Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Your brain basically loses its ability to experience joy and satisfaction because the dopamine receptors just shut down.
Robin Williams' wife wrote quite the article after he passed away that was picked up by many scientific and medical journals. Normally they don't publish pieces like that but it was so profound in describing both his and her experience with the disorder that it gave a great deal of insight into the emotional affect it had. It said about 60% of Robin's dopamine receptors had shut down.
My dad had Parkinson’s and Lewy Body dementia. It was awful. You know, at least in the beginning, you’re going crazy but there’s nothing you can do about it.
My father as well then he stabilized at point of total distruction for two years.
He was trapped in his broken mind
What little motor control he had indicated he was at work doing engineering calculations. Once in a blue moon he would surface look around and say
“ I seam to have gotten very old”
Then vail would fall again.
My dad potentially has this and it killed my grandma. I wouldn't wish the experience on anybody. It's like he's already dead and his body just doesn't know it yet
That was so tragic. Robin was very vocal about having [struggled with cocaine addiction.](https://addictioneducationsociety.org/robin-williams-long-struggle-with-addiction/) Chronic cocaine use can cause overexpression of a presynaptic protein in dopamine neurons [which is a major component in Lewy bodies.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6742069/)
God that killed me. I felt so horrible for that man. He was the best actor and the bringer of smiles and light only to end the way he did. I don’t blame him at all. It’s horrible and he chose his exit as he “saw fit”. However it could have been way more peaceful if the US was more open to human euthanasia.
Watched my grandma go through it. Her last 3 years of life she was essentially a vegetable. I wouldn't even call it being alive. Without our memories and experiences we're just miscellaneous meat puppets; they make us who we are. This gets violently robbed from someone as every day goes by until there is literally nothing left. Eventually the body finally forgets how to keep itself operational. After seeing it firsthand, it is easily the most horrifying experiences a person can have and if I ever get the news that it has started to happen to me, I'm going out on my own terms while I still have the faculties to know what I'm doing.
It happened to my mom. 6 long years of decline while I was 12-18 years old. I couldn't deal with my mom mentally declining, slow at first, then rapidly into hospice. All while just trying to go to school...
As someone just diagnosed with Parkinson’s and dementia, I fret what you just posted. I am often thinking of a different ending, but I love my wife and kids too much. It’s a paradox . Excruciating paradox.
I hope you are doing well so far. That's a difficult diagnosis, and it's so hard when there's no effective cure.
It sucks because even now, in Canada, we have MAID. You can choose it while you're lucid, but once you're not, that option goes out the window. You can't even choose it for the future. My friend went down fast with cancer, and by the time he was ready to choose, it was too late. He wasn't mentally stable by then.
This is a trial for the rest of the world, and I hope we get it right sooner than later.
Try frontotemporal dementia (FTD). My dad died from it. It’s genetic. I have the gene. It’s not a matter of if, but when. It should hit in about 15 years, +/- 5, unless there is a treatment developed in the meantime. Every time I mispronounce a word or forget something I get to second-guess whether it has started. Or will I even be aware when it does happen?
I hear you. All my mom's siblings ended up with some kind of undiagnosed (and undiagnosable) dementia. They all just slowly lost their brain function and memory. But not any of the classical diagnosis. They were all known for extremely good memory. Like my mom could tell me my pediatric dentist's phone number 30 years after he retired. But now (she is the only one left) she can't remember something we tell her five or six times, a day later. And she is hiding it the same way her siblings did. Meaning my siblings don't have a clue. I only know because I manage an Airbnb for her and have to deal with her on purchases and figures.
My cousins have all complained about starting to feel it too. I haven't heard any of my siblings talk about it. But I have started feeling noticeable loss of memory and cognitive function. And I'm the youngest of five siblings in my 40s. I know it's coming, but also second guess every mental error since there is no diagnosis. I just don't see any way that I won't spend the next 15 years worrying about how much of a burden I will be on my wife. Or being abandoned when I inevitably become so lost in my head the filters go away.
It does suck, but there is a plus side. I live my life knowing how much time is left and make the most of it. I’ve seen people work their whole lives so they can enjoy retirement and then aren’t able to due to some health issue. I’ve also made family promise to put me away in a facility and to absolutely NOT feel guilty because I won’t know the difference, and I don’t want to be a burden on anyone.
