Ask Lemmy

My biggest fear is that my office chair might break in such a way that the hydraulic piston breaks through the seat and punctures my colon.

Dementia

Dementia.

My mother has dementia.

Every time I forget something I know I should know it terrifies me.

Extinction. Our technology gives us the power of gods, but we still have the brains of hunter-gatherers optimised for living in tribes of less than 150 people. My own death doesn't worry me, I'm not bothered by knowing I'll be forgotten, but the possibility that there might not be anyone to carry on is what I think about at 3 AM when I can't sleep.

I'm afraid I'll live my whole life in fear like I'm doing now, that I'll never experience love, that one day I'll wake up old and alone, in misery and just waiting to die but too afraid end it.

Your fear of disappearing resonates the worst for me in regards to my daughter (4) doing so. It makes me want to vomit to think of her just gone, at the mercy of someone or something else, with no way to know where she is or how to save her. It rips my heart in half that so many parents throughout time have lived this exact nightmare and never received answers. I find some relief that I live in a very safe part of the world where child abductions rarely (if ever) happen, but there are a number of other ways your little girl can just vanish.

I wouldn't say this perpetually weighs on my conscience, but every time I remember it can happen, it really fucks with my head.

Having to work for another 20 years.

Being eternally trapped in a mental prison. Imagine having a panic attack that never ends. I'm pretty sure that type of prolonged stress would cause a psychotic break where your psyche fractures and you become a despondent shell. You would become deathly afraid of everything, even the people you love, because of an unceasing paranoia. That basically sounds like hell to me.

I'm not really afraid of the idea of nothingness after death, because at least then I am released from the torment of living.

Letting down people I love somehow

Death by violent means

I've had health issues since I was a kid (all stemming from developing Crohn's Disease symptoms before I was even a teenager), and a lot of them still haven't been resolved (in part of reasons such as developing new conditions due to medications I took to treat another condition). One of the worst things I fear is that if I randomly end up leaving this world in a way that incurs an autopsy, the results will end with something like "Damn, this man had issues. If his doctors had known about X then he could've lived a much better life, the treatment is simple".

I go through so much, and I've done countless research to try to track down possibilities that my doctors hadn't considered (some of my research has in fact lead to me finding out new things that my doctors didn't account for, even as of this year) - and I always have this terrifying doubt of "What if I had just chosen a different doctor, the next one on the list might've had this idea years ago and prevented some of this". That line of thinking of "Could've, should've, would've" doesn't help of course (as my friend likes to tell me "What if the sky were green?") but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it more often than I'd like to.

Micro-plastics

The speed at which we are (not) acting on climate change. Our tolerance for neoliberals/capitalists absolutely wiping their arse with the whole planet.

Something similar. Not necessarily the fear of death or a painful death, but the very real possibility that once the light goes off, you disappear for good.

I won't get into religion or anything like that, but it all feels...very inefficient. IMO, reincarnation always seemed cool, because it's essentially the reuse of consciousness in another being. I also remember reading a cool story years ago where it turned out that everyone was actually the same person, and in death you reincarnated as the next person, with the ultimate goal of having lived every life to ever live and becoming god. The idea that someone could live for even a very brief moment, and that energy is just gone is just so wasteful that the universe just seems cruel for it to even be a possibility.

The idea of living as if my life hadn't really started yet and then one day realizing I'm old and I wasted my life.

Dylan.

Everything. Everything scares me. If I stop and think about anything in particular, I slowly realize how frightening that thing really is.

Cat. Sits with its ass on your face while you sleep.

Dog. Eats its own vomit and greets others by sniffing their ass, then tries to lick you.

shivers

I have a phobia with butterfly spawn, the wiggly kind.

Can't look at it, don't wanna talk about it either cuz then the image pop up in my mind.

Don't mind the adult form or the pupa. Also fine with other larvae since they all mostly look the same.

Intolerance.

Aka, the lack of willingness to understand one another — I mean, the ability to discuss and work together toward a common goal, even with people we (deeply) disagree with — and the hostility towards whatever dares being/liking/talking/thinking different.

This is a not only a sad dead-end, imho this is also the very end of any society and of any civilization when the only other persons we can tolerate around us are exact copies of ourselves. People behaving, dressing, talking and thinking exactly like we do — or like we want them to.

This frightens me way much than anything else because I see no way to escape it and, even more terrifying to me, I see no place anywhere where one could escape it. Intolerance is growing everywhere, and it's growing fast.

Humanity. I know it's kind of self-defeating or something, but humanity just scares the shit out of me.

The idea that life maybe just isn't worth it. I can't seem to be rid of it but I take the fact that it scares me as a good sign.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't like the amount of power big corporations have. Nintendo is currently abusing their power to stifle their competition and potentially harm the future of gaming. Google recently proved that they have pretty much full control over the internet. Microsoft is ruining the entire PC market. I could name more but these are the first few that came to mind.

Alzheimer’s, and the fact that my mother’s genes put me at terrible risk of developing it. The idea of my mind slowly fracturing while my body continues to live is utterly terrifying to me, and I have actively thought about buying a gun to take care of the problem should it ever appear. Problem is, I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it if it does.

That what ultimately ends my time here, will be my own fault.

And spiders... Fuck spiders.

Time. Imagine not just you disappearing but all humans. Given enough time absolutely nothing lasts.

I don't really know how to describe it, but it's like I go through life just waiting for the other shoe to drop. When something shocking or remotely dangerous happens, my brain automatically assumes the worst is going to happen and I like go into survival mode. I get filled with such dread.

Seeing how rapidly and how fervently the public, one's own family even, can be turned into puppets of powerful interests. All it takes is the right messaging. The right conditioning. Television was just child's play. Today we've got "smart" phones, baby!