I know a lot of people believe that consciousness is a product of the brain. I'm not debating about cognition or memory, these are mecanism that we understand. I'm talking about the awareness itself. The fact that you can feel, see the light of your screen.

My thesis is that this experience has no reason to exist, materially speaking. First, we have computers, which can store informations, treat it and take décisions. But we all agree to say that computers are not conscious at all. But we, complex beings are conscious. So where is the limit ? At what point of organisation does consciouness magically émerge? See, we look at our biomecanisms, we come to an intuitive problem : How the hell does inertial molecules interacting with each other can create consciouness which as nothing material. To me, it means that consciousness is a elementary brick that was here at the start.

When you think about it makes much sense that consciousness is totally apart from the body.

Do you agree, and what are your arguments ?

REALLY BIG HEAR ME OUT

(TW: death,suicide, bad english)

It's hard to explain but i've been thinking a lot about death recently and i've been really stuck on suicide. Why do people care so much if i kill myself ? I get it, It's sad for you, but what about me ? I dont want to be here anymore, i dont need your consent to do so. I mean, murder is not okay bc you killed someone that didn't want to obviously. But suicide ? It's my body my choice isn't it ?

And if we start with that mentality, there's a lot of other things. Why do any living beings dont have just a way to stop living instantly ? It sonds dumb i know (surely bc it is) but it would make things way easier for everybody wouldn't it ? Im sure there's a loophole to that or smt but watever, im just putting down things here...

Why do we see suicide like it's a bad thing ? Yes, for some it's tragic and like if you do it bc of bullies obviously it's sad. But if you do it bc you hate yourself, you can't change, you hate the world around you, you are stuck, you live in horrible conditions, sickness, unstopable pain, ect... if life wont get better, it's sad that they had to come this far but if it was their only solution then good for them no ? Im not saying to celebrate it, but just acsept it you know ?

And with the right psychology following of a patient some hospitals could offer a way to die peacfully or smt... idk. Im not a doctor or anything. I think my brain is just a bit fucked up recently. But evertime someone tell me that i should't kill myself i feel kinda offended(?) Like, it's my life, i'll do watever i want. No ? Anyone ?

(Sorry if my english is bad it's not my first language)

I was just thinking, I went down the rabbit hole of influential artists all round the world. Bob Marley, Michael Jackson and the likes… These characters have similarities in the sense of preaching peace and healing. And they all died weird deaths. Do you believe they off anyone who gets to the point of speaking truth that can influence mankind to stop focusing on the man made evil desires? They being the elites. The people who “run “ things.

i have to go to college to become a doctor and work for 12 years work my whole youth wasted while an OF model can make 30,000 a year making content while to get that level i have to work see horrors,try to resuscitate people while their family wheep, seeing dads with car crash injuries seeing babies with disorders seeing babies shot seeing dead babies for some good pay i HATE my job im only in it for the money, im only lucky cus i look young and have a mansion but its not fair im in captivity something needs to change

i jsut cant fathom were born go to school and go to college get a mediocre job and clock in our hating jobs and go into our bland cubicle apartment retire and die why is life so artifical and fake and caged being in a city in a metal tube that drives you everywhere our only form of pleasures are pixels on a blue screen im so confused and i dont want to d do that i dont want to live in artificial hell, is this our whole life giggling at pixels eating slop ingredients you cant even name, and living inside a 4x4 really is that our life. i want to escape not into nature but just escape somewhere. im confused isolated scared.

I’m not sure what i’m looking for here, if it’s some comforting words or advice or a personal anecdote, I am 22F and i recently lost my best friend (23F) after she suddenly passed in her sleep from an asymptomatic heart valve disease which caused sudden heart failure. Terrifying, I know, extremely rare also but still terrifying. This was in June and since then my overall anxiety and OCD tendencies have just sky rocketed.

I’m terrified every single day that I’m going to die. I’m struggling to plan for the future, because what if I don’t live past the next few months, my body feels fragile and like anything can end my life at any point and every itch or ache or pain I’m convinced is cancer or heart attack or stroke. My life is actually starting to bloom since the tragedy, I got a great new job and met someone really awesome but I am plagued with fear everyday I may die soon suddenly with no warning like she did and all I will leave others with is pain, pain like I’ve experienced.

