no human has ever beaten death

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BRUTALITOPS

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Sometimes I think of how terrifying it must be for someone to point a gun at your head. Or you watch a random execution video, and you try to put yourself in that persons shoes. What is it like to be the one man in the room who is about to have the lights go out, and everyone else is going to continue on without you?

And then I remember, holy shit, I DO have that gun pointing at my head. We all do. Given that I am still in the early part of my life, death seems so far off, so distant, completely unreal to me. But we all know death is in fact, a certainty. There is no escaping it. I am that man in the room... and when I die, billions of people are going to keep on living their lives, perfectly content, for the moment.

I don't know what bothers me more, dying itself, or knowing that one day I will be the odd one out - that my time will be up. That it will be me in the casket, condemned to my cold dark hole in the ground, erased... while everyone else gets to go on living. And sure, I am sure I'll get a nice little eulogy, but for every person at my funeral there will probably be 4 others that are just ho-hum about the whole affair, attending merely for moral support for those closest to me. They'll go on with their lives perfectly fine the very same day. Maybe if I am lucky people will tell stories about me around the holidays. Yet slowly but surely, the memories I have imparted onto people will become faded with time.

We have always stood on the shoulders of giants to exalt the species, billions sacrificing themselves for the greater achievements, knowledge, wisdom, power, technology, and education of our future children. I won't even be a footnote. Humankind won't even expend the energy to shrug over my death. "Honestly", they'll all think . . . "What's one more?"
 
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Perhaps it's because I truly harbor such grandiose thoughts and opinions of myself that I think this way, but to me the purpose of my actions, should lead me to transcend death through memory. That in 1000 years people will still know of me, and with luck there will be monuments to remind society that I once walked among them.
 
Demon Swordsman Crona said:
Perhaps it's because I truly harbor such grandiose thoughts and opinions of myself that I think this way, but to me the purpose of my actions, should lead me to transcend death through memory. That in 1000 years people will still know of me, and with luck there will be monuments to remind society that I once walked among them.
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Here is a monument to your memory.

HomerSimpsonBeerSong.gif
 
Grind, I will personally come to your funeral and create a major disruption. That will be talked about for some time at holiday dinners. :awesome:
 
I have beaten death for 52 years!

If you will arrange to have me notified of your death, I will attend your funeral dressed as Death (black robes & scythe) and just glare at people.
 
Ah, that time in life when we start to face our mortality, not a fun period. It got really bad when I had kids. Now that I have had cancer and am approaching 60, I don't fear death. I do not want to die, but dying doesn't scare me as it once did.
 
King of Owls said:
Sometimes I think of how terrifying it must be for someone to point a gun at your head. Or you watch a random execution video, and you try to put yourself in that persons shoes. What is it like to be the one man in the room who is about to have the lights go out, and everyone else is going to continue on without you?

And then I remember, holy shit, I DO have that gun pointing at my head. We all do. Given that I am still in the early part of my life, death seems so far off, so distant, completely unreal to me. But we all know death is in fact, a certainty. There is no escaping it. I am that man in the room... and when I die, billions of people are going to keep on living their lives, perfectly content, for the moment.

I don't know what bothers me more, dying itself, or knowing that one day I will be the odd one out - that my time will be up. That it will be me in the casket, condemned to my cold dark hole in the ground, erased... while everyone else gets to go on living. And sure, I am sure I'll get a nice little eulogy, but for every person at my funeral there will probably be 4 others that are just ho-hum about the whole affair, attending merely for moral support for those closest to me. They'll go on with their lives perfectly fine the very same day. Maybe if I am lucky people will tell stories about me around the holidays. Yet slowly but surely, the memories I have imparted onto people will become faded with time.

We have always stood on the shoulders of giants to exalt the species, billions sacrificing themselves for the greater achievements, knowledge, wisdom, power, technology, and education of our future children. I won't even be a footnote. Humankind won't even expend the energy to shrug over my death. "Honestly", they'll all think . . . "What's one more?"
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As I've gotten older; I've come to realize that it's not who remembers you, but how they remember you.
I have a large family and I'm sure that there are going to stories about me, for a long time.

I can't think of how it would be, to die and have no one remember who you were.
 
being old must suck. For the vast majority of life you are in the range of the median age. But once you get pretty old you are once again an outlier on society. That's what I don't want to happen the most.
 
King of Owls said:
being old must suck. For the vast majority of life you are in the range of the median age. But once you get pretty old you are once again an outlier on society. That's what I don't want to happen the most.
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By the time it happens, you realize how stupid most of society is, so it really doesn't bother you to be an outlier.
 
dad once told me the worst thing about being 95 was knowing that all those old people around him hadn't been born yet when he turned 21.......
 
It's funny that you posted this, because I had the exact same thoughts the other day. It suddenly dawned on me that I am going to die. Granted, I always knew this on an intellectual level in the back of my mind, but now it is more real to me. I never stopped to consider that someday, I'm going to be old, lying in a hospital bed somewhere breathing my final breaths. Fading into the black doesn't terrify me, but the idea that I will be utterly forgotten after a relatively short amount of time is terribly depressing. Two hundred years from now, I'll be long forgotten.

Even if I somehow made such a mark that I am remembered throughout the future of humanity, eventually, billions of years from now, the universe will come to an end in a big crunch and everyone will be erased for all eternity. Life is truly meaningless.
 
Melos said:
It's funny that you posted this, because I had the exact same thoughts the other day. It suddenly dawned on me that I am going to die. Granted, I always knew this on an intellectual level in the back of my mind, but now it is more real to me. I never stopped to consider that someday, I'm going to be old, lying in a hospital bed somewhere breathing my final breaths. Fading into the black doesn't terrify me, but the idea that I will be utterly forgotten after a relatively short amount of time is terribly depressing. Two hundred years from now, I'll be long forgotten.

.
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Cheer up. This isn't necessarily true.

You may walk into a bank at an inopportune moment long before that...
 
Yep or die mangled in the wreckage of your automobile.

But on 21-21 all you Earthlings will be dying a lot anyway.
 
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