I am cripplingly scared of the passage of time and of death. Please help me.
I don't know how to put this into words, but I will try as best I can.
I understand that every moment happens and I live every moment. At this time, I am typing into a keyboard and watching text appear on the screen. This is a moment. I understand this.
I also understand that there are an infinite number of moments that have passed me by. I have eaten a meal today, and that is a moment that has completely concluded and finished.
Now, the marriage of these two ideas leads to something I am very scared of: the fact that everything I live will become a memory. I am still rather young, so I have a lot of future ahead of me. But very soon, in an instant, without any time passing, I will be an old man. And when I am an old man, I will not be able to relive my experience as a young man, even though I have lived it once. I will simply be old, and soon after being old, I am going to die. Right before I die, so many moments that I have lived would have become memories.
Right now, I am living in a memory. As I re-read this post tomorrow, the time of me typing this will be a memory. This chugs along into old age, you see. When I am about to die, every moment I have experienced will be a waste. It will all be memory. It will not mean anything.
And then I will die. I am so unbelievably terrified of dying. I am crippled by it, and whenever I see time pass by me -- every day -- I remember my own mortality and fact that I will die. I am so young and so able, and yet I am going to die. I am so scared.
... as an aside, I learned by a TikTok video that the last thing a person realizes as they die is audio. The last thing you do when you die is listen. That is very scary to me. When I am listening at my last second, what is the point? What is the point of listening to it? I cannot change anything. What I hear will not affect the world. What I hear will not affect me, in one second. And I can't help but extend that to the rest of my life.
One of the worst parts of this is that, as I philosophize in my head about all this and make myself very sad and very scared, I realize that time is still going on, and it will not stop, for all my philosophizing. I can think abstractly about epistemology or language without being scared of them, even though I can find them in my everyday life. But time is so present in it all, throughout everything.
I am really, really scared. Please help me.