 30/10/2020 21:06

@73kittycat73
31st October...Samhain in the pagan religion...Halloween but actually All Saints... The day of the dead, the night when they say the boundary between the living world and the world of the dead is more porous

OP posts:
Screwcorona · 30/10/2020 21:07

We definitly have meaning. Every future person is a part of the people that are here and now. Our very identity had been built by our history and ancestors.

The individual will be forgotton but wont cease to exist. Our energy will move forward just like time

Gncq · 30/10/2020 21:07

Pink Floyd
Learning to Fly