We don’t like to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the stuff that would literally make us wish we were dead, but it can be an interesting exercise, if nothing else.
You could also start a list of things to put in your advanced directive, to ensure none of this ever happens to you.
I’m just saying.
14. You have to try to do something worthwhile.
Probably life in prison, just a completely pointless existence.
13. Humans aren’t meant to be alone.
Prolonged solitary confinement.
12. I would have to agree.
I think Metallica summed it up pretty well in One:
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cellLandmine has taken my sight
Taken my speech
Taken my hearing
Taken my arms
Taken my legs
Taken my soul
Left me with life in hellThat’s certainly worse than death.
11. It’s so permanent, though.
Wishing to die but not being allowed to.
10. Coffee won’t fix that.
Severe chronic fatigue to the point where you can’t live your life and barely recognize yourself anymore. You can barely get up to go to the bathroom. You lose all of your friends. Being alive is miserable because even trying to watch a TV show is too hard due to the severe brain fog you’re experiencing. Nothing is enjoyable.
But you’re not going to die. No, you’ll live a long life of being unable to function and dismissed by doctors who tell you graded exercise is the only answer despite that being from one flawed clinical study that was later disproven. You constantly question your sanity because your condition is typically blamed on your mental health. You grieve the loss of yourself. You decide maybe you are to blame, somehow? But you’re so tired you can barely finish a sentence, so therapy is also a struggle.
(Mine finally got better when they found out I had a very large aneurysm in my renal artery and surgically fixed it. They told me it wouldn’t help my fatigue but they were incorrect. The year I spent in bed was terrible. I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as well, so I’m always dealing with various issues and I’m hyper aware this could happen again and my functioning is not a guarantee. Many folks are not as lucky and never make progress.)
9. Most people just want to be remembered.
Rome used to erase people from history as a punishment worse than death. It was called “damnatio memoriae.”
I think I would be horrified to be condemned to this sentence but I think the worst is probably to live a life of misery by being enslaved and tortured.
8. Yeah that could be awful.
Being eaten alive by an animal.
7. Not the best superpower.
True Immortality
Hear me out. If you were truly immortal, (that is, you could never die under any circumstances), you’d outlive everyone. Even if you got close to someone, they’d be dead in what, to you, would feel like the blink of an eye. Given enough time, I think this has a good, if not 100% chance of driving you insane.
Eventually, you’d outlive the human species. When humans went extinct, you‘d have no one to talk to, forever. Now you would certainly go insane.
Oh, and the worst part is still ahead. In trillions and trillion of years, the universe’s stars will all have exhausted their supply of nuclear fuel, and the universe will reach heat death. Now there is nothing but you on a cold, inert, dead sphere. Now you get to endure this for all eternity.
Sorry for the abject depression.
6. A lot of burn victims say that.
There is a story about a fireman (which I admit, I cannot verify) who received 3rd degree burns over pretty much his entire body.
After almost a decade of pain and skin grafts and looking like something out of a horror film, his doctors asked him if it was worth it.
He replied that he wished he had died that day
5. No one wants to die alone.
Now with Covid going around, old people who are suffering from it and fighting for their lives for 2 or 3 weeks in the hospital, knowing they aren’t getting better, dying slowly without having contact with family or friends because they don’t have a cellphone or etc.
Suffering for weeks and eventually dying seems horrible, not only from Covid but also from cancer,..
4. I really hope this is hypothetical.
Being suicidally depressed for well over a decade, making an amazing recovery and turning your life around, getting a very few good years, then developing early-onset Alzheimers/dementia that makes you believe you’re back in your depressed years for the rest of your life.
3. The world is cruel.
DIPG.
It’s a cancer of the brain stem that mainly affects children. The brain stem controls the most basic functions of life: breathing, heartbeat, etc. (Mike the headless chicken lived on because he still had a brain stem.) As the cancer progresses it takes more and more of the kids’ abilities while keeping their personality and intelligence in tact. Imagine being seven or eight and one day you can walk and the next you can’t.
Or one day you can swallow and the next you can’t. All the while you’re still “all there” in your head so you know everything that’s going on.
DIPG is considered terminal at diagnosis. Neil Armstrong’s young daughter died of it before he went to the moon.
2. Another vote for this one.
Immortality.
I would dig immortality if you couldn’t die from natural causes, but inability to die at all would be unimaginably brutal.
You would outlast all humanity and remain alone for 5-7 billion years until the sun explodes, then you would spend untold billions of years floating through space…. conscious the whole time.
That’s if you don’t get trapped inside some inescapable construct like a canyon, or volcano, or the middle of the ocean, or underground. And you’re stuck there forever while every inch of your body is writhing in pain and is unable to move.
Thats my only fear during immortality. So be smart and not too reckless.
1. Someone has thought about this a lot.
There’s like an infinite amount worse fates. For example, a trickster god just turns you into a sentient rock and drops you off in a wasteland. That’s it forever, your still you you can think and have senses but you cant move because your trapped as a rock.
You just sit there forever staring in to the wastes and try to occupy your self. You cant die, you cant sleep, all you can really do is think. Eventually you’ll be buried and wont be able to tell what time it is.
“Eventually” you would hope to yourself, “the sun will explode and my stony form will be destroyed by the solar fire and end my miserable excuse for an existence.”
Yeah, time to update that will!
I’d like to die with dignity, thanks.
What would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments!
