What scares you?

tetsu@sopuli.xyz to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 102 points –

For me, it's disappearing. That someday something will happen to me and no one will ever know what it was and where I am. That I will become one of those mysteries you see online and on TV shows. Whenever I think about it I feel nothing but dread.

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Dementia

Alzheimer/Dementia is one of those few situations where I really can't blame someone for going out on their own terms. The idea of being trapped inside your own effectively disintegrating mind is terrifying.

The same thought for your physical body also seems reasonable to me. Or just for intolerable pain.

Yeah I think its weird that it's considered more morally sound to make them waste away in agony then let them willingly end their suffering through controlled means.

Like, if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it. Wouldn't it be better to make sure they do it in the cleanest way possible?

I live it everyday. Others around me see and deal with it. Very frustrating. Sometimes you know its happening and sometimes your just not functioning normal anymore. Its like being a shell of your former self.

This for me. Would love a peaceful death with next to know one ever knowing who I was but with me completely knowing who I was until the last moment (well ideally in sleep so that last part is a little malleable)

This or some kind of psychosis... Mental health, neurocognitive abnormalities scare the shit out of me. That its very possible it can happen to me.

I once met a guy who was stuck in a drug enduced psychosis when I was 12 or something. It shook me pretty badly. I'm not opposed to drugs at all, but I've always had an irrational fear of halucigenic drugs since.

Lots of people make almost full recoveries from psychosis. Not so much from dementia.

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.

Oh... oh no... Damn it, I will never sit in an office chair the same ever again without thinking about this.

Have you seen the Mythbusters episode?

I don't remember it. But there's enough metal hardware under the seat that I'm sure it's basically impossible to break that way.

Having to work for another 20 years.

I was in this crystal clear cliffside cove and could see in front of me maybe 10 m or so but the Rock only went out about 5 and then just plunged into the abyss. and after exploring the coastline I swim out about 10 ft past the rocks and realized that I could see nothing but the deepest blue I'd ever seen.

literally anything could be just a few body lengths away watching me were sensing me, it was almost overwhelming.

I felt this visceral terror, that I've felt before in the middle of reading a Lovecraft story.

very much looking into the eye of something unknowable.

Oh fuck no! Dark water is a big fear of mine. I like swimming, scuba diving, snorkeling BUT those dark patches in the water make me truly feel paralyzed and electrified at the same time brbrbrbr. One time I went to the Yucatan penninsula to swim in a couple of cenotes and boy did it make my body shiver! Let alone the meaning of cenotes in mayan cosmogony and what not but the pure sheer terror that that black water gave me was like nothing else.

I understand thalassophobia. The deep is scary. Funny thing is, though, I can handle being on a ship or flying over water, even though I think about how far down it might be.

yep, I'm good with either of those. and I love swimming far out as long as the bottom is still there.

It's once the the Earth falls away that I don't want to be there.

Oh shit, just reading about this scares me. It must have been so terrifying, not knowing what's in the deep water

beaches are usually sandy or have detritus floating, but this was just stark clear, perfect blue getting deeper and deeper as it devoured the light.

Do you recall which Lovecraft story?

mountains of madness.

I had similar chills with other Lovecraft stories, but then my roommate in college told me that the first time he read mountain of madness he had like a mini breakdown because it was so terrifying, and I hadn't read that story yet.

and the way he describes the immensity of surreal psychotic landscape is pretty terrifying.

I actually read through the story like three or four times in a week to feel the chill more than once.

I haven't reached that one yet, but I'm close. I really enjoyed A Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, Rats in the Walls, The Temple, Call of Cthulhu, and the very beginning of The Festival, when he describes wandering along the seaside road toward the distant twinkling lights of a wintery village. The opening pages of that book are beautiful.

That's great.

The gothic beauty of his writing is part of what's so deceptive about his world building, he can seamlessly lull the reader into terror through hints and connotations even within beautiful descriptions until all of a sudden you're mired in the psychic clutches of lunatic behemoths.

have fun, do you have his collected works?

I actually don't remember the festival.

I have the collected works ready to read but haven't restarted it yet.

I have this one here. It's huge and leatherbound. Unfortunately it's missing several of his less popular ones. The Hound is one I'd like to read, but it isn't included in this volume.

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

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.

There is no changing the future or past actions. The only time you can change anything is this very moment. If you focus on what you may or may not have tomorrow, you aren't living today.

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 lived with cats, none has ever sat on my face.

There, there... I'm sure some cat will sit on your face someday.

Dental pain. Experienced it once and that was enough to give me lifetime nightmares. Absolute horror!

Dental procedures helped me understand that most of us would quickly buckle under torture

Oh fuck yes. I had a removed wisdom tooth get infected, and the dentist said "due to all the pus, the anesthesic won't work as well, but don't worry, we'll go as fast as possible".

It's a phrase that features frequently in my nightmares.

That and the "You'll feel some pressure" lie.

Yeah, no. I know how pressure feels and it is not that!

I am female therefore many medical procedures that should absolutely use some kind of anesthesia, do not because "it'll be over in a pinch" "it's mild discomfort" etc. IUD insertion is a big fear of mine.

Fwiw, my IUD track record is 1 easy insertion, 1 easy removal, 1 "that wasn't fun" removal and 1 "maybe giving birth would be preferable" insertion.

Your mileage may vary.

Dementia.

My mother has dementia.

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

Get tested early. Your mother's dementia may not have been found till late stage. We have treatments for the earlier stages

That's a fear I have as well. I heard walnuts are good for brain health, but they taste like dry paste. I still eat them with some fermented foods and it helps. I also heard pizzle games are supposed to help keep your brain engaged.

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.

That last part I get. I want to face death calmly and rationale and if living is painful or such would like the accessibility and option and will to take a painless option.

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

You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

Your comment makes it seem as if you exist outside of humanity. Unless you're an alien or a robot, be the change you want to see.

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.

Watch Pixar's Coco, if you haven't already. To me the idea of a part of us living on after death in the memories of others is very comforting (for the ones who have not died - I don't think it'll matter to the dead person).

That's just parenting, mate. It makes you worry about all the details you never worried about before and it makes your hair turn grey and gives you sleepless nights. But all in all it's all worth it somehow.

A hypothetical fear of course, one with my wife who I've been with for 15 years now.

One day, maybe hopefully 30-50 years in the future, my wife and I look back and think about how good our lives were. We raised happy and successful kids. We bought a house. We had dozens of pets. We celebrate the end of our life together. But she doesn't make it.

And I have to spend the final years alone with memories of her. Two controllers. Two spoons. Two of everything for decades. Now just me.

And Never being able to explain to the rest of the world how amazing she was.

I'm so terrified that my wife will go before me...

But I also don't want to let her down by going before her and making her live her own last days/weeks/years alone....

Love is so difficult

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.

Letting down people I love somehow

Ask to be their pallbearer.

Fortunately I don't know any scrum masters personally so they would not even get the experience of being let down last time by a dev. Exceot in a purely metaphorical sense I guess.

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.

Grey aliens. Yep, I know they're almost certainly not real. They freak me the frack out. It's undoubtedly all the UFO stuff I read as a kid about abductions and such. A very petite friend once threatened to dress up as one in a realistic costume to scare me in the night. I begged her not to for her personal safety: I'm certain I would not react in a safe or rational way.

Being alone at night creeps me out because of this. Driving alone in a remote, low population locale? Horrifying.

Nevertheless, I still read up on stories and other media about the paranormal. Why am I like this? No idea.

It hasn't ruined my life or anything. I've spent time alone far away from people, when I had to. I can go places at night. It's just something that creeps into my mind sometimes. I function as a grown ass man, but I still get the creeps about it when I'm alone. I don't know that I'll ever completely shake it.

Statistical chances of being killed by grey aliens based on current statistics: 0%.

Statistical chance of colorectal cancer: 4%

Almost certainly not real... :)

I think there is an extreamly high probability they are real, considering it's been millions of eye witness reports by now.

I guess it's easier to assume every single one of those are just wrong. But if even one of them is right, we have visitors.

I don't even understand why people find it so difficult to believe. I keep hearing "yeah they can't travel here because distance", as if humans somehow has all the knowledge about space travel despite hardly even understanding how to get to the moon. :)

Actually we even forgot how to get to the moon. That's how much we care about space travel. Yet we are experts at it, somehow. :)

It's dumb, which is why I assume it has to do with psychological safety mechanisms and that's why people can't think rationally about this.