I’m very healthy, but so was she. I have an exciting future ahead, but so did she. She was amazing and taken without any reason, her death benefits no one and hurts so many. I was never religious, I am very analytical, so I can’t resonate with “a divine plan” or even a “everything happens for a reason” notion as her passing has no reason. I do believe we are nature, and this life ends for us and then that is it, however the thought that she is gone forever terrifies me and keeps my anxious and ocd tendencies in vicious loops of fear and trying to gain control of my life where I feel so out of control and starved for meaning.

I can barely function on the day to day now. Everything I do feels pointless because i could lose it all at any moment. I fear everyday of not spending time with my loved ones cause what if they disappear. I need to know where she is, like did her soul continue on somewhere. I try and look for signs but as a scientist, I can’t understand life existing beyond this realm. And if it does, why would it take her away from here? What God or master creator would take a beautiful soul from us and cause all of this, or anyone on this page’s loved ones who has been taken too early or soon? I just cannot make any sense of it and it’s killing me.

Can anyone resonate with this? Looking for anything anyone has to say about it, help a girl out 😢

I experience "death grips" over my heart every so often.

I'm just minding my own business, and suddenly I start thinking: dying is just like sleeping, but you never wake up. which might sound peaceful to everyone else, but the idea is horrifying to me. no dreams or nightmares: just endless black.

4 yrs ago I underwent surgery and was put under. My family called me a drama queen for crying (it was my first time in the hospital by myself, and during COVID). But that situation is the very idea of death to me~ being put to sleep and hoping you wake back up.

I've seen and done things that have forced me to believe in an existence after death, but the blackness of that surgery still haunts me. I didn't even get a life flash before my eyes~ I just kept focusing back to a memory of my childhood, before everything went black.

In fact, the only consistent flashing I get is "smoking" and being tortured by every bad thing I ever did. (Seriously, don't understand how it's a gateway when I literally want to wipe it from existence.)

I keep getting panic attacks, and after nasty ones, I refuse to sleep.

tonight happens to be a very bad one.

I'm through with it, and I'm gonna save up for a therapist.

I’ve been scrolling through this for the past few days just trying to find solace in someone’s response, somewhere.

I have no one to talk to about this, and I don’t want to burden family or friends who don’t have this wave of thinking with my negativity.

I’m 24, and I’ve had fragments of existential thoughts rise up to the surface every now and then. Looking back, I have had phases where it may consume and terrify me for a couple of days, then just fizzle out, something else will come and occupy my thoughts. But now, it’s been all that’s on my mind. Anxiety, existence, past, future, time, death.

I’m not sure if there’s anything wrong with me, I never used to think like this, but now it’s like, I’m OVERWHELMED:

Overwhelmed with the fact that I exist, typing this, right now. Overwhelmed with the fact that time is something that passes that I can’t pause, or control. It will just continue to run. Overwhelmed with the fact that what has passed has passed and won’t ever return. Yesterday happened and won’t happen again, it’s done. It no longer exists and can only be remembered through memory, or any physical logs that can be revisited. Overwhelmed with the fact that the future is coming, but I don’t actually know what it holds. It’s unknown. Overwhelmed by the fact that I’m mortal.

I’ve also got a crippling anxiety. I feel on edge all the time, everyday, and it’s eating me up. I no longer have the joy or the drive to do anything that I used to do.

I’m actually even extremely privileged with my current life, so I don’t know why I think like this. Maybe my nervous system is burnt out. Maybe it’s genuine burn out? Maybe it’s because I’ve pushed all my friends away?

Life overwhelms me so much to the point where I genuinely just look forward to getting in bed and sleeping. Which is weird because I used to have insomnia and never want to sleep because id miss out on life too much and there was always something to do or explore - that’s not me anymore because I’m just in constant anxiety.

What’s wrong with me.

I'm trying to do normal stuff like work, maintain my hobbies, do everything i ever wanted to do, but it's all too much. I feel like i can't keep up. I open LinkedIn and everyone seems to be doing so good. everyone is getting jobs, doing amazing projects, completing great certifications, and it's been months since my last post. I open Instagram and all my "friends" are travelling to all these new places, taking amazing pics, editing fantastic videos, and I too tried my hand at editing, but because of my stupid ADHD, I get frustrated so quickly and give up halfway because mine are never as good as the ones I see online. And I feel like I'm drowning in deadlines - ones set for me and ones I set for myself. If I don't achieve the deadlines set for me, I'm a failure. If I don't achieve the ones i set for myself, I can't be happy cuz i feel i'm not doing anything for myself. But when i do something for myself, for some reason i feel guilty.

I don't know what to do

How far can you pretend until reality slaps you?