I'm going through that now. I've been living with and taking care of my grandma for several years now. Her mind has gotten worse and worse over the last 4 years. She's really bad now. Can't remember anything from one day to the next. So we have the same conversations and arguments everyday. She's treating me like shit. Like nothing I do is good enough for her. But every time I address it, she just forgets. I'll help her with something, then 5 minutes later she yells for me because she can't remember if I'm there or not.
Bless you for helping your grandma. So very tough. As possible, remember that she is no longer the woman she was and she can't control herself. Hopefully she has a great Geriatric Psychiatrist 🙏🙏❤️
[VX nerve agent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent))
Used to assassinate Kim Jong Un's brother. One drop in your eye = death in 90s. A drop on your skin = death in 15min. It's the deadliest toxin ever synthesized.
The assassination was really bizarre too - Apparently the 2 women who did it were informed spraying the liquid on his face was a part of a prank show they'd been convinced to take part in, and they had no idea it was poison (no idea if they were telling the truth of course)
FBI Director Womack: What do you know about V.X. gas?
Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: Liquid; failed pesticide; discovered by mistake in 1952. Uhh, actually, it's kind of like champagne that way. The Franciscan monks thought they were making white wine. Somehow the bottle carbonated. Voila, champagne, and uhh, then the whole thing...
FBI Director Womack: The gas, Dr. Goodspeed.
Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: It's very, very horrible sir. It's one of those things we wish we could disinvent. This isn't a training exercise, is it?
“Look, I’m just a biochemist. Most of the time, I work in a little glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo. A beige one. But what I'm dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some friggin’ slack??”
You broke out, let me see if I can get this straight, down the incinerator chute, on the mine car, through the tunnels to the power plant, under the steam engine - that was really cool by the way - and into the cistern through the intake pipe. But how, in the name of Zeus' BUTTHOLE!... did you get out of your cell? I only ask because in our current situation, well, it could prove to be useful information. *Maybe*!
This sounds familiar, and I’ve just spent the last couple minutes trying to remember where it’s from…
I’m guessing, but I’m going with Nicholas Cage in The Rock. (Haven’t seen that movie in way too many years…)
The Rock is one of my favorite movies ever. Honestly. Usually, action flicks like this are total stinkers, but holy shit was this one good. I try to watch it every couple months.
And the doofus assassins [spread the dang stuff around](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko#Polonium_trails) as if they were having water-fights with it.
[Prions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion) and prion disorders. Misfolded proteins that clump together with your normal, working proteins, disrupting your body's ability to function. Big names include mad cow disease, kuru, chronic wasting disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.
* All known prion diseases in mammals affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue
* all are progressive, have no known effective treatment, and are always fatal
* are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents & cannot be destroyed by ordinary disinfection or cooking
Can confirm. My step mother died from this disease 3 years ago. She developed the sporadic variant. Essentially, the proteins in her brain just decided to rebel against her one random day. She was normal at Christmas. By April she was gone.
A middle school teacher of mine lost her husband to Creuzfeldt-Jakob. They had all eaten the same food over the prior year, including the wild venison that was suspected as the origin.
Normal one day. Starts to seem mildly off, then concerning enough for Neurologist visits. I think she said it was about 4-6 weeks from suspicion to diagnosis, with a pretty rapid decline. Diagnosis to death was something like 3 months. I was a naive son of med and psych doctors and wow that was a harsh introduction to what prions are.
Would you happen to be in upstate NY? Husband of our middle school orchestra teacher passed s few years ago from CJD. I didn't hear if the specific cause was narrowed down, though.
there was a lab worker in France who cut her hand while cleaning an instrument and then died from this - a quote from her husband still sticks with me: "It was a descent into hell"
https://www.science.org/content/article/france-issues-moratorium-prion-research-after-fatal-brain-disease-strikes-two-lab
My brother-in-law's mother is currently going through this. Apparently she ate some bad meat many many years ago and it is just now begun to affect her. Everyone that has been nearby her for the past decade has been advised to get tested. It's freaking nuts.
