/lit/ - Literature

The universe goes dark forever and hopes cease to exist.

>>10694140
I once had a dream where I lived out my entire life and died happily of age surrounded by family.
My fear is that I’m doom to repeat that moment again and again for eternity, never going to either an afterlife or a void, but living the same life forever

>>10694140
never getting married and having kids

What happens after the universe ends?

>>10694140
How can you be deprived of a concept unless you fail to understand it? Do you mean you will be deprived of the objects the cognitions signify?

>>10694166
A new one probably begins

>>10694172
But what if not. What if it's just nihil

>>10694174
universe ends and contracts and then another big bang happens and history repeats itself, and you live again

Idk the board for this but I wish there was a board for appreciation of painting and visual art. The Scream is one of my favorite paintings and Munch is a great painter

The description of Hell from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

>>10694181
technically it's /his/ but rarely gets discussed there
you should read Knut Hamsun which is the literary equivalent of Munch. from the same place/time period

>>10694171

I don't know. I'm not that far along yet. That's probably a good thing. Fuck, I'm okay with death I just want it to be like I go back to sleep like I was before birth I don't want to live in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream world. I'm scared that's what will happen.

>>10694191
I've seen Hamsun thrown around, is he real shit Munch in prose? I'm so in love with Munch's style I'll pick him up if this is real shit.

>>10694199
he actually is, as far as existentialist dread goes

What if we can't escape our consciousness? What if our minds simply are indesctructible and can not ever cease to exist?

Not being remembered when I die and drifting into nothingness because there is no afterlife.

Lads, you've all died a thousand thousand thousand times before. You were just as scared this time as all the other times. Just let it happen. Next life will be better or worse. What does it matter? You won't know any better. Your carbon will be useful short term.

>>10694161

I constantly have suspicions that my wife is a lizard person that puts eggs into my drinks that I let her take a sip from.

>>10694140
Convincing someone to be my wife and bear my children, and then only to fall back into a lull of self loathing and paranoia. It permeates every relationship/friendship I have along with the unfathomable capacity to experience and to be experienced. I want these things so desperately though, and I squeeze myself into a little box as to not hurt anyone out of my stupidity.

I remain stupid out of fear and fearful out of stupidity. I don't know what to do but I just want to scream all the time.

>>10694298
I'm living the first sentence of your post, and my greatest fear is knowing that I'll not do a good job with my kids, they'll grow up fine anyway, and all realize I was not good at being a dad. After that, my next biggest fear is one of them being retarded.

>>10694298
You just need to try and fail

Failure wont be as bad as you think it is, and then youll learn

The weight of the world and humanity does rest on you shoulders , even tought it doesnt feel like it.
And whatever you do.
You areny saving them ,or yourself at all.
Cosmic defeat
Cosmic doom
All on you
And the only thing you have are tears of the bystanders as you look them in the eye. And wish you were still a kid again.

A sudden disaster, like the sun being blocked from shining, water becoming undrinkable or a huge plague epidemic.
Also that one day there wont be humans around to observe anything and that everything that we ever managed has ended.

>>10694140
dystheism/maltheism. Basically the idea that the being who apprehends the uiverse is just some extra-dimensional guy. You know, the demiurge and all that.

Reminder that Alzheimers is LITERALLY the river Styx.

What if this world is hell and all the good things are there to give false hope, which is the hardest thing to bear, and it doesn't really end, just start over?

>>10694318
A sweet prescription, sure, but I have failed. I've failed a lot in my life, and I've seen what it can bring. I'll try try again probably, almost certainly, and I will fail again most definitely. But to be a husband, to be a father, the way I see it you must be nigh infallible. I say infallible to a larger degree, don't misunderstand this as though to be father you can't miss a ballgame or a dance recital. It's missing twenty weeks of ballgames, being unable to afford dance classes, or losing a wife when I lose faith in myself. It's a lifetime comittment to being infallible after a life of failing.

Do you reckon [you] will come back to life the moment someone is born with your exact neural match?

If I was the only one to live forever. Like, forever forever, no substitutes. Think about it.

>>10694434
Genuinely the worst thing that could possibly happen. Unless you could die from explosion or something, that'd be fine.

>>10694417
How is false hope the hardest thing to bear?

>>10694270
I never knew Kafka was such a latent normie.

