Existence: What the fuck is going on?

[Pyrrho]

...

• Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.[/list]
  http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
  
  As for your future nonexistence, you should consider how things were for you in the year 1800. Was 1800 a bad year for you in any way at all? That will be how your years will be once you are dead. Nothing bad can happen to you when you cease to exist. Not even boredom.

That Epicurus quote (specifically the part I placed in bold) has been of much comfort, and I'm inclined to view it that way... sure, the idea that my stream of consciousness is flowing towards the complete annihilation of my sense of being, and this can only be synonymous to the lack of experience we conceptualize as our state prior to birth, does, on the one hand, rid me of fear over the thought of actually being dead...yet it is also, on the other hand, aside from being utterly and frighteningly inconceivable,

How is it inconceivable? Can you not conceive of the fact that you did not exist in 1800? Do you not understand what that year was like for you? It was nothing to you, and that is what every year will be like after you are dead. Those years will be nothing to you.

kind of depressing to me, in a way similar but far worse to reminiscences over the joy and innocence of childhood and the fact that I will never again experience those days of youth in which I could take the world for granted.

You won't be feeling nostalgic for bygone days when you are dead. Your problems are only with your attitude before you die, not after.

It's as though everything I strive for is but an hallucination, and the reality as it is for all time, apart from this spec of existence I cling to as all there is, has been, and will be, is literally nothing.

It isn't nothing. It is just that everything in your life is finite.

Think about a woman smiling sweetly at you. It is just for a moment. But it isn't nothing.

It takes the wind out of my sails sometimes. It spurs on a primal fear because I see infinities all around me, and I must surrender my complete self to it, and eventually let go of the pleasures and pains of life, even life itself, and bid it farewell...forever. And how DOES eternity, whether past or future, come to find itself defined at this moment, preceding the next, proceeding the last, as if additional events were added to something that has no numerical value?

Infinity isn't defined by what happens now. Your life is defined by what happens now, and some of the time near now.

You make me think of how some have reacted to the fact that, eventually, our sun will burn out. Some people have been upset by that idea. But the reality is, it is completely irrelevant to the lives of every person who has ever lived. They are really being upset over nothing that matters in their lives when such a thing upsets them. You may as well be upset that some other star will also burn out in a few billion years. That, too, is irrelevant to your life.

Anyway, those are just some of the ideas I feel literally plagued with at any given instant (much to my girlfriend's dismay, who complains I don't listen enough...).

...

You should listen to your girlfriend more.