Not sure anyone can know. We all deal with death and finality in different ways. Some may become more comfortable with it while others may never fully reconcile it.

No clue.

How did it feel before you were born?

When you come to the realization that there is nothing to dread and fear. Life just terminates and one ceases to exist. You will be dead but you will not be aware that you are dead. You will no longer exist and will not be aware of anything. I think your black graphic is a good analogy.

I’ve been an atheist just about my whole life and the sense of dread over the finality of death has never gone away completely. Rather than dwell on it, I use it as inspiration to live my life to the fullest.

One thing to consider is that for billions of years before you were born, you did not exist. It’s really not a big deal to return to that.

It depends on the person. With some, it is simply the full realization that it is going to happen, that there is nothing you can do to stop it, and that it is simply the end of existence as a biological entity. With others, it is having lived a full life, or having atained one's major goals. With others, it is simply reaching the stage of being at peace with oneself.

There is no point in dreading the inevitable. No one gets out alive. We all know, one day, we are going to die. Knowing that, make every day count. Do what you love. Cut toxic people out of your life, family be damned. Work on being the best at something. Take care of yourself, be smart, sensible, have a cookie. Learn something new, every day. Sing, out loud, every where. I have never stood at a coffin, looking at the deceased & heard, "they could have vacuumed more." Enjoy the day, plan for the future, kiss toads, tell grating people to feck off in no uncertain terms and make damn sure the Grim Reaper has to run to catch you.

Dread and fear of dying are good thing when they make one appreciate the life one has right now and inform choices one makes to stay healthy and live well for a long time. Attention on now, not a future fantasy is the gift you are giving yourself. Celebrate!

Death is not something to fear is just a fact just like gravity. Energy is recycled perpetuates the next instrument that absorbs the energy.

I'm puzzled how anyone can be that sure about anything. I certainly am not!

Anyway, Shakespeare's Hamlet of course reversed the dread:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

It's coming eventually, no matter what you do. Worrying never gets one anywhere. So don't worry.The best thing is to make your days count.Enjoy your life while it lasts.

"It depends".

I find that people who dread their mortality as atheists probably dreaded it as theists. They just had comforting lies to paper it over with, and don't now. So the problem isn't caused by deconversion, it's simply exposed by it.

Personaly I never dreaded it when I was a believer and if anything my unbelief made me even more accepting of my mortality.

You might want to read philosopher Ernst Becker, particularly Denial of Death, to get a little perspective on this. It's a particularly powerful book given that it was written while he was dying. The short version: the whole story of human history is the story of people's immortality projects, their attempts to deny, cheat, and circumvent death.

The only general advice I can convey is to consistently deal in reality (always a work in progress; our brain really doesn't like reality). Remind yourself that mortality is not just the fact of death, it is a (for lack of a better term) "scope" for your existence. A lot of existential angst is tangled up in the desire to accomplish something -- to do rather than to be. To perform. To excel. To triumph. To demostrate proficiency and to acheive success.

All of these strivings are rather poorly defined and we're always failing at them, and all of them are designed, not to do good, so much as to make sure we leave an impression. That we will be remembered even after we are gone.

I find it liberating to realize that none of that is necessary, that I can inhabit the present moment, leave as little as possible unsaid to my loved ones, be as kind as possible, and try to ease other's way in life -- and it is sufficient, even if not as acknowledged or appreciated as it "should" be. Just do my bit ... don't worry about being lauded now or later for it, don't worry about how indispensible I imagine myself to be. The dread of death is in large part (for me anyway) an ego inflation -- the notion that I'm more important than I actually am. When I'm less important, my sense of accomplishment and adequacy increases. Things become "doable" if you will.

Just my $0.02 plus inflation for what it's worth. You're on the right track; just keep walking into the light of knowledge -- self knowledge, knowledge of reality -- embrace it in all its beauty and absurdity and fragility and impermanence. In time, you'll find peace,

I am learning about the roots of the English language right now. It beats learning about mere speculation of the afterlife.

The idea that you weren’t afraid of death because of what awaited was based on nothing whatsoever and sold to you by snake oil salesmen.

Who wants to live like that?

Instead it’s the very acceptance of this fact, that allows me realize how special this happy accident is, not only of life, but the consciousness and security we have that allows us to ponder such things, aspiring to not waste it and live it to the fullest, before our molecules and atoms are recycled into the earth... and later... through the cosmos.

Just my thoughts. Hope it helps

We don't have any warm and cozy promise of a perpetual postmortem party, but on the other hand there's no eternal torture either. There's simply oblivion. There's nothing to fear because it's the end of awareness.

There's too much to experience while you can. Don't squander what brief fling with happiness this life can offer in worrying about what happens next.

Congratulations on overcoming Pascal's Wager! I will only say this: was the nothingness before you were born so terrible? Then neither will be the emptiness that comes after. It's really only the transition that makes me nervous, but there's not a lot to be done about it.

I cannot say I think about it much. I think I fear dying, more of the process of dying. But being dead doesn't scare me personally. Of I imagine myself as dead, I feel disappointed that I didn't get to do more.

I can only speak from my personal experience, but I don't think contemplating eternal nothingness ever gets easy. For me, there is some solace knowing that I'm going where every other living thing has had to go. It's the great equalizer.

I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
Worrying the future is something some do, dont, or learn not to.
Being dead is nothing....literally.
Dying, well that can be excruciating in a few ways - but we do have options.

You will find whatever you find. The interesting part is the hunt. If you discover something that will allow you to accept the notion of not existing, great. If you don't, that's okay too. Searching is the important part of the process -- it shows you're not afraid of facing the bogeyman.

Glad you joined us❣?
All things end. It's natural. It's ok. I'm terminally ill with a brain tumor. I got over myself. I did die during an operation...it was nothingness. No pain, no fear, just nothingness.
No big deal.
Life's been good. Forgive yourself & allow yourself to live. You're validated. Enjoy your life while you're here. ?

Why fear death? Do you fear the time before you were born? Live each day in the knowledge that your existence is a wondrous fluke & is yours to give meaning to & to enjoy to the fullest!

I think this is more of a question of making sure that the process of death is not frightful. This might include intervention with psychoactives, but I'm not medical staff or anything.

Maybe being saved helps? Is it possible to know one thing, but feel another?

Oddly enough, for me, I don't dread my death, but I still haven't gotten over a deep sadness that my mind won't continue on afterwards in Paradise. I'm pretty recent, too.

This was on NPR in 2005, spoken by Aaron Freeman...its basically what i want said at my funeral.

"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly..."

-Aaron Freeman.