h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just to add to Hoo's answer about how an atheist can handle the fear of dying alone, I think you can also try and rationalise it.

After all, death is a necessary thing on a finite planet. As well as releasing your phosphorus and the like, you create the space for future generations. Death is also what drives us on as individuals and as parts of a Darwinian form of progress.

You can find some solace in those concepts, if they are things you have lived by in your life.

sprout

>> After all, death is a necessary thing on a finite planet. As well as releasing your phosphorus and the like, you create the space for future generations. <<

Hell's bells then, I want to be paid before I die. I don't plan to be anyones free lunch. I've got me human rights you know?

""Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", but I don't think that's in mans "nature""

It certainly isn't in woman's, in my experience...



Ach, enough with the misogynist humour. I'm censoring myself on those from now on.

I am daily enraged by the thought of dying and missing out on all the future fun. I am also peeved that I was born so late and missed out on all the past fun. So I ignore both emotions and just get on with it, being grateful for being alive right now.

I consider myself lucky to have been born when I was. I wouldn't like to have been born much earlier - wars and so on being something of an inconvenience - but equally given the handcart in which the world seems currently hellbound I'm glad I got free milk at school, O-levels, a student grant, an easy driving test and all the various other massive advantages I was privileged to receive which subsequent generations can only look back on with envy.

So no, I wouldn't want to be younger. Or older. Which is just well, eh?

Along those lines, I think the boomers probably had it best of all. As you say, the chances of dying as a neonate or before the age of 5 were just to high to want to have been a member of any previous generation. And then there is dentistry. And cancer.

On the other hand, we boomers will find it difficult to finance our extended life spans.

"On the other hand, we boomers will find it difficult to finance our extended life spans" [Witty Moniker]



The people in my parents' generation have benefited from modern medicine. My mother's parents lived, on average, 77 years. She lived almost 16 years beyond that. My father retired at 62. Now he's 93. A year from now, if he's still alive, he will have been on Social Security 31 years.

A recent study found that pessimists live longer than optimists. This is because pessimists assume that bad things might happen, so one must put resources aside in case they do happen. My mother was a pessimist on some levels. She reused things, bought everything on sale, and saved money on food by using vegetables from her garden. None of her plates and bowls matched. My brother remembers her still using sugar bags from the 1930s. Neither she nor my father had credit cards in the last 20 years of their married life.

Optimists tend to run their credit balances as high as they can, assuming that they will always have jobs and can pay off the balances.
By those standards, I am clearly in the pessimist camp, though I do have credit cards. I pay off the balances in full every month.

>> Just because a question is able to be formulated,
it does not follow that that question can be answered. <<

Uhm... 42!


~jwf~

That's true as far as it goes, jwf, but 42 is not necessarily the "right* answer.

"...wars and all that..."

...still a long way from actualization of Woodrow Wilson's dedication "...to end the scourge of war forever...", but making progress.

A 'magic' moment in American history, circa 1900, for the first time in the history of the human occupation of the continent, not a war being waged anywhere in north America.

Eventually that moment is going to come in world history, not a single war being waged anywhere on the planet.

It may come later this century.

>> Among the patients I see at work, there are far too many who don't seem to have much pleasure in their old age << :Teaswill @59

On the contrary: I find that there's no fun like growing old and the best bit of all is watching yourself deteriorate...

>> best bit of all is watching yourself deteriorate...<<

Thy Rod doth comfort me!

Indeed, one of the dangers of being elderly
is a sense that one knows everything worthy
of knowing. Here, the body surprises and gives
the mind lots to consider and re-consider.

Why is this fingernail splitting?
What are those strange lumps?
Didn't I just pee a few minutes ago?
Why wont this cold go away?
Am I hungry or full?
Is it tomorrow yet?


~jwf~

I distinctly remember having an existential crisis moment as a child regarding mortality and the reality of it about being dug up by archaeologists. The whole idea of someone coming along and poking around in my bones 2,000 from now gave me the screaming heebie jeebies. Still does. Of course, I'll probably be cremated so it's not a problem as such but... what? You mean I could eventually be history? Nooooooooooooooooo!

[Although mostly I am just gutted I won't get to see what happens next.]

>> A 'magic' moment in American history, circa 1900, for the first time in the history of the human occupation of the continent, not a war being waged anywhere in north America. <<

http://www.autopsis.org/foot/lynchdates2.html
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/

>>I hate the idea of no one noticing I'm gone.


Having just seen this very thing happen at the end of Godfatjher3, I wonder if your fear could have come from being influenced by a piece of fiction such as this movie? Have you been effectively hypnotised by such a suggestion, and now can't understand why you feel it, since it is by your own admission, plainly irrational?

I knew someone who had a massive stroke. It took four days for people to realize that they should look in on him. He survived, but wasn't in good condition.

Stone art, I need to make a distinction between bigotry & banditry and war, though those do amount to serious violations of the peace.

Stipulated, the society of those times was far from perfect and still is.

There were a number of subsequent actual military actions in North America so far as that goes.

There has been real progress made in the direction of securing the peace in the interim.




The fifty years of peace in Europe from the end of of WW II to the outbreak of the Serbian-Bosnian conflict of the 1990s was the longest period of uninterrupted peace in European history.

>> from the end of of WW II to the outbreak of the Serbian-Bosnian
conflict of the 1990s was the longest period of uninterrupted peace
in European history. <<

There was the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 of course
but I guess that was just an 'internal Soviet' situation. Several
other anti-Soviet uprisings such as 1968 in Czeckoslovakia and
the 'people power' movement of the late 1980s which led to the
fall of the USSR notwithstanding.
The ongoing conflict in Ireland is best forgotten as well.


~jwf~