Not one shred of physical evidence exists to support the hypothesis that earth has been visited by intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s all fairy tales.

BTW, the nearest neighboring star is 4.25 light years away. You might want to marinate on that.

Oh shit, humans don't know about something so it can't exist. :)

You go ahead and wait for your evidence, bud. Will be a while.

LOL. So you believe in bullshit that people claim to have witnessed? How many people claim to have been spoken to by some magic daddy in the sky?

I read somewhere that so much of the Saturn V development wasn't documented properly, or the documentation has been lost, that it's hard to easily build that system anymore. In that sense, I guess, we've forgotten how to do it. Obviously, the math and physics are still understood, so it should be as simple as designing a rocket of equal or greater capacity, and it appears we have.

Apparently, the Artemis I mission already put an unmanned mission with the Orion spacecraft through to orbit the moon and return safely to the Earth. They're planning a crewed flyby in 2025 and Artemis III is projected to land sometime later this decade.

It's a crime I didn't know that before looking things up about the Saturn V.

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.

My biggest fear is something happening to my kids. If something happened to them my hair would turn white, I would curl up in a ball and die.

Or something happening to my wife (who I’ve been in a relationship with more than half my life now). This is about the only thing for me. I’ve come to gripes with my own mortality but even I’ll admit it would be hard to move on from the loss of a close loved one. Grief is just difficult.

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

And spiders... Fuck spiders.

Getting old. Because it's like old people are just ignored. Nobody thinks they are good looking or interesting and they are mostly just tolerated, not appreciated.

That in combination with body starting to break down is not a great feeling.

When you get old, there are often other old people to hang out with and they mostly find each other interesting and appreciate them. You'll be ok and you'll think young people are naive and you'll laugh at their obsession with superficial things. Medical issues are real. Take care of your back, knees, and teeth.

Yeah perhaps. And good advice about health for sure.

I don’t know. Most people I work with and know think the elderly are fascinating since they have so many stories and some experience to learn from. My next door neighbor is in his 80s and I love chatting with him and his wife.

Yeah but you are the exception, a bit wiser and emotionally mature than most. :)

And its because of this real lack of quality care for the elderly (outside of the wealthy elderly) that I workout and eat right as much as I can. I probably won't be able to afford a good retirement home so I need to stay as health and fit as I can for as long as I can.

I do the same. Exercise, eat healthy and sleep properly. Once the body starts to get real problems, fun is over....

My grandpa died a few years back. I really loved him. I miss him. Same with my great grandma, she died when i was 20. Both had fascinating and harrowing life stories.

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.

That I don't know that my memories are true, or that I might just suddenly experience eternal suffering.

Yes, this! Also, I have a fear of that I could have just appeared in a simulation, with all of my memories preloaded. It feels so eerie not being able to know if I appeared right this second, or if we're in a simulation or not.

Actually, the probabilities that we're in a simulation seem quite high. Imagine a universe, where there are 10 technologically advanced enough civilizations that start simulations. But why would the start just one simulation? Why not millions of them? And then the people inside said simulations also start them. So all-in-all, there are billions of simulations. It would be more probable that we're in one of them, rather than that we're in a real universe.

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.

See https://lemmy.world/post/18437211

That is awful, Celiac's (and really any autoimmune disease) is no joke. I see a lot of parallels reflected in their post and I truly hate that for them so much - constantly struggling to find foods that you can tolerate, having numerous surgeries, seeing a million different doctors, being in and out of the hospital all the time to the point that its a second home, lab test after lab test that only result in more questions than answers, symptoms and other issues spiraling up due to complications of going through the condition - you name it.

I feel for them, every day feels like you've got the curse of Sisyphus. I feel like there has to be a solution for people like them and I, and its unfortunate that there is just so much about the body and its various systems that we don't understand. I constantly struggle with the idea that we've come so far with the sciences, and yet it feels like in matters of human physiology like the GI, immune, and nervous system we've barely scratched the surface.