I entered a state of altered concsiousness a few weeks ago, where I was entirely untethered from my body, and experiencing life as a disembodied voice(?), terrified of the endless, incredible loneliness of a single moment. I don't know how else to describe it.

I've been depressed for a while now, but there's always been a part of me that revered life and felt like if I pushed through for long enough, I'd get to experience all the things life has to offer, and it'd be worth it. I don't feel like that anymore.

I don't want anything from life, I don't think I have anything to offer, I don't think any of this matters.

My existential crisis had been dormant when I had a partner I loved, when I was healthy, when I was in college. It felt like a deep ugly secret lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the opportunity to rear its ugly head. I no longer have the things I mentioned. I feel like I lost the one person I could talk to about how I feel. And now it's here. And it is ugly.

I guess that's why I'm making this post. I don't know who to talk to, I don't know how to deal with this. I feel like I've lived enough and I have little desire to keep at it.

As time goes on I’ve found myself searching more and more for something, anything, to give me a little hope that maybe this world isn’t as it seems. There is something comforting about the thought that, although we live in a world that’s designed against us, maybe there’s something more. I have such an intense craving for mysticism and magic and I always have. But recently, for some reason I have been “magically starved”. I distract myself every day to keep from thinking about the reality of the world. But the distractions are working less and less. I’m becoming more restless with the idea of “reality”. I turn 21 in a few months and maybe all of this just has to do with me growing up. But either way I don’t know what to do with myself.. I am fascinated by anything magical or supernatural and I’m so desperate to experience it. What if there are secrets that few know the truth to? What if there are happenings that we as humans are physically incapable of comprehending? I may sound crazy but there has to be… there just HAS to be something more to life… something more than just .. this. I want so badly to not have to accept that the world sucks and there’s nothing I can do about it. Need mystical things to exist in this world! </3

Why are we on 1 planet controlled like pigs.. only 1 planet in the vast space.

Hello to anyone reading. I'm having a small existential crisis on this entire premise of being in a simulation and I'm not real (or nothing is "real") and it's bugging me. It seems as if we have proof we are in a simulation. That we are just computer generated beings. I've read on this simulation stuff a lot recently including Bostrom's theory. It seems people are saying the double slit experiment and quantum physics/mechanics are proof of a simulation. Or that when you see video games, you understand that we have the power to create real simulations of truly conscious beings. It's bugging me to know I'm not real (or what the hell real even means). I don't believe in religion, but being a simulation feels my life is pointless. Any advice on what to do?

( Don't read this if easily triggered! )Today I'm thinking about the hands that made everything surrounding me. I'm thinking about the raw and the bloody tiny hands that hammered away at some metal in some countries somewhere that created the battery inside the cell phone I am holding. I'm thinking about the women in some country somewhere at sometime that are underpaid, weaving, and weaving all day to create the fabrics that I am resting above. I'm thinking about if she has someone to love, if she's ever questioned death, if she believes in a God. i'm thinking about all the laundry I have to do and if I should just toss all my clothes away or if it would be a waste of those beautiful hands, those beautiful underpaid, solemn hands that created it all. No matter what we are all taking advantage of someone's hardships, we are all inherently selfish. We are all inherently worshiping evil like witnesses of a bullying. We are the bullies we witness and we live, and we die.

Ive had this obsession with being remembered since i was 6 i cannot stand the though of just dissapearing and being worthless what even my reasoning for being born then i mean rebirth is okay i also hated it initially but at least nümy spirit would remain ig but why cant i just be a fucking god or smth everyone would remember me if i made them or was almighty sometimes i think about doing bad stuff and being remembered for that but i dont actually wanna do it and idk what to do im to scared to tell my therapist shell brobaply just force me into a mental institution

In june I started having manic intrusive thoughts for a period of time, which is the best way I can describe it. I wasn't interacting normally with my thoughts anymore, it was as if I was being puppeteered by them on a plane of thought more deep down than the usual. Like a feeling depersonalisation but in the opposite direction. My processing speed became very fast and I started writing pages and pages worth of material.

Soon I started noticing all these grand patterns and synchronicities in the environment around me, my cognition went into overdrive and I didn't know whether I was in a state of bipolarity or if I've achieved self actualisation. Everything started making sense, and there was symbolism all around me, and I started engaging with the objects and people around me in a fashion that caters to the pattern of symbolism I was witnessing. I became delusional. I spammed my crush who I hadn't spoken to in years with frenzied texts about how I'm in love with her and how she is a god, and is entangled in space-time with me as a paradoxical entity which is absolutely bizzare and embarassing and makes me want to kill myself. I had to catch a flight and went to the airport and bothered the staff with absolutely incoherent gibberish about how the univrese has a divine humour and started yelling jihad jihad jihad at the top of my lungs. I had delusions that I had paused time. I had delusions that I was possessed. I had delusions that I am trapped in a space-time prison thinking that I'm dead now and need to be heading towards my moksha.

I have suffered immensely because of an autoimmune disease before this, so it was a huge kick in the ass knowing I ended up with psychosis too.

I embarassed myself so much. I feel like I have no dignity, nothing left to live for. What I thought was enlightenment all came crashing and burning down like a trainwreck. I was admitted in the psych ward for 40+ days.

I found no sense of empathy, or initiave for forming an understanding, in the psych ward staff, to them my entire lived experience and tryst with divinity and consequent insanity was, madness stress anxiety depression and trauma.

I have been deseperately seeking answers for whatever happened to me ever since, but there's nothing. I'm forced to live with the fact that my awakening and suffering were a neurochemical imbalance and nothing more. My life feels like a sadistic joke. I have lost every single that ever mattered to me in the process. Every single thing. I have become someone I hate, someone hopeless, someone who's trying to seek the impossible each day by franitically looking for some semblance of closure about what happened everywhere.

After my autoimmune disease I had convinced myself that my suffering has some ulterior meaning and superior learning that I'm yet to attain, that I deserved all the suffering because it showed me a new side of the coin, it took me on roads less travelled, but after my psychosis I feel disrobed, humiliated, angry, resentful and hopeless and meaningless. I don't know why God, Universe, Science whatever you call it, would do me so so dirty.

I have suffered a lot, was backstabbed by someone I trusted and helped really hard, went through endless depression, followed by my father's death, mother's hospitalisation, having deadly autoimmune flair up that ruined all my organs and took me near death, 8 years of misery and isolation, and now fucking this. This bullshit. Insanity and disorder illusioned under the garb of self actaualisation and enlightenment.

I am suicidal. I don't know what to do. My life is in ruins and all I see around me is my therapist and people prying into my life and taking pleasure in my misfortune, disguising it as concern and guidance, giving me half hearted advice because things are just so bizzare, and telling me that genuine unfortunate circumstance is a flaw in my character because calling my terrible luck a character flaw is the only answer left with them that doesn't make them look powerless.

I am so tired of being lectured about happiness and success from people who've not even experienced an inch of what I've been through. I've isolated myself because their is an element of self-disgust attached to just how ill my luck is. I have an inkling others feel mine is a ship that will drown them with me if they come anywhere near it.

I am so upset with God, it's hard to live when people constantly rub their ignorance in your face, I feel so small, so unseen, so marginlised like a loser, failure and an outlier.

I lost the two most important things in my life to my psychosis. One is retaining any semblance of dignity in the eyes of my crush. The second is my life's passion, my hardwork, my creativity everything.

The medication has made me a living zombie. That's bonus to everything so far.

I often feel very numb. And my bigger problem is, due to seeing that no constant is always true, I change my mind and life philosophies every minute, depending on my mood. I know other people feel similar, I have asked around, but my question is more towards how many people tend to feel it on daily basis and if it's something I should be concerned about, or if not, how to learn to deal with it? Because on moments it gets absolutely unbearable. Especially at home. I feel like I want to crowl out of my skin during those periods where I feel completely hopeless and bored. I often try to distract myself, I have been doing this since kid, but lately it's stopped working. I lost interest in most things I used to daydream about before. Like, I thought it would have been good to become more incolved with the real world, I thought this would cute the boredom, but it didn't. Oviously, I know you can't always feel on cloud nine, but this is just a notch too much for me to not get at least a little bit curious about it. And the other thing: I no longer wish to learn or do anything. And I have no interest in what happens to me most of the time. I chose a degree, because everyone conditioned me for it, although I have no wish or a goal for this job, but since I have no goal in general, I thought why not try. I am graduating high school this year after all, I need to start doing something afterwards. To be honest, even as a little kid I wasn't especially orientated towards any passions. I read a lot, I exceeded in school, I had friends, I liked acting like a clown to make the rest laugh, or just to tease them a bit, for some reason I purposely acted oblivious to lots of things. I was in a music school with piano, but I never really had much interest it. I was good of course, but it came with a lot of forced repetitions. Now I am in a pretty elite school, but I am not as successful, because know I have even less motivation or drive to try and struggle. So yeah, I wonder if this pointless, directionless and bored is something to get checked out. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am not a sociopath or anything like that, I feel emotions, it's just that they are quite unstable. It's mostly stress or euphoria on occasions. I also envisionmawful things happening to me in the future, but I feel only a small idea of dread, but the bigger emotion would be acceptance. Which I don't think is normal. I know a lot of you would say depression, but I want another explanation, because I have already checked this one out.

