Personal Development for Smart People Forums - View Single Post - Dont stress, one day you will die, and the cause of the stress will not matter.

ChaosKiwi · 05-25-2009, 10:47 AM

I often come across the posts on many of the threads in the Pavilina forums that offer advice along the lines of "Don't worry or stress about this or that, because one day you will be dead and it will not matter".

I would like to start a dialog about this.

Personally this frustrates me. It presupposes that stress and worrying are inherently bad. It is nihilistic in that if the above statement is true then any event or work will ultimately not be important. As such it completely ignores that any work or effort could be important for a limited span of time.

On a more personal level whenever I have tried to use this to calm or motivate myself it has done nothing but stress me out. In such situations I feel like I am closer to my death without experiencing and or achieving the things I want to. I think this is because I cannot accurately gauge the amount of time till this final event (for obvious reasons). It may actually be because my conscious perception of time really only extends about a month into the past (Do you know what I mean? Like I only feel presently connected to each day for the past month at the most, after that it is only the more significant events that I remember), which I may relate to my conscious perception of time left in the future.

Your thoughts please.

05-25-2009, 10:47 AM	#1 (permalink)
ChaosKiwi Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 124	Dont stress, one day you will die, and the cause of the stress will not matter. I often come across the posts on many of the threads in the Pavilina forums that offer advice along the lines of "Don't worry or stress about this or that, because one day you will be dead and it will not matter". I would like to start a dialog about this. Personally this frustrates me. It presupposes that stress and worrying are inherently bad. It is nihilistic in that if the above statement is true then any event or work will ultimately not be important. As such it completely ignores that any work or effort could be important for a limited span of time. On a more personal level whenever I have tried to use this to calm or motivate myself it has done nothing but stress me out. In such situations I feel like I am closer to my death without experiencing and or achieving the things I want to. I think this is because I cannot accurately gauge the amount of time till this final event (for obvious reasons). It may actually be because my conscious perception of time really only extends about a month into the past (Do you know what I mean? Like I only feel presently connected to each day for the past month at the most, after that it is only the more significant events that I remember), which I may relate to my conscious perception of time left in the future. Your thoughts please.