death, eh?

i never used to be scared of death. moreover, i never understood people who claimed to be afraid of death. it seemed so foolish. death is an instant, and after there is nothing. even more so, death makes sense to me. when people around me wrestle with the idea "why do we die?" it was so clear to me: we die because life needs an end. i never believed in hell or heaven, for no reason that i can articulate without ending in "i don't know, i just don't get it." nevertheless, i always felt like death was a termination of life, not a gateway to anything else. death seem so final, and therefore, extremely neat. you live, and then at one point you die. to worry about something that was both inevitable and rational made me feel like a nattering naybob of negativism.

then recently, and i say recently meaning in the past week or so, i started to think: what if there is a hell? what if hell is like pittsburgh, in the sense that it is a real place. saying "i don't believe in pittsburgh" is not going to keep you from going there. it seemed so self-satisfying to dismiss any chance of me going to hell by saying "i don't believe in it." i seemed to wholly overlook the idea that my belief in hell is totally irrelevant. it would be like me saying, "i don't believe in 7th grade." that's all well and good, but my refusal to accept 7th grade doesn't diminish its existence, it only blinds me to it. i started to become anxious when i realized the notion that hell may be very real, and if that is the case, i will certainly be making residence there for the better part of eternity. i have not come to a conclusion, because doing so would be impossible. i will instead to what i do best: analyze something until i have deconstructed the hell out of it (pun fully intended) and it becomes meaningless to me.

i wonder what nietzsche would say about this.

listening to: "dust in the wind"