But if we die……

[draconica]

Yo what's up. Existential dread. Mic drop.

Thank you, thank you everyone, you're such a good audience. In the other blog, when I only just finished typing "existential", the guys in the comments blew up and wanted to obliterate me for even bringing this sort of thing up. They were ravageous, but you? Very nice guys, not thinking about death, embracing your life with chill and harmony.

It's the second post in a row where I address the existential dread without even talking about it. Last time I spoke about mortality, but mortality relates existential dread in a way that's similar to how health relates to medicine: a declining health nudges one towards visiting a doctor, and a declining life nudges one towards worrying about dying.

Like every good angsty teen, I had my first episodes of existential dread (ED) around my 14-15s. "When I die, it's all over." Scary. It also was connected to a theme of not ever being loved and such. Then the ED a major comeback around my 25s, where I, very depressed and lonely at this point, decided that I will destroy my sanity by thinking about death all the time, so it makes committing a content warning easier. What a fool I was! What it did instead was only make me more anxious, and since then anxiety has been a huge problem in my life. The a COVID hit. More ED. Now I can die from meeting too many people — an irrational fear I had even before the COVID, but at that time it became empirically grounded.

Then the COVID slowed down, and I went to a therapist, because I figured I can't even go shopping easily anymore. "I can't relax," I told them. "I'm always tense and anticipate something bad will happen." — "Welp, too bad, can't help you with that. Let's instead treat your social anxiety with CBT." — "OK," — I agreed. At that time I didn't know that at this point I was supposed to find a more suitable therapist. But maybe then it occurred to me that people don't care about existential dread. And I slowly began to care less.

I'm not a fan of CBT. It seems innocent enough at first glance, but as you practice it, it seems to resemble more and more a form of self-gaslighting, which improves the observed mental health outcomes, but then other unobserved outcomes arise and then your therapist says "let's apply more of CBT to this problem", and the vicious cycle is designed to never end. CBT will not fix your existential dread.

But what will? You probably know that accruing money is a bit pointless in the big picture because you can't take it "to the other side." But word has it that after accumulating enough money beyond certain threshold, all that extra money you make will actually be transferred to your afterlife, and you will be judged as superior to those who made less money, and those who hasn't reach the threshold will be doomed to burn in hell forever, because the divine forces haven't blessed their souls for salvation.

But no one knows what that threshold is and everyone is racing to find out.

So watch out. Maybe consider joining the rat race lest you be left behind.