People Share The Most Horrifying Existential Questions That Keep Them Up At Night.

Ever have that nagging feeling of existential dread?

No? Well, read on to find out what that is!

Yes? Then you will relate so, so hard.

Enjoy.

Many thanks to all the Redditors who responded. Check out more answers from the source at the end of this article!

1. I don’t fear being dead, I believe it will be much like those billions of years before I existed. But I do fear the manner of my death. Whatever it may be. I hope it’s a long way off, I hope it’s quick and painless, and I truly hope that I don’t see it coming.

That’s because what I really fear is that moment of realisation where I know it’s arrived. Whether it’s falling a great height maybe, or noticing catastrophic injuries, a crashing vehicle, or worst of all, realising that I’m trapped or burning and that all I’ll know for the remainder of my existence is fear and pain.

It makes my palms sweat.

Of course, this kind of worry doesn’t do much for productivity so evolution has kindly led our brains to master the art of not thinking about all of this. Most of the time.

But every now and again we’re reminded that every minute we live is another minute closer to that moment.

It’s coming for all of us.

Stay safe.

Nw5gooner

2. Any time I start to contemplate what consciousness actually is, I get a headache. It’s just so weird using our Brain to study our Brain. It’s like googling Google.

Rhokanov

3. Never mind asking what happens to us after we die. What happened to us before we were born? I’m not so concerned about where my consciousness will go afterwards as I am confused about where it came from in the first place. There was no me ever before in history then one day there just was.

Coffeeverse

4. That we are just a cluster of uncountable atoms which interact with each other in a specific way. What is the meaning of dying? Our atoms will be still there and they will be re-utilized by nature for something else.

spleniusredditis

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5. There are things we will NEVER understand simply because OUR BRAINS CAN’T HANDLE IT. The universe, with all its colors and sounds, is just vibrations. How we see it is unique. What if there IS life out there, and we can’t see it because our brains are too primitive?

Neil Tyson puts it this way: we are 96% (genetically) alike from the chimp. That 4% difference of DNA is the difference between doing basic sign language and building hubble telescopes. WHAT IF… there was ANOTHER being, 4% different from us in the same direction that we are from the chimp? We’d pretty much be idiots in their presence.

kkibe

6. What is out there? This universe is so big that we will never know. And I, for one, don’t believe that we will ever become an intergalactic civilization.

PowerfulWarbird

7. If we can only know the universe through our five senses just how much of reality are we completely, hopelessly oblivious of?

K33pMeHangin0n

8. If I’m teleported and all my molecules are torn apart and sent to a remote destination – did I just die and the “me” that comes out the other end is a clone, or separate entity?

necromundus

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9. Your mom had a mom, who had a mom, who had Mom, who had a mom, who had a mom…etc… Blows my mind.

u3h

10. The fact that I’ll be old and eventually die. My grandpa is my hero and in his early 80’s now. Sharp as a tack. But he was in his early 60’s when I was in elementary school.

My whole life he’s just been old- incapable of doing some physical things. Sore. Tired. But very, very intelligent. Handy. Wonderful with family. Seems to just get everything right.

It’s the gap in between trying to figure myself and my life out currently and that point of being an elder that messes up my current existence, considering we are all ephemeral in the end.

tst3c

11. Atoms have electrons whizzing around them. What are the electrons whizzing through? Not air, since air is made of atoms… What is in between the pieces of atoms?? What is that empty space made of?

ketchup_delivery

12. Why Donald Duck wears a shirt, but no underwear ?!

MITSF

13. Why is there something rather than nothing?

awolliamson

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14. You’re sent to investigate a hostile planet. It’s so bad that you can’t leave your vessel, you have to gather information about this place using sensors on the outside of your craft. Your craft doesn’t even have windows.

Your sensors include a couple of visible light cameras that only face in one direction, a couple of simple microphones, a few sensors for analysing the chemical content of solid, liquid and gas samples, and some sensors that can detect temperature, pressure, friction, etc… Your craft also has a gyroscope and accelerometer to detect its own movement, and you receive information from your craft’s motors so that you can track the position of appendages.

You go about gathering information on the planet, learning about its systems as you do and writing up reports. One day a door in the craft that you didn’t know was there opens. A man walks in from a corridor. You aren’t in a spacecraft, just a well dressed set. It was all an elaborate simulation. The information you were receiving from your sensors was just being generated by computers. The video feed was being recorded on a different continent.

The first two paragraphs describe your actual life. The craft is your body. Is the third paragraph possible? If it is, what is “you”? Who walks into the craft? Where do they walk in from?

blndcavefsh

15. Could God microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn’t eat it?

s0undslikepuget_

16. The possibility of an alien life form that is so so different from us and so much more advanced that we cant even begin to comprehend its existence or its motivations or its way of seeing and affecting the world.

The way a bacteria cannot possibly understand a human, no matter how hard it tries. It just literally does not have the biological machinery to understand what a human is.

In popular media, alien encounters typically take the form of something we can comprehend or at least experience with our normal senses: spaceships landing on Earth, messages arriving from far away, people getting abducted for experiments, etc. These are all things we can observe or at least acknowledge using our standard machinery, ontology, etc.

But what if one day weird stuff just starts happening.

Gravity starts to fluctuate or physical laws start to break down and we have no clue what is happening or why and it’s because something so big and advanced is “interacting” with us the way we “interact” with ants when we dump a bunch of cement on them to build a highway. When we build a highway on an ant hill the ants have no clue what is happening and how it fits into the broader scope of “highway construction”. They just notice that something huge and catastrophic is occurring but have no way of even beginning to grasp its significance or source or cause.

What if that is the form that an alien encounter takes rather than something more proximate to human experience, such as spaceships landing on Earth…

flowermotion

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17. Does the universe keep expanding until it collapses? Then just start the whole thing over. Essentially repeating everything an infinite amount of times.

NotUsingMyMainOne

18. Would you rather die someday or live forever?

I definitely want to live longer than 100 years. Almost certainly longer than 1000 years. Maybe I want to live a million years, or even a billion. But forever? Literal immortality? Even if the universe itself doesn’t experience heat death or something, even if civilization were eternal, I honestly don’t know if I’d want to be a part of it.