I'd been wondering for so long now why all these materialists so vehemently insist on the idea that after physical death follows complete nonexistence, although it would evidently render the existence prior to it entirely pointless, and their insistence never seemed a purely rational, fatalistic concession, as in having no hope to survive the death of their bodies, but much more like the dogged defense against who-knows-what unthinkable corruption... or terror.
The latter must be the answer then, and this terror is called apeirophobia.
I never even heard of this word before;Wikipedia doesn't have it, not even in its comprehensive and partially very bizarre list of phobias. (A fear of flowers? Of certain colors? That's weird. But one of the most ridiculous to me is a very new phenomenon called "Nomophobia" - I don't even have a mobile phone! LOL)
What is described in the article about apeirophobia is truly curious to me, needless to say that no such sensation ever occurred to me and it's very hard for me to conceive of it. I've never been scared of open spaces but rather the opposite, I'm very prone to claustrophobia, both in a literal and figurative sense: the fear of being trapped, hitting dead ends, having no way to go.
The author of the article, Bobby Azarian, says in it, "The largest number of years I could imagine failed to make a dent in infinity. My primitive brain filled with an existential angst. The idea of living forever was even more unsettling than the idea of no longer existing after death."
This appears to me somewhat contradictory (which isn't saying anything really, as being contradictory is normal human nature) in that the idea of ceasing to exist is also unsettling him - but eternity even more so. Yet in this case there probably can't be any further alternative besides these two possibilities...
He goes on to quote someone else as saying, "Now I’m in my 30s, and the thought of eternity still freaks me out. It usually hits at night when I’m trying to sleep."
This notion is quite familiar to an extent - I think we all have such certain things that creep up as we're trying to sleep. Different things for everyone I guess. For me it's often memories of my tormented childhood and my so-called "family". Other times it's about being trapped in a human body. To an extent the exact opposite of the materialists. I think about all that awful goo inside. A jelly-like mass confined on the inside of a skull - and they think this mass is what they are?! And they don't mind that?! I don't know. And do you ever think about that we're literally full of shit? No, I'm not saying we're all a bunch of liars. What I mean is, when you go to the bathroom and take a dump - there's lots more where that came from, and it's in there all the time. Wherever we go we're carrying a load of poop around inside us. I think that's pretty disgusting. I wouldn't want to be such an organism forever. It's actually pretty humiliating to be something like this, and I hope to have a more dignified existence someday. This as an aside - so to me it's bad memories and thoughts the disgusting nature of the human body which creep up in sleepless nights.
I may look further into the subject of apeirophobia though as it kind of fascinates me. I can see it can be quite tormenting to people and I don't mean to belittle that, but I think it doesn't need to be. Because what people don't take into account is that with the death of the body we will inevitably change. Life is a process, death is a process, and both are not processes we're merely observing but they happen to us, which means we're part of the process - part of the change taking place. Like, when you think back of your childhood, back then you probably thought about what it will be like when you grow up, and you may have had a bunch of very unrealistic ideas about it because you couldn't really imagine being an adult - because it was outside your own experience. But eventually it simply happened that you grew up, and now you may think back of "what silly ideas I had back when I was a kid!"
As a kid you probably couldn't have imagined the way you'd be now as an adult - I know I couldn't have.
I missed out on so many things I only realized or learned about much later, and they have changed me. But the change doesn't stop there. It probably never stops, probably not even once we reach the afterlife.
The article further quotes someone as saying, "I feel that we are all insignificant compared to the universe," and, "The thought of the distance between galaxies is unbearable.”
This idea of feeling insignificant next to infinities of space and time is something I've heard quite a lot - but never felt that way. Rather in the contrary: Having the ability to contemplate these concepts, to mentally grasp them, actually makes me feel quite empowered. The knowledge that there is so much more out there than this sad little human-infested world, such vast, infinite space, is a very comforting thought. I'm not afraid of losing myself in the infinite. I feel the need for so much more space, smothered by this overpopulated world, so overpopulated and light-polluted that I still haven't been able to really stare out into cosmic infinity at night and finally behold the Milky Way.
(Warning: If you happen to suffer from apeirophobia you might rather not want to watch this video. It's called "Powers of Ten", a brief journey from the subatomic level out to the edge of the observable universe and back.)
Nearly as an afterthought: I found this bit here about an interview with Richard Dawkins (one of the most famous proponents of materialism) which surprisingly seems to confirm my idea that apeirophobia may be what motivates them.
(Hubble Ultra Deep Field. May not be suitable for apeirophobics either...)
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