is it dead or alive?

I like the light.

Reminds me of one of my favourite Alan Watts quotes:

"When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, - Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that...it will pose the next question. What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born...you see...you...you can't have an experience of nothing so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born."

I don't remember what being 6 months old was like either, but I'm told I screamed and shit myself the entire time, so maybe the experience actually wasn't great.

We are hard-wired to fear death so we don't usher it on. By the time we are old enough to die of natural causes, we are in enough pain and so starved for serotonin that we're more or less ok with it.

I experienced getting kicked in the nuts as a kid, that did not make me less afraid of getting kicked in the nuts

You've already experienced

Have I though? I don't think my ability to "experience" existed prior to my birth.

Because existence outside the void is glorious and beautiful and painful and strange; the Void is just empty nothingness, forever, and should not be cherished.

I can handle being dead, and I won't even complain about it, but dying sounds like it sucks.

Before your first taste of ice cream you had none. Now that ice cream is permabanned and you’ll never have it again why you so upset?

Instant surprise switch to nonexistence after my kids are grown up and have their own lifes would be totally fine.

Preferrably in synchronization with the life partner.

It's not the being dead that's the problem, it's all the nasty stuff connected to the transition process.

Last time I didn’t exist, I existed. I’m terrified it might happen again.

I only care about other people dying. Not afraid of my own death at all, except in how I know it will affect others. If I knew no one would care or remember that I existed, I'd skip to my death like I'm off to see the Wizard.

Being not alive is not even another state of being. There is nothing to do the "being" on either side of alivetude. It's not like, once dead, you're now in Phase 3 of beingosity (the first two phases being pre-alive and alive). Your energy and nutrients will serve other purposes, but we're talking about consciousness here, and that is as fragile and malleable as a flaccid penis, and as temporary and fleeting as a decent erection.

A way I like to conceptualise it is with this thought experiment:

Everyone on Earth has the power of telepathy, except you. You try to explain what not being able to read or transmit thoughts is like, and the other people who do have telepathy are struggling to grasp it. "Is it like a dial tone? Or is it maybe the ambient silence when you're in a room with nothing making noise, like the sound of your own bodily vibrations?" and you have to be like "no, it's none of those things, because those things are all still imagining the presence of a sensory platform that just doesn't exist in me. It's not a faulty telepathy, it's complete absence of it that doesn't hint at its own absence, there is no telepathy hole in my brain that I can finger, it's all solid and complete as far as my sense of self is concerned".

Death is nothing to be afraid of. Your fears and anxieties around it are all supposing the ability to retain hindsight once the process is completed, like you'll watch the party continue without you and that you'll miss out on things that would make you happy. You're simply projecting yourself forward in time, perhaps imagining yourself in some weird paralysed state, uninvolved in life, but still there. You'll have no framework within which to experience experience. So fuckin' relax and enjoy yourself and try to make everyone else's ride as nice as you can. That's literally all there is to it.

Oh, and MILF porn.

It might have been void before, or it may be our actual life that we're currently unaware of, because this is a learning experience where less limited creatures constrain themselves to the "human experience" in order to learn from it. There's no real reason to believe that's the case, but it's just as probable as nothingness. If life is full of surprises, maybe death is too.

You didn't experience either tho

The thing that currently calls itself me wants to see the third Spiderverse movie before it ceases to exist. If the future "me" doesn't want to see the third Spiderverse movie then "I" have died and it's basically the same thing. Don't leave me on a cliffhanger bro.

People post this expecting it will make death more comfortable, but all it does is make contemplating the past less so.

When powered on, a TV or computer monitor can output black. When powered off, the lack of signal is noticeably different than the black output. You do not experience a lack of signal.