I ponder this as well. Admittedly, I'm not comfortable with the concept, but I refuse to harbor a false belief in an afterlife just feel better about death and nothingness.

This is one question that I don't understand why people have trouble understanding. It's seems simple to me that when your brain stops working, there will be no more you. It's like the millions of years before you were born. I hear people ask "if you don't believe in heaven, where do you go?". You'll be dead, you won't go anywhere. When a car's engine dies, does that energy go somewhere?
Sure your chemistry will eventually help the grass grow, but that's about it. I have no trouble with that.

You, as an entity, will cease to exist when you die. Your energy will be recycled, a will your molecules, but you are gone forever as the entity that you are today. That is a fact. So, what is there to worry about?

I don't even think about it. When I'm dead, I'm dead. What may or may not happen afterward doesn't concern me.

Well if the idea that there is only nothing when you die bothers you, try focusing more on being present with the people in your life that really matter. Build experiences and relationships, so that one day when you stand before the void. You may look back and say my existence had meaning.

It's a lot like how things were for me in 1870.

its just nothing. You stop when you die. like, if you fall asleep and never dream or wake up. Thats just it. No pain, no thought, nothing to fear.

If i know i am about to die, I would laugh and say "The world is YOUR problem now!"

Until, or unless, someone is able to return from bona fide death, and tell us what's it's like, I'm not gonna use up any energy to speculate. And speculate is all we can do ...

I am going to admit something. Sometimes I wish that there was strong scientific evidence of a "spirit"/"soul"/"conscious thinking essence" or something else that survives death. I am not scared of death or that there will be something unpleasant waiting for me. I do find it rather sad that this may be the only one that were guaranteed of and once it's over, it's over forever.

I saw a story of a very young boy who claimed a past life. He had a birth mark similar to an axe wound on the back of his head. Supposedly he located where his body was buried. Identified his killer which resulted in a murder conviction. The recovered body had a massive axe wound to head. I take these stories with a grain of salt, but who knows? I sure don't. My common sense tells me it's most likely lights out. But I do find these kind of claims very interesting.

It's something that I can understand well enough rationally, but emotionally, I don't at all like the idea of not existing. I guess it just goes in the bin with all the other things I don't like. I do like to promote the idea of longevity research à la Kurzweil.

I'm trying to come to terms with this myself, too. When the emotion rises that I won't be around fairly soon, I keep reminding myself that I wasn't around until very recently, and it did not bother me before then that I didn't exist.

If there was no such thing as nothing, we would be just all crowded together. There would be no space, so nothing is a good thing. I hope that comforts you.

Atoms don't go away. Energy does not go away. So, what makes us will not go away. Science can't prove that our minds exist when our bodies die ... it is all a matter of conjecture.

It might be a lot like the event horizon as described by Steven Hawking's Theory on the energy around black holes the energy basically becomes densified and repurposed. Then there are the other unexplored dimensional influences, we are unable to explore in our current carbon form.

I, for one, don't know about an afterlife. My belief is that religion is a man made explanation for something that can't be known. I concede that their idea, or any one of billions of other possibilities may be the truth.

We once discussed thoughts of returning to the soil, going to scientific research and freezing.

I don't believe you come back as something else per se, or in this personal energy you mention. When I die, the collection of molecules that make up my body will be redistributed. The energy impulses generated by the chemical reactions in my cells will dissipate into the universe. Their contributions to the universe will be far less than a molecule of water would make to all of earth's oceans.
My concern isn't what happens after I die, but what I can do to improve life while I am still around. As far as the effect dying will have on me personally, I don't think I will be any different than I was a century before I was born.

It's easy to imagine being dead you ever wake up and forget where you are and how everything was black before you opened your eyes. It's just like that but like sleep you wouldn't realize the time that went by. Also yea I mean sometime I think about if in another life I could be in Japan or somewhere that doesn't have a join me or die cult trying to possess the whole worlds people.

Maybe you should not think about dying, and think about living. If you think about living whilst living, and leave thinking about dying for when you die then it's really easy.

We are stardust...that's a fact and we will return to stardust.

well, what was it like for the trillions of years before you were born? it's the dying part I'm not keen on. you won't care about being dead because you will be dead.

I've experienced deja vu. A very strange sensation for sure. That feeling of " I've been here and have seen this before!" So I relate this to the possibility of reincarnation. Space and time are relative to each other (space/time ) and can be warped and distorted by matter and dark matter, energy and dark energy. So time ticks at a different rate depending on these properties. GPS satellites are calibrated to compensate for this because time ticks at different rate from the earth surface compared to the orbit of the satellite. Whew! Hope I got that right!.....so with that being said I suspect that everything that has happened or will happen,exist somewhere in the infinite vastness of space/time. So when I experienced deja vu it may be some kind of glitch or fold of space time that I for some unknown reason can momentarily perceive. P.s an alien once told me "to travel in time is to travel in space!" Forward or backward. He! He! He!.

You will simply quit thinking - the brain dies, and EVERYTHING that made you "aware" will cease to exist for you. Each person's world dies when they die. You more than likely will not know you are dying (if you're lucky), so the best thing to do is to treat each day as though it's your last... IMHO.

Ok, just for kicks let's say reincarnation is a reality, and we have had and will have countless moments of existence. It would seem that the conscious mind would immensely be cluttered if it could recall past or future existence. So for me, just because I have know recollection of past or future existence, dismiss this possibility I can not.