Used to get it every time I read an article on the current state of climate change. The dread has kinda just shifted to acceptance. Short of some miracle-tier scientific breakthrough or like literal divine/extraterrestrial intervention, we’re just hard fucked and there isn’t jack we can do about it.

Kinda adopted the personality of this dude:

It comes in waves for me. I’ll feel fine for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, then I’ll be deep in the depths for days, weeks straight. Mostly at night, staring out my bedroom window, contemplating the horror of the abyss.

At least once a week. Sometimes almost daily.

Existential?

More like Exponential Dread.

Almost never.

I used to have it a fair amount, and medicate myself to avoid it a fair amount as well, and then just about exactly 20 years ago, in the span of about three days, I started feeling sick, got more and more sick, went to the doctor and discovered I had cancer, and had emergency surgery. Then I went through about six months of really awful chemotherapy.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend having cancer as a cure for existential dread, but it worked for me.

As I have gotten older, the frequency of episodes have decreased. In my early 40’s now. I would say it occurs at least once every 3-4 months as opposed to weekly in my teens.

Wait, you guys stop having it?

At 50+, I get it almost daily. I never had it before. Not sure if its the state of the world we live in now, aging, or a combination of both. All I know is I’m glad I’m old and won’t be around to see some of the stuff I’m scared of.

Every day since I was in junior high about. Knowing that I have nothing to really look forward to except working a job I don’t really want to afford to barely keep myself alive right up until the day I die, alone and forgotten.

Hey, it could be worse, you could be a kid whose whole world is in the midst of melting down before they’ve even had a chance to realize what life could’ve been like if not for the shitty decisions of the preceeding generations.

I accept it as a part of living.

Between COVID, climate change, and my own worsening health, pretty much constantly.

I used to feel abject terror constantly. But you can only feel that way so long before something breaks in you.

Not worried about being dead, really. I didn’t exist for millennia, I got my time in the sun, I won’t exist for the rest of time. It hasn’t bothered me.

Dying on the other hand sounds like a painful, grief-ridden, stress filled misery. I really don’t want to have anything to do with a drawn-out death. That’s what bothers me.

Whenever I think of the future I get it bad. Disabled, poor, parents are my carers, couldn’t afford to live on my own even if I could. And every year the bushfires get bigger and closer to home. If I let it it constant dread would become my default state, but I am aware of this and try to focus on the now.

Not to say I don’t do my best to safe guard the future, have plans in place for if I ever need to navigate the things that scare me most. But I try not to dwell on it. Someday my parents will die, failing some sort of miracle I will end up in a care home without my pets. But I might also drop dead tomorrow in which case all my worrying will have been for nothing.

Right now at this very moment things are going ok and the number one thing that makes it not ok is worrying about a time in the future when its entirely not ok. But why meet it in the middle? I can’t change the rivers current, best I can do is try to steer on the odd occasion where the path splits.