How to deal with the idea of death?
I am fully aware that at some point in my life I will die, but for over a month now, that idea has been tormenting me. Every time I get in the shower or think about the future, I just ask myself, "Why am I doing this if I'm going to die?" I already know it makes no sense to question it because no matter what I do, I will end up dying anyway, but I simply cannot get the idea out of my head. While everyone else is living their normal lives, I cannot stop thinking about it. I am 17 years old and I think I have anticipatory anxiety; before, I used to always think about the future, wondering what would happen next week, next month, next year, when I turned 30, until it reached a point where I stopped focusing on almost anything in my life, and I started thinking, "What about when I die?" I get FOMO about missing out on everything that will happen afterward, I don’t want to die. Plus, my mother is Christian and sometimes talks about hell and those things, and I get into a conflict because, if there were nothing, that feeling of emptiness is horrible when trying to visualize something you simply cannot imagine. People tell me "it's like before you were born"—I don't want to feel that because it is simply NOT feeling anything, and honestly, it brings me anything but peace. Some say "when you're older you'll understand, you'll be tired of everything and you'll just want to rest"—that doesn't help me either because right now I want to live forever, even though that is, first of all, impossible, and if it were possible, at some point our planet will go extinct, so if I lived forever I would be left stranded in space. And it's all piece of shit because I want to exercise and I think, "What for, if I'm going to die?" Obviously, I do it anyway because right now I'm alive and I try to focus on the now, but I feel like a hypocrite or selfish because I see a very elderly person making plans and in my mind I say, "It's incredible that they do those things knowing they are going to die," which I have no right to think because if those people love and value their life, that's completely perfect, because I am the stupid one who worries about those things and I don't know what to do. I try to imagine myself at 20 or 30 years old and I would feel old or simply that I have less lifespan left; I know that maybe I have a long time left before I die, although every day there is the possibility that something happens and I die without even realizing it. Because when someone dies, they never know the exact moment they died, because they are already dead. Meaning, tomorrow I could walk out of my house and get hit by a car, next week I could find out I have cancer, tonight I could not wake up and not even find out that I died, everything shuts off and I wouldn't suffer. If I look at it that way, it's like it's completely unnecessary to worry about dying because when I do, I won't find out, everything will shut off and I won't be able to feel anything. It is exactly that which frustrates me. I am a very vivid person who likes to feel everything, feel life, love deeply and whatever you want, so imagining myself in a plane where there is literally nothing, not even black, nothing, is simply suffocating.