The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death. It's just insanely difficult for us to internalize that idea because we're animals, we avoid death instinctively and fear loss instinctively.
> Ceasing to exist will happen. It's guaranteed to happen.
Not from your point of view! You can experience every moment leading up to your death and may be lucky enough to realize you're about to die, but it's not possible to be aware of the end of your own existence. It is always a future event. (Based on our best models, that is. Obviously the living can't possibly know what it's like to be permanently dead.)
> The fact of anxiety being useless doesn't do much to get rid of it.
I don't agree; it's valuable to be aware of the unconscious motivations of anxiety - it's just that awareness alone isn't sufficient to cure the anxiety.
> None of that does anything to mitigate the feeling when the yawning expanse of inevitable non-existence comes into one's mind
Again, I don't agree! Being able to think about "the event" from different angles gives the brain an escape hatch from anxiety traps. The anxiety might come, but now you have tools to handle it instead of be dominated by it.
Yeah, I've done the stoicism thing and all that (since before it was cool, LOL). It's not like I'm crippled by anxiety about death. I just find "why worry, you won't experience it!" to entirely miss the point.
> The anxiety today is not useful because it's anxiety about something that will never happen. You'll never be aware of having died or lost anything through your own death.
Isn't addressing the thing that (I think?) most people are worried about when they worry about death. I don't think most are worried about how bad they will feel after they die, which is what this is concerned with. It's totally beside the point.
The point is that we are conscious, now, and imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant. Upsetting, even. It's subjectively identical to the end of the universe.
"But you used to not exist"—irrelevant, because 1) I do now, and 2) I at least get some kind of window into what all that was, since it's... the past.
"But you'll experience nothing, so it won't be unpleasant"—even less relevant. I'm not worried about that state of (not) being, being unpleasant. I'm not worried about existing with an awareness of having died, as mentioned in the quoted bit.
> imagining what it means for that consciousness to end and for the entire future of the universe to not exist to us at all—really imagining it—can be rather unpleasant.
It's unpleasant, and it's difficult to imagine, that doesn't mean you should be anxious about your own death.
Again... from your subjective experience, I'm not sure it's even meaningful to say that you will die. You will only ever experience being alive.
You can't even be sure that the universe will continue after your death, either. Does it seem most likely that it will? In some models of the universe, it's actually infinitely more likely that it won't, because it all exists inside your (Boltzmann) brain.
Like what is the specific thing that causes anxiety? That's still not clear to me. Not-knowing, yeah, that can cause anxiety. And it can be soothed by changing your perspective, taking delight in the mysteries of existence. We all have a visceral anxiety about death which our bodies evolved to have, because it's quite useful for a living thing to want to stay alive. But that's not based in reason, and we can use reason to alleviate our anxiety.
I do understand that, yeah. And thanks for the neat analogy.
What I believe is, you probably won't actually ever have to stop drinking wine. From your perspective, I'm not sure it's meaningful to say you'll ever stop existing, because you can't experience it. You'll (probably) just stop existing for me, and I for you.
It's fair to be sad about it just like I'm sad that the elves left Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age. But neither my own death nor the leaving of the elves is something I can ever actually live through - they're both just stories to me.
But now is not then.