Honestly not to take away from your fear but it's the light at the end of a tunnel. I can't just walk into the ocean and leave my family and pets to fend for themselves, but when it eventually happens it'll be a relief.

Medical needles/injections, and that moment when we die. Not death itself, but that moment when the lights go out. I feel like I'll know and be very scared. Also mold for some reason. I can't bring myself to touch it or clean it, so I just have to prevent it or, worse case, chuck whatever has the mold.

Heights, depths; but not consistently.

After considerable reflection, I realised that a lack of a margin for error is what truly terrifies me.

Lot of contenders really! And the only solution is to try not to think about it, these are things I can't do a god damn thing about.

Heart disease

Brain aneurysms

The fact that just experiencing negative emotions degrades your health (that is so unfair); depressed because everything's gone to shit? Mad because people keep fucking you over? You don't live as long because of it.

Basically let's just say all the ways the human body can fail you and isn't equipped properly for the lives we lead. The food I'm "supposed" to eat disgusts me, and I could be on the verge of death at any given moment and not know it.

The fact that we're less than a single ember in the history of the universe and all that astronomers believe is charted to happen after us is like, incomprehensibly massive cosmic events, lot of black holes.

The fact that some day I'm going to die and that's just going to be it is chilling, the most I can hope to is try to be one of the "fortunate" ones that makes it to around 100 years of age; and even then I'll probably be tired of it and physically/mentally degraded pretty severely by then. What's it like after you die? It's exactly the same as it was before you were born.

Oh yeah, black holes. You go near one of them and time slows down as you're torn apart at the atomic level. Imagine falling into a meat grinder but it takes a thousand years, or a million. You'd be insane and dead.

The idea of suffering in silence while people either can't see that you're distressed or don't care. This could apply to just being depressed and wishing you had friends, or like, actually having something bad happen to you where you'd be fine if you had another person around, but you don't. Something like choking or falling off a ladder while living on your own.

Climate change and the fading light of earth's biodiversity .

The rise of political folks who desire modern fascism.

Late stage capitalism and its tendency to basically make the entire world worse.

False vacuum would be a nice addition to your list

Sort of falls in with the "we are a single spark" thing, like, yup, there are 50 different ways the universe could just kind of end all of human history forever.

Heights, s.n.a.k.e.s, clowns, and being kidnapped and getting sick or not having feminine products while I'm locked in a place without adequate facilities. Also, the vastness of things like the ocean or the grand canyon. And that I'll wake up from the dream, be 12, have to relive my life, and wont know how to get back to this exact spot.

What is so bad about snakes?

No feet

That's not true. Many snakes are over twelve inches long! Hope this helps.

Does not make me feel better. 😱😳 The way they move makes me nauseous. If i see them in the street i feel like i have to pick my feet up off the floor if my car.

Hopefully you encounter as few as possible in the future.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Even though I am an arachnophobe, I also just can't stand insects in general. They're unholy creatures that I wouldn't mind if we removed without destroying the world. The worst part is I'm pretty sure my fear of insects comes from an early childhood cub scouts(?) day camp(?) trip where I opened a tarp on a wooden tent frame and saw a bunch of ants, so it's an early, somehow traumatic, childhood experience.

I can agree with Archer on this one: brain aneurysms and saltwater crocodiles.

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

Change. Particularly the kind I can't deal with.

The past year or two in the online landscape has been turbulent and has shown me that I fall back to the familiar as a coping mechanism. And if that familiar should be unavailable... Ouch. ;_;

If you can't control the change, why would you treat yourself as if it's your fault? Change is inevitable. Learn to be at peace with yourself and exterior changes won't affect how you feel.

I would suggest a few books for you if you're interested.

People, dying without ever been loved by a woman. Both of those are related.

The fact I won't be able to retire. I don't have the money because of financial abuse from my SO. I honestly don't know what I'll ever do. People in my city are living in tents in the park and I assume I will have to do that. I'll have a good pension but it won't be enough for the cost of living as it is now.

(Please don't suggest I leave, as kind as you all are, I cannot afford it).

I want to die awake. Preferably a gunshot to the head. That bad things happen to good people even death, life isn't fair but you play the hand your dealt, and while not in vain, life has little meaning when thinking of times massive scale. Like the poem of Ozymandiaz.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”