Separating inner doom from outer doom

Heineken

Does your worldview become doomier when you're contemplating your personal fate? I wonder to what extent doomers' perceptions of the big picture are biased by considerations related to their own demise.

How I envy my dog, drowsing on the rug beside me. She does not, like me, awaken in the middle of the night with a weird and cold awareness of the proximity of death. (Does that ever happen to you?)
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"Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog

"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother

TheTurtle

It did.

But now I feel a certain detachment from it. Death is the inevitable destination toward which we are all heading. Having experienced the death of my mother, my father, my father-in-law and the lingering wasting of my Alzheimer's stricken mother-in-law all over the past couple of years, I have come to realize that there are definitely fates worse than death.

I am, of course, taking steps to move forward even as the world around me collapses, but I realize that there are no guarantees.
And this doesn't seem to bother me any more.

Dogs can indeed be a role model for us. Smile

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“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” (Ted Perry)

aflurry · Intermediate Crude Joined: Mar 28, 2005 Posts: 806

i have two disabled parents and and unstable sibling. waking up with the shadows long is a regular occurrence for me.

on the other hand the real insomnia part has settled down, though my personal circumstances are no better. this leads me to think that alot of underlying anxiety is situation independent.

if things didn't seem to be playing out according to doomer script i would doubt my own impulses more.

Pixie

Yeah. I think the world will eventually sort itself out. I, on the other hand, am dependent on a medication, so if the time ever comes when I can't fill my prescription, I've got about ten years. One more reason not to plan for a long retirement.
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Just another tofu-munching bike-riding Rambo(/Rambette)

threadbear · Expert Joined: Jan 22, 2005 Posts: 7246

When I was 5 years old my parents told me that death was permanent and complete cessation of the entirety of what we know as "life". I'd wake up in a cold sweat at night hyperventilating and imagine I was like the vanishing dot on an old fashioned black and white tv screen.

Going to Protestant Sunday School only reinforced the idea that anyone who thought otherwise was deluded, fantasy prone, etc...

I've had decades to examine belief systems, since that time, and now conclude, to my own satisfaction, that death only closes the door on this chapter. Noone can change a stubbornly resistant point of view. But one thing I've discovered is that many people think that the ultimate reality must be bleak, cool, austere and hopeless. They cling like crazy to it, not seeing there might actually be something neurotic, not about the idea, but with their tenacious clinging to it.

Pixie

efarmer · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 17, 2006 Posts: 455

My youngest sister died of breast cancer recently, she was 43. She fought like a lion and kept her hope and humor until the last day, even while she was fading with her youngest toddler wanting her to play with him in bed. She taught me a great lesson, that even in the face of overwhelming odds and dire predictions, you can have control over how you are going to be right now and today. In fact that is really what you are going to be able to have control of with any certainty during your entire life.

I made a remark on this forum about Lovelock's book to the effect of that I would rather flit into the fire, happy to the end, like a june bug, than to have the balance of my existence spent poisoned and distraught by some gifted and literate messenger of doom. If we must fade and die, why submit ourselves to the torture of doom
as a macabre interlude?

It is my hope that in the face of inevitable but unscheduled death, and unpredictable life, that I can be as hopeful and brave as my sister so lovingly taught by example.

This is five or six posts to date wherein I am quite serious, I may be slipping ...

Byron100

Interesting post, Heiny Smile

I would have to say that contemplating my own personal fate actually makes me *less* of a doomer than if I knew "for sure" to a certain age I'd live to which takes place deep into the post-collapse era.

Granted, there have been times (yes, more than just once) I've stared the Grim Reaper directly in the face (he must like me for some perverse reason..LOL), but I'm really not afraid of actually dieing as opposed to living a horrid, dispirited life for year after year after year. I'm medication-dependent too (asthma), so if that gets cut off, I really do hope I don't make it another 10 years, as that would really suck having to fight for breath for that long. :/

I also subscribe to the belief that "living" is just an illusion, a mere chapter in the overall scheme of things. I've been around before, and I'm certain I'll be coming back at least one more time. I just hope I get to have kids and to grow food and live in harmony with nature next time. Smile

Really, that's all that matters to me at this point.

In the meantime, I'm just going to take each day and season as it comes and soak up life's experiences the best way I can. It's all we really can do, right?
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Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide...
...and the meek shall inherit the Earth!

