21M. Never really thought about death much since I was a kid. I was raised in a religious Christian household, where I was taught about the concept of an afterlife, which helped me cope with the idea of death. I saw it as nothing more than a transition into the next life.
However, as I studied different sciences at school and university, I gradually began to lose faith in the religion. The more I learned, the harder it became for me to believe that many of the stories in the Bible were physically possible (e.g., Noah putting all living organisms on 1 ship, Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus resurrecting the dead, etc.).
I officially became agnostic last year, after doing my own independent research, and coming to a final conclusion.
A couple of weeks ago, I greened out after taking too much hits from a bong at a party, and had a panic attack that lasted until the next morning. My mind was racing with dozens of different thoughts, but the one that kept coming back was the idea of death.
I suddenly started thinking about death in a way I never had before. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of simply ceasing to exist. The thought that in just a few decades, I would be nothing more than a decomposing skeleton buried six feet underground really messed with me
This also might sound a bit egotistical, but I struggled to comprehend the idea of the world continuing to exist as normal without me. People would carry on with their lives, new memories would be made, and the world would keep moving forward as if nothing had happened. Eventually, everyone who knew me would be gone, and I would just be a name on a gravestone.
Just three years ago, if I had been in this same situation, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as fearful, and would just tell myself that even if I died, my soul would continue to exist in the afterlife, and that I would be reunited with my loved ones in paradise. But now that I no longer believe in an afterlife, I don’t have that same sense of reassurance to fall back on. I feel like I’ve lost something that used to make the idea of death much easier to accept, and I’m struggling to come to terms with that.
Any advice??