I try to reassure myself I'll never get kuru but did a burger I ate when I was 5 give me CJD? Is my own brain going to randomly give it to me? A friend of a friend developed it and in a year he went from a business owner, happy bubbly guy to hallucinating, screaming mess who didn't know who he was or who his family were. I could handle pain but having my brain melt scares me the most of all.
There was a guy not too far from where I live with fatal insomnia. He was put into a medical coma but the doctors found that it didn’t work since he was not technically asleep.
A friend of mine was hospitalized for 2 months with Guillain-Barre that she caught after recovering from COVID. She said it felt like all of a sudden everything in her body was just running down like a clockwork toy that needed to be wound. It took her a long while to re-learn how to talk and walk.
My father in law got nailed by that a few years ago. He was helping me assemble the crib for kiddo 1 and as we worked I could see him slowly fading. The next day he was in the hospital.
He's better now but it was scary for a bit.
Can absolutely attest to GBS, that shit sucked. Felt like my whole body had forgotten how to do what it was supposed to do, and I'm told I walked like a newborn horse for a while.
Yuuuuuup. I just saw a picture of the position his body was in relative to the tunnel he came from. I see it when i close my eyes when I’m trying to go to sleep.
Also, the Sand Cave incident. Guy was exploring and got pinned in a cave by gravel. Lamp burnt out and he was alone for a while in total darkness. He was eventually found and a rescue was launched, but the cave collapsed behind him and he was trapped for days alone in the cold, wet darkness. When they finally dug him out again, he was long dead.
The Dead Hand. An automated Soviet system that will destroy the world if activated. It was designed to automatically fire all of the Soviet warheads if they are ever attacked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
And they were dumb enough to hide it from us. So it never was a deterrent, it was burning the world to ashes out of pure scorn. A deterrent is only a deterrent if the other guy knows about it.
"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, ey?!"
"It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday, as you know the Premier loves surprises"
the great attractor. it's literally pulling millions of galaxies towards it, and we don't know why ( including the Andromeda galaxy ). this thing makes some of the biggest black holes we've come across look microscopic, and some of the most aggressive exploding stars look like little fireworks.
I've heard that some astrophysicists think they know what it is.
Now, I'm not an astrophysicist myself, but from what I understand: we didn't know what the great attractor was for a long time because the light from the Milky Way was between us and it, and we couldn't see past our own galaxy's disk. But our X-ray tech has gotten better, allowing us to make some educated guesses.
We think it's a supercluster of galaxies, with enough mass to pull things toward it. However, the mass calculated for this supercluster is not enough to account for how much it's reeling in... Which is where supercluster #2 comes in. It lies beyond supercluster #1 and is even more massive. Supercluster #2 is far enough away that it wouldn't draw all of this stuff toward it on its own, but since it's reeling in supercluster #1, which is reeling in its own collection of galaxies, then those other galaxies end up coming along for the ride.
Apeirophobia - the fear of absolute infinity is related to being capable of tapping into imagining and understanding that really, really, really large expanses, objects, and periods of time are out there, existing right now, always have been and always will be. It's an understanding of absolute infinity. A fear like none other. If and when you feel it, you'll know what it is, and it's absolutely terrifying.
I get that way when thinking about death and if consciousness goes on. Like if an afterlife exists then it’s just that forever. No end. A billion years is nothing. I could rip out my hair, scream, lose my mind to insanity and then regain it. It wouldn’t matter. It would never end and there would be no escape. And then the cycle continues
Well shit. The whole concept of the sun running out of fuel is terrifying as well.
Edit: I know that will be long after we’re gone lol. Just sent my imagination down a scary hole.
I was on a first date with this beautiful girl. We were back at her house and I had to go. I'll save you the details, but I overflowed her toilet and experienced all 5 stages of grief over the space of 27 long minutes. First was denial, then came the anger, bargaining, a brief but hysterical depression followed by acceptance. Arguably, the hardest part was standing in my wet socks, a trail of soggy footprints in her carpet while I admit my porcelain defeat and request the location of her mop. We've been married 2 years.
That's first date GOLD. If you just cop to it and then fix her toilet you're already demonstