How Do You Get Over Death?

[Tartarus Sauce]

I think it was Camus in the Myth of Sissyphus who argued that our brains are terrible at logically processing the existential consequences of death. We only personally understand existence from the frame point of conscious awareness, anything beyond that simply defies our experiental comprehension. Which is why everytime I go to sleep at night, time warps forward several hours, I rarely experience any awareness during those several hours since I rarely ever remember my dreams.

Therefore, although we understand death will occur, our brain tends not to factor that into its own timeline of expected experiences, consciousness can't understand its own demise as it has no reference point for comparison. Our consciousness had a beginning, we have earliest memories, but our conscienses don't really know when they "began" to exist, there are just soft limits on the record and lots of sketchy fragments in between. We lose consciousness when we sleep, but the entire experience gets erased from our timeline of awareness the moment we wake up. We simply never experience anything outside the framework of consciousness.

This limitation of consciousness means that although the intellectual component of our brain understands death will come eventually, our consciousness vehemently denies it since it has no comprehension of existential oblivion. This would explain our tendency to think and act as if we are deathless, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is also why belief in an afterlife is popular since most common interpretations of life after death affirm our concsiousness's view of itself as immortal.