>>10694140
The worst is being without God. All this suffering and joy, attributed to nothing but impersonal forces. Not even my own anxiety and excitement would be mine, yet I would feel it is. Either infinite death without Truth or infinite death with the coldest Truth; I don't know which would be worse.

Realizing you were born a man but the doctor cut off your dick to make you a woman, and you were made to have sex with your brother as a child.

>>10694289
I'm pretty sure my wife is indeed a lizard, for she loves when I put my anaconda near her eggs.

>>10694289
holy shit this is the funniest thing i've ever heard

>>10694450
I meant, when it turns out to have been false. And it fundamentally is.

>>10694442
Nope. Referee won't allow it. Not even when the whole planet goes poof. Never.
Now that's what I call cosmic horror.

>>10694481
You know the Truth

>>10694140
no wifi

>>10694518
Yeah, that's definitely the worst then.

>>10694522
What do I "know"?

>>10694507
How, if you choose to compare sufferings like you are, is it the hardest to bear then? Explain the fundamentals seeing as I am clearly missing them.

What's really terrifying to me is that I may die before my old age, when all my genuinely interesting insanities will come tumbling out alongside the dementia.

I imagine being tortured for all eternity to be the worst one.

>>10694533
If you know something bad is coming your way and is unavoidable, there is some consolation still in knowing it. But if you think nothing bad is likely and it does happen after all, it feels much worse when the ground gives way under your confident step.
It's not a well fleshed out thought, I'm afraid.

>>10694524
Yeah, or Groundhog Day, only forever and ever. Not sure if it'd be worse than the previous scenario, but still.
I imagine your mind would eventually melt away, or rather rot. Slowly melt and seep into a puddle of its own waste products. Not before burning with a literally unimaginable torment. Eventually--mercifully--hopefully--consciousness would cease, I imagine. But before that? The horror...

>>10694574
Therefore, isn't death the most merciful contraption? What a deus ex machina, straight from God Himself. And the other anon was saying what if this line is hell--how could it be, if it ends? Maybe purgatory, or some sort of limbo which we get to circle until we drop to either side. I wonder what's there to drop into: a pit in the middle, heavenly drafts to pull you upwards on the outside? Or just the river Styx, turned ocean, all around?

>>10694140
Becoming paralyzed from head to toe, trapped in my own body.
Or having to endlessly repeat my life, even without being aware of it.

falling into a black hole. seriously, it has to be the scariest way to die ever.
>accidentally fall into itd gravity field, you can't steer your ship away and you see the hole in the distance slowly getting closer, you know how you're going to die now and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it
>when you get close enough the hole starts filling your field of view, nothing but an enormous completely black void, probably the blackest black there is
>when you cross into the hole you see space behind you disappearing as you fall into something completely dark that nobody really knows anything about
>then in complete darkness there is zero hope, youre just waiting to die either from being vaporized by intense radiation, stretched by unreal gravitational force, or reaching the completely unpredictable singularity

>>10694140
Listen to Timeghoul - Discography
Second half especially. Death metal band just full of concepts about time ... and horror. Good album. Good stuff.

>>10694672
you mean coolest way to die? unironically wanna go like this because
1. time stops
2. youre stuck there until the universe implodes
3. you can time travel
if you dont have an infinite death its meaningless, but the thing is time would slow so much u wouldnt notice it til it sped back up again

>quantum immortality is real
its horrible. truly horrible.

Infinity scares me because along with all the other possibilities it also offers the possibility of infinite terror

I have killed my family and what I see of them are delusions

I have these constant thoughts that crop up randomly, sometimes when I wake up one morning, somethings when I just finish an activity, where I feel like I must've died at some point and resumed reality where I last left it. Either in a separate timeline, or right where I left off. I know it's no true and it's just the next day, or the fluidity / simple transition of a moment to another but sometimes the horror feeling of being reborn creeps over me like goosebumps up my spine.

>I think that my entire life is just a setup by a malicious and especially clever god to condition me to value a set of concepts I will be deprived of indefinitely

It is. You are the god.

>>10694686
you're mistaken. time doesn't slow down for you, but you slow down for anyone who observes you. for you the universe implodes in an instant and you experience time all the way to your death

>>10694764

Also, deprivation of any and all concepts that are purportedly not the Self is the default and only way in which such concepts can be conceived of, since the Self is the only truth and the only good.

>>10694199
Yeah, early Hamsun like Hunger, Mysteries and Pan do remind me a bit of Munch's paintings.

>>10694423
>missing ballgames
what's this meme about? i remember as a kid i hated when my parents wanted to watch my games

>>10694756

But you regularly experience this to a far greater degree in dreams. The one where you were a bird, the one where you were two people simultaneously looking at each other, the one where you died, the one where everything was as it usually is now as you're reading this and could've continued being so indefinitely had you not woken up; none of these are Ontologically distinct neither from each other nor from waking life. Ask yourself how important any one phenomenon is and what power it has over you when their totality randomnly changes and you barely notice.

>>10694289
upvoted

>>10694471
T. Mgtow that can't get a woman to love him because they don't want him, so he rationalizes this as going his own way to stave of existential dread.

>>10694289
>>10694495
>implying your waifu pillows are wives

>>10694140
That I will fail to raise my children properly and fail to create a cohesive, functioning family, in which each member reaches his or her potential.

>>10694140
I have a reoccuring nightmare where the xenomorphs from aliens-
okay, so what happens is, they're not real. BUT, if I'm afraid of them, they become tangible. If I stop being afraid of them, they cease to exist. But because they can hurt me, and because I spend the whole dream fleeing from them and watching them murder people en masse, of course I'm afraid of them. It's... awful.
I spend my nightmare running from them, watching them eat and kill people and I know it's all my fault and I can't stop it. I can never stop it.
Nothing will ever top that existential terror.

On the other hand, good people being misunderstood and hated for trying to do good is pretty fucking awful, and I will cry, every time.

>>10694140

Isn't this the Cartesian delusion?

>>10694636
>Becoming paralyzed from head to toe, trapped in my own body.
Oh yes, that'd be pretty horrific too. Senses on or off? Which do you think would be worse?

>>10694944
this is an actual thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome
only recently they found out that this guy was trapped for 30 years.

>>10694718
>oh well, these delusions are being pretty nice to me *shrug

a portal to hell

>>10694764
I'd never thought I'd make such a shitty god.

>>10694783
So you get to see the entire life of the universe unfold faster and faster until you see the end of all things? Sounds pretty cool to me.

>>10694968
yeah, since time is moving at almost 0/1 the rest of the universe would continue moving but you would be trapped until the very end (theoretically never? the theories vary) because it would take longer for you to die of old age (or even age a second) but if the universe implodes then u would see it collapse and witness teh big bang

>>10694140
my life desu

>>10694140
Immortality

>>10694672
Wouldn't you be ripped apart by gravity long before entering it?

>>10694672
Dude this gave me flashbacks to some book I read when I was a kid that described in explicit detail what it would be like to get sucked into a black hole. It was truly babby's first existential dread.

>>10695697
You could actually survive passing the event horizon, but at some point you would inevitably get spaghettified

>>10694485
Dude that's some heavy metal shit. Also real fuck this.

>>10694140
Say no more

>>10695697
iirc if the black hole is exceptionally big (like pic related) you would survive inside it for hours if not days (ignoring the radiation)

>>10695752
My favorite alien incident. Also the creepiest fucking shit. There's just something about big headed things just fucking floating around just makes my goddamn asshole clench.

here, have this. incident wasn't as good, but goddamn is that a scary ass picture.

>>10695780
all of the philosophy and literature in the world could never prepare me for flying bulletproof light-up gremlins. I remember your that incident as well from many books, it was supposed to be real stanky alien witch right?

>>10695780
all of the philosophy and literature in the world could never prepare me for flying bulletproof light-up gremlins. I remember your incident as well from many books, it was supposed to be real stanky alien witch right?

oblivion; the end of all things

>>10695758
>inside it for hours if not days
try millennia

>>10695816

Holy shit, yeah. Just the idea of those fucking things coming out of the forest like that, that don't even fucking flinch when they get hit with a bullet.

I had a dream with things like that once. I looked out the window and saw what I knew was old school fae digging in my yard. They looked like big black humanoid shapes with giant silver eyes and mantis arms they were using to dig with. I knew, that if they knew that I had seen them, they'd kill me, so I very slowly closed the curtains and sat back down at my computer. Then the curtain shifted (like they do in horror movies) and then they were in my room, on top of me, hacking at my throat. I woke up screaming. Smarts don't do shit when you know you're gonna die.

And yeah, stanky space witch is pretty apt, though people say it was just owls, but they say the goblins were just owls too.

>>10695780
>>10695816

Consuming psychedelics and the effects never going off

>>10695840

>>10695758
that's a big hole

>>10695842
I see it like this: either I'm getting my money's worth or (depending on what part of the trip I'm stuck on) my depression would be cured.
>>10695834
After reading Communion I unironically will always somewhat believe in visitors conjured from our mind's dread, anxiety, hysteria, etc. It's incredible to me that groups can all experience similar phenomenon despite it no evidence of it empirically "happening" at all, that is the existential horror to me. Maybe Im putting too much faith in my memories regarding Hopkinsville/Flatwoods/that school in Africa where dozens of kids saw a spacecraft. Overall I think Strieber is full of shit but he got my extra dimensional noggin joggin'.

>>10695923
>I see it like this: either I'm getting my money's worth or (depending on what part of the trip I'm stuck on) my depression would be cured.
dude, you don't want it. Permanent drug induced psychosis is a thing, and it is not fun. At best, it's harmless hallucinations, like crabs wandering around. At worst, you have crippling psychological problems like paranoia, delusions, recurring drug "flashbacks" and any number of other things. I don't take drugs, but I knew people in the scene.

>>10695895
For universe

>>10694222
underrated

Nothing will ever cease to exist.

Not having an afterlife after we die. We literally cease existing. There's no eternal sleep, no paradise, no hell, no "everything was a dream". You simply disappear from existence.

>>10694270
Fuck man
Kafka why'd you fucking do this to me man

>>10696107
so, the real world is the most horrifying concept you can imagine?

rokos basilisk

>>10694352
But if those first 3 scenarios happened I’d finally have an excuse to kill myself

>>10695651
God I hate this "do u even realize how terrible immortality is?? bet u never thought about it all the way!!" bullshit
You'd literally eventually turn into a god; you're lower than a rat if that doesn't appeal to you.

>>10696371
this, /thread

also fuck you you fucking faggot for telling more people about it you nigger

That I'm all alone in this world
Not in like a loveless way, but more in a everyone else is in on it and I'm not. If you've seen Anomalisa, the nightmare scene where everyone is connected and chasing him is terrifying to me. Just the thought of being completely alone in the world like that is awful for me to imagine

>>10694140

>>10698515
man glados and skynet are little bitches compared to AM

>>10694140
rejecting God

being shadowbanned

>>10694140
In what little spare time I have as a welder traveling around the Midwest, I study fear. I ask everyone what their worst nightmares have been, what their worst fears are. Here are the ones that stuck with me the most.

An immense, unstoppable, gluttonous beast no smarter than an infant tearing into reality.

Having your brain linked up to something as banal as a roomba or a lamp and being completely aware of how incapacitated you are.

Having all of your organs, from your toes to your intestines to your lungs to your brain and eyes, harvested. You can feel everything, but you can't speak, and you are completely aware of the entire thing.

Becoming an unthinking slave to a greater being, or even worse, to a lesser being, but again, being completely aware of how useless you are.

Being immortal and invincible. Nothing can kill you and you can never die.

Being forced to relive the same day or two days over and over.

Being forced to punish your innocent loved ones, specifically, children and family.

Watching your loved ones be raped, killed, and devoured.

Here's probably my favorite: Encountering extraterrestial life hellbent on destroying life that is magnitudes more intelligent than you can ever imagine. Imagine the human mind compared to this alien mind the same way a cockroach's mind is compared to a human's.

we fear death and we fear immortality, and we certainly fear waking life.

arent we some silly fucking creatures?

>>10696963

I have to wake up tomorrow and do the same things I did today. I have to do this until I die.

>>10698722
Cool shit. I want to do something akin those lines too.

>>10694180
>time is infinite
>live infinite lives
>suffer for eternity
I dont care what Nietzsche said, fuck that shit

>>10699107
And even then it might not be over. Existence was a mistake

>>10694891
Had a dream like this but instead of xenomorphs it was that fucking Chuckie doll. In one I was driving my car and the bastard popped up in my rearview mirror in the backseat with a knife. I sorta realised that if I just stopped being scared of him he'd vanish, and he did, and I woke up, and I haven't had a dream about him since.

That someday I will die and won't exist anymore.

>>10694161
wait I thought that was the good life

auralgraphic cartoons

>>10698722
Why do people fear ground hog day? The only scary thing about it is that the world around you stops moving in a sense. Regardless of your actions, they day cannot progress, that doesn't meant that you can't progress though. With infinite days you could just read infinite books, accumulate infinite knowledge and eventually release yourself from the trap. As long as you are the centre of your world everything else looping doesn't impact you. It's the same as living day after day in normal life, except you're not marching to your death.

>>10700481
the isolation. you are, presumably the only person this is happening to. Even if you aren't, there's no way to find that person. you're all alone, and no one can help you, or understand.

>>10700490
Who knows what hell each person endures everyday? Most people hide facts about their current existence from people and suffer alone, it really isn't any difference. Anyone afraid of this scenario should focus and removing themselves from society because they have an unhealthy attachment to other people. Considering you are the only existence that you can prove, caring about other people is silly.

>>10694171
I think "concepts" was a poor word choice on his part. I read it more as "character attributes" (REEE) or "virtues."

>>10700345
Man, I mean I'm not excited to die, but death seems like the best vacation ever. No more rent or food or politics or anything to worry about. No more worrying about health issues or relationships or family or anybody else dying. Just rest and peace. The ultimate vacation. Of course when you're dead, you can't you enjoy any of the pleasures of life, great or small. That's why the only way I can see being afraid of death is if you never truly live.

>>10700481
In general, the repetition would be straight-up torture. In both situations you're essentially alone, but at least when you're immortal, there's ALWAYS change on SOME sort of cosmic level. The entire human race might feel like only a few moments to an immortal being, but at least the universe would keep changing, at least, though you might be completely alone, there would be some stimulation and change. And above all, whether humans like it or not, we crave change and variation. We go insane without it.

Groundhog day is terrifying because there would never be any change beyond that immediate day. Let that sink in. You would amass enormous knowledge, but for what? What will it gain you? When you immortal you might discover science beyond atoms and astrological physics, and you might become the god of your own world, but with groundhog day, is any of that knowledge worth it when you're imprisoned for life inside of the same exact day, doomed to repeat it? It's the same as being immortal, only now it's much worse, because you have no freedom, and you are a prisoner in that single day for eternity.

Unless you have the mercy of killing yourself.

I think that's the #1 criteria for true terror: When death becomes the preferable alternative.

>>10701441
>Groundhog day is terrifying because there would never be any change beyond that immediate day.

But there never is any change whatsoever.

Honestly, for me it would be some kind of neural interface that allowed people to subjectively experience huge swathes of time in short real time.

It would be pretty horrifying to be in a 4x4 cell for the equivalent of a 1000 years, in only 20 real minutes for example.

>>10701783
Read Stephen Kings short story 'the jaunt'

>>10694188
“Oh no hell is really smelly”
What is so scary about it?

>>10694518
That ain’t that bad, just borin I guess.

>>10701981
I once spent 13 hours sitting behind the stankest people on the planet.
It's pretty bad.

>>10694518
You don't have superpowers though? Like you cannot travel at the speed of light?

>>10701992
It's interesting to think about for a minute or so. I can recall feeling actual rage because I was forced to be in proximity to people that stank bad. Must be some evolutionary thing.

>>10702095
I was losing my goddamn mind. Halfway stankmeister left. I thanked god. Too bad that he was immediately replaced by someone who stank even worse. I didn't even think it was fucking possible. I felt attacked in my lizard brain.

>>10702117
Was this on a train ride or something?

>>10702123
bus ride.

>>10695752
>>10695780
what alien incident is this??

All living creatures have ghosts but they are affected by gravity so the center of the earth is full of ghosts mashed together in a never ending screaming nightmare.

>>10702510
1: Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter
2: Flatwoods monster incident

>>10701441
I have extensively thought about a groundhog day scenario and it doesn't terrify me in the slightest. It really has sunken in. Who cares if the world doesn't change? It has nothing to do with me realistically. I can still go and talk to people I know, do things I love, and as you said amass knowledge. There is enough media in the world for you to consume (along with the internet) for it to take a very long time before you should realistically want out. Like I said, if you have infinite days jusr study physics and you will eventually find a way to exit the loop.

>>10702832
>before you should realistically want out

That's the thing. There is no way out. No amount of knowledge could ever bring you out, in short, this is otherworldly power enslaving you for no greater reason than torture. There is no human knowledge that could bring you out, and even in death you are doomed to repeat the cycle. Yeah, it'd be fun for a bit, but I feel like you would have to have absolutely godlike willpower to be able to transcend human consciousness and not simply go fucking insane and cease to think rationally.

>>10694140
>Most horrifying concept you can imagine?
memorizing this thread

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