Leanan · News Editor Joined: May 20, 2004 Posts: 4490

I was born and raised atheist, and though my parents took me to church if I asked (they wanted me to make up my own mind), I've remained atheist.

Perhaps for that reason, doomeristic visions of the future don't bother me. I grew up knowing and accepting that humans aren't very important in the universe, and that the world existed without Home sapiens for most of its history, and would doubtless exist long after we were all extinct.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, it's mundane worries that I think about. The project at work that needs to be re-designed, the tax returns I need to file, etc.

Kind of like Connie Willis's story, "Daisy, In the Sun." The world is ending, the sun is exploding, but Daisy is a lot more worried about the mundane terrors of growing up: menstruation, having to wear a bra, attention from boys who want to put their arms around her all of a sudden.
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"The problems of today will not be solved by the same thinking that produced the problems in the first place." - Albert Einstein

Ferretlover

I woke my husband up the other night by yelling "No!." It seems that there was a mob systematically breaking into houses to take supplies. What had startled me was the sight of a sumo wrestler (named 'Mungo"-don't ask me how I know!) standing in my bedroom doorway to prevent us from stopping the mob!

I supposed it was reading about guns earlier in the evening.....
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"RRrrruuuunnnn!!!" ~Apocalypto

FireJack · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 16, 2005 Posts: 449

I used to be terrified at the idea of living forever. I don't see how you could make a good case of how you consciousness could outlive your brain especially when you can lose things like your personality when its damaged.

As far as I'm concerned I can live a decent life even if everything falls apart. I'm a loner who has no problem living very simple its getting enough food to eat that will be the problem. Need to get into gardening making a larder etc so I don;t have to become a slave.

efarmer · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 17, 2006 Posts: 455

It is my strong hunch that a guy named Mungo will accept a bribe of dream conjured M&M's and switch sides in the heat of battle.
Sweeter dreams if possible, but something to keep in mind ...

Heineken

Some fascinating responses so far. Most of them have focused more on the self-death issue per se than its potential impact on one's opinions about the broader "doom" scene. I suppose this was to be expected.

I used to think about death a great deal when I was young. Then as I went through my 30s and 40s, death lost its appeal to me as a subject of obsessive thought (except during occasional scares when I feared I might have acquired HIV), and I became enmeshed in the intense ephemera of work, money, exercise, eating, sex. Now in my early 50s and in mostly good health, I find that death has reappeared in me with force, though unbidden.

The intense awareness of the reality, certainty, and relative imminence of death happens to me only in the moments after I awaken, either from a diurnal nap or at night. It is very difficult to describe the sensation, but it temporarily shakes me to the core. Basically, in that moment I truly understand and accept that I am going to die and glimpse the awesome permanence and blankness of that state.

Somehow this experience is tied to the sleeping state that preceded it and that overlaps somewhat the period immediately after awakening. Sleep is not death, but they share things. So it is a logical connection, although I pondered the cause-and-effect relationship for the first time only while writing these comments.
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"Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog

"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother

Grifter

I tend not to contemplate my personal fate with regards to peak oil. I think this is because I am single. When I was not single I was constantly worried about my wife and how she would fare in the future. (I wont go into why in case she reads these).

Now I have what I remember as a teenage mindset in that I can't imagine IT happening to me. I worry about others still, my godson, parents, unindependent brother, sister in debt but reliable work and my wife a little.

I feel most doomerish when I see folks worrying about something that is IMO less than pressing like road congestion, telephone masts or not being able to afford some fashionable clothes. It is other people who make me feel hopeless, although I accept it is my own fears that I project onto their current lifestyle.

Interesting thread.

wisconsin_cur

My sense of outer doom is more doomerish than my own fate. By that I mean I think I will be ok, it is the poor baby born tonight in Banglidesh and the billions like her that keeps me awake at night.

Regarding my own death, I will be at peace once I get my kids to adulthood. Not that I do not want to be around to help them as they go through the first years of establishing their own lives or to hold my grandbabies but once my kids are out of the nest I will feel that I at least accomplished the minimum that was required of me.

If they are young I will die feeling like I failed and that is the worse possible fate I can imagine.
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"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
-Friedrich von Schiller

"What I try, may not work. It may be ineffective. It might even turn out in the pages of history to be the exact wrong thing to do, but I'm going to try to do what I c