Ask Lemmy

On the smaller scale it's probably my wife and dog dying, in the larger scheme of things it's the rise of fascism here in Germany and Europe.

Getting falsely accused of something that requires me to interface/deal with, and potentially be incarcerated within, the US justice system. Fuck all that with a bundle of rusty rebar.

The worst is that it can possibly happen at any given moment. You could look at a redcap Karen in a store, they take it the wrong way, and bam, your life is a loving hell for the next decade or more. Nope.com

Cancer. Everyone has a bunch of fucked up cells at all times, but your body keeps you healthy by repairing or killing them, time after time after time… until one of those cells says “fuck the system” and goes rogue. No one is safe.

Imagine every day, your muscles get just a little bit weaker. Maybe you can't open a container you used to be able to. Or you find you can't lift your arms high enough to shampoo your hair anymore. No matter how much you try to exercise, it never helps. Pain sets in due to incredible stiffness. Your fingers start to curl up until they are nigh unusable. Entire limbs become gnarled.

Eventually you lose the ability to walk. Then speak. Then eat. And finally, even your breathing muscles become so weak and paralyzed that you constantly aspirate due to your inability to cough. Recurrent infections set in. Then you die of respiratory failure.

Prions - Actually nightmarish.

Being given an anesthetic that should put you out for an operation but only immobilizes you and you remain cognizant thru out the operation feeling everything being done.

Kinda happened to me in middle school when I broke my arm and they gave me anesthetics to knock me out so they could re-set my ulna and radius but half way thru i wake up to my arm in 5 Chinese finger trap-like device to hold my arm up and a strap across my bicep with weights on it weighing my arm down and 2 doctor's trying to push my bones back in line.

That we may be living in a world where the super-rich and powerful from all countries have conspired to establish a kind of global absolutist monarchy of the utterly unscrupulous, in which fabricated conflicts between countries serve mostly to distract from the fact that those pulling the strings behind the scenes have already undermined every political system and are simply pitting people against each other in order to secure even more power for themselves through war, mass surveillance, propaganda, the rationing of essential goods, and blatant destruction.

Please note: This is a conspiracy theory with no solid evidence, not a fact, but a dystopia that unfortunately seems increasingly realistic these days.

Emerging evidence of abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment

...evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment. A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss. A marked slowdown in Antarctic Overturning Circulation is expected to intensify this century and may be faster than the anticipated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown. The tipping point for unstoppable ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be exceeded even under best-case CO2 emission reduction pathways, potentially initiating global tipping cascades...

This is just an example from today, but overall the climate news from recent years scares me more than anything else. Insect counts are plummeting globally, wildfires are getting noticeably worse everywhere, all of the ice is receding, ocean currents are destabilizing as the temperature patterns in the air and the water shift, and crop growing seasons are changing. I get the impression that the predicted climate changes are not only happening now, but are accelerating noticeably.

Unpredictable food production is bad bad bad. If you watch the series Fall of Civilizations, one of the most common elements of collapsing societies is destablised food production (not necessarily no production, just irregular). If this happens globally, everything stops and people start dying in large numbers.

Personally, this is the only political issue that really matters. Every other thing that people argue about is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Having rabies and not knowing it until it's too late

Surviving my children.

The morning after entirely way too much beer and spicy food

Glacier collapse causing sea levels to rise. Global ocean currents failing. A meteor hitting the earth. The next pandemic Locust Super Volcanoes

Any disease that causes you to slowly go mad. Things like fatal insomnia or rabies.

Non-existence.

Jusy thinking about not existing at all gives me this gnarly feeling of primeval fear.

The normalisation of genocide, pantopicon surveillance, neoliberal fascism.

The moral framework of the West turning out to be meaningless propaganda.

People who enjoy breaking down and hurting other people.

In terms of anything that does not include something related to death or torture its probably having an operation on your eye while being conscious. I know someone who had to get surgery on his eye and could see while two doctors were doing stuff on his eye. Even just hearing this scared the living shit out of me.

unit 731 (seriously, genuinely, don't look it up if you're unfamiliar, it's beyond nightmare fuel the kinds of torture imperial japan committed and got away with)

Time dilation.

Imagine you go to prison for a year. That’s one year you’re without your family and friends, and a year they’re without you. 1:1 time.

Now imagine you’re put to sleep and kept in a coma like state, fed by tubes. A computer or similar machine induces a dreamlike state that is indistinguishable from reality in which you will be imprisoned for 100 years. You never sleep. You never eat or drink. You never need to. And you can’t relax, you’re constantly being hunted or otherwise threatened. In the real world your family never left your side because in the real world, you’re only under for an hour.

Something similar happened to a guy on Star Trek (O’Brien on Deep Space Nine). Black Mirror did it a few times. And the fourth season of Sword Art Online (an anime) did it as well. Probably some others. Oh yeah, Interstellar. So you may have seen it.

Nice try, sleep paralysis demon

Mondays

Bears. They don’t kill you right away, they just crush your face and start gobbling at your gutty works. Sometimes they leave for a bit to digest while you’re still not dead and come back to finish their meal later.

There are existential horrors and real life scenarios that are probably worse than death, but bears still take the cake for me.

Some form of torture. The thing about torture is you can always add "and then..."

Psychological and physical

Imagine being forced to rip off your significant other's fingernail.

And you might say "There's no way I'd do that"

Sadly you will. Either to save yourself or them from more torture.

You will do it, we all would. That's scary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings

Becoming a quadriplegic or suffering from "locked in" syndrome, where I can no longer move anything myself, cannot feed myself or use the toilet, etc, just laying there, 100% dependent on other people for everything. I'd rather be dead, thanks.

Burying my kids.

Death is the only correct answer. We've been singularly focused on avoiding it since we were single-cellular. Any other fear presented here represents a "what if" hypothesis about what's on the other side of it.

A failed democracy.

Elephant shit, because it is so much.

Being buried alive.

alzheimers.

The idea of lobotomies.
Just being trapped in a shell of who you once were, for the remainder of your life... Bloody hell, what a horrible part of history.

Dick spiders.

More seriously: body parasites of any kind.

The sun moving the other way through the sky

Homeless in the gutter on a cold night, shivering so hard it hurts like needles, wondering hoping to find the threshold of death in the hopeless misery of a lost battle of life in a dystopian world with no ethics or morality; surrounded by people that treat animals orders of magnitude better than me; completely indifferent and uncaring about my last breaths and thoughts as I pass alone in the freezing cold.

Liquid shit.

Ebola

Read The Hot Zone bloody terrifying **

For me personally being out in nature with no cover and encountering a thunderstorm right above me. Most scary things are scary because I read about them at some point or heard about them in the news but the fear of getting struck by lightning is much more archaic.