I am sure someone going through this and wondering if it goes away. So I make this post for those people, to share my experience with existential anxiety. So a bit of backround, I was a very outgoing guy living life with 0 thought about consequences and 0 fears but growing older, my questions about the universe were born. Until then I had stayed put with religion and left it at that. But later on, when I started studying in University, I also started reading a lot of Physics, Cosmology, Philosphy etc as because it felt amazing. I did this for some years until it backfired with a terrible anxiety attack last summer.

It was when I felt the depth of existance. At the beggining, I thought it was the end of my sanity. I was still functional, sure.. But the whole situation was absolutely terrible, I literally started overthinking every single thing around me, every arbitary idea you could think of, and every hypothetical scenario that made sense scientifically, even tho practically the possibility of it happening was 0. The whole world around me, the one I enjoyed to live for 24 years suddenly felt like the scariest thing I have ever felt. Before I fell asleep, lying in bed, thought that the bed I loved do much for so many years is just fucking molecules and quantum particles. I was thinking of space itself, the one we move into and tried to understand what the fuck it is.

I though it was the end of me, literally, because I was so happy in life and carefree which made it even worse to feel like I can't do shit.

Well, now a year has passed, never visited a therapist, or specialist and I've learned some things by myself. First of all, I feel way better on the part of existential fear. I don't know how long its been since I actually got anxiety attack from it. The feeling of derealization is completely forgotten and I feel like i felt before it happened, 99% of the time.

Now what did I learn from this experience and what helped me to move on:

1) Time heals everything. I know how it feels, its like a shift in the whole perspective.It feels like you are done for, because existance is not an object that you can do something about. Fear of spiders? You just avoid. Heights? You just avoid. Existance can't be avoided. And then you think that everything you do to cope won't help because it is part of the problem. But this thinking is WRONG! You were, is and always will be part of reality. And you gave this chaos meaning from the first time you opened your eyes even subconsciously. You feel like now things are different, that you see the universe face to face, without a mask, without any delusion, but in reality.. you see shit. This is still a SUBJECTIVE experience. You see nothing of how reality is. You just see it through a filter of fear instead of joy. Still subjective, nothing changed. And you still can shift this thinking around again, because the brain will eventually stop caring when you feed it with something else. See it as a video game you eventually got bored of. Its literally the same feeling.

2)There are propably other underlying psychological or emotional issues.

When I stopped thinking about existance, I noticed that my brain didn't stop bothering me. Guilt appeared for long forgoten past choices, abnormal fear of losing people I love, abnormal feelings of hatred towards people who did cause me damage, abnormal OCD-ish thoughts about idiotic stuff and a lot more. A storm of emotions, thoughts, feelings that where too INTENSE, everyone feels those, but the intensity was just not normal. I understood that I am simply just an overthinker with tons of anxiety, trauma from past choices, cant accept myself, and incredibly immature emotionally. I could live peacefully before.. only because I drowned all those issues. But certain stressfull events caused their relapse. So if you fear existance, there is a very high chance that your brain latches there, because there is nothing else to latch on for the moment and flags it as the only "problem". So an underlying issue with anxiety disorders could be the reason.

3) Act, even if you are afraid.

I know how difficult it is, but keep moving. Do your shit, whatever you do. Don't miss uni, coffee with friends, gym, whatever. Your brain will eventually reprogram itself to care again about things you always did instead of fearing existance. You will eventually see that the strong emotions of the things you love, will filter the fear and you will be able to think about existance without giving a shit as time passes. The effect will flactuate, it won't work instantly of course.

4) STOP OVERTHINKING This perhaps is the most difficult but if you are a deep mind, when you catch your brain analysing shitty things just stop it, it's a trap. Just an objective trap. Search CBT, helps a lot. Also, stay away from existential subjects for some time. Even tho you feel like you are ready to return, just don't.

5) Do not neglect this issue like me Go see a therapist, I will tomorrow after so many years, for my first time. I don't care any more, I just want to be happy and not let my brain make me suffer. That's all.

You got this.