I often see quotes from people like Fred Hampton about how they’d willingly die for the people. Or engage with Huey Netwon’s concept of reactionary and revolutionary suicide, or see how people like Daisuke Namba looked death in the eye and readily accepted it. And I really just…don’t get how they did it
I…I’m a coward. I know it. I don’t say it to myself enough and I don’t work on it like I should. But still, I can’t conceive not fearing death.
To start I dont want to fear. I don’t like the paralyzing sensation, the absolute inability for me to do something. When I was…more depressed than I am now, I often contemplated (i guess if im being honest, reactionary suicide). And what stopped me was not only my connection to society, but also just being afraid, afraid of what might come next. Is it nothing? Is it reincarnation? Am i eternally damned to some hell? What would even be the good option? I feel like a coward every time I sit down and contemplate that I didnt do it. And then I feel like more of a coward for wanting to take the easy way out. Nowadays it’s not that I want to die…its just that I wish I was never born in the first place.
But moving on. It’s not just fear of the unknown. I don’t want to hurt people. Not just people. Everytime I think about it, I imagine my cats wondering where I’ve gone, why they can’t see me anymore. Why I abandoned them. I wonder about my mom, about my family, what they’d think. Especially if I ended things myself. Would they hate me? Would they hate themselves? I don’t think they even know the extent of how I feel.
It’s basically every night now that I think about it. I think “what if this was it. What if I died now? What if I went to sleep and never woke up?” And I feel immensely scared. There’s so much I wish to do, wish to learn, places I wish to go. I feel like a failure for being so insulated, that if I died now that I wouldn’t have changed the world in my years of existence.
I’ve been watching 人民的名义 recently, and in one episode a charecter went over the details of his life in the sino-japanese war, about how he joined the CPC to carry explosives and use them against the Japanese. And I sat there watching and asking if I would do it. Would I have carried explosives under fire to destroy Japanese pill boxes or joined the Guomindang’s Dare to Die corps against the Qing? And honestly I couldn’t definitively say yes. I understand the inevitability of death, I understand that one day I will die. But I don’t understand how I accept it.
If you’ve read this, thanks for letting be honest. I know there’s more to the world than just me. But I don’t know how to tell my brain that…
I really don’t see it as people NOT fearing death, and more of a “their fear of death is not a greater force than whatever they are willing to die for.”
Whether it’s a cause they will die for, or their own despair that causes them to take their own life.
I truly believe everyone, at some level, is afraid to die. You may put on a brave face and say stuff like “I don’t fear death but I also don’t want to die,” like half the thread, but I mean, come on. Just say it. You all are probably afraid to die at some level, you just accepted it and also have things you care about more than that fear. Even people who are religious, and see death as a release to whatever afterlife, and claim to embrace death. Is it really no fear of death? Or are their convictions to their religion just so much stronger it overrides it?
Like, fear is good. It keeps you on edge. It keeps you alive. You can’t “be brave” if you aren’t afraid. Because being brave, or in the case of religion, having faith, pretty much requires there to be fear or uncertainty that you are fighting, pushing aside, whatever.
Aren’t their lots of various sayings based around things like “If you don’t fear death, you aren’t being brave, you’re being dumb.”?
The trick is to not let it rule you. I’m afraid of getting mutilated in a car accident. It doesn’t prevent me from driving, and I’m not thinking about it every time I drive, but is someone swerves in the direction of my car, my adrenaline is gonna spike and I’ma react in an attempt to not be in an accident. And I do that because I am afraid of the outcome. I am afraid of being injured, or even dieing. But I don’t sit around and dwell on it.
That’s just how I see it.