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Anyone else experience the feelings that you are constantly dying? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by BalabakGuy@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I don't know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.

What I'm trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can't stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren't they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can't bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.

What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don't know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I'm bored, stressed or relaxed.

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[–] Serval@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

I never really solved this, though I grown to accept it as a sort of reassuring fact.

I am constantly dying and being substituted by my new present self, but I'm only aware of that because my reasoning brought me there, I'm unable to feel that I'm experiencing it first hand. The self who started this comment is already lost in the past and didn't even realise that it happened, there is a perfect continuity between them and me.

It's a bit sad that "I" won't be specifically the one to experience the future, but some of the other selves with which I compose my identity will, which is good enough.

Moreover, it means that I have no need to fear ceasing existing (like with neurodegenerative diseases, death and similar situations), because it has always happened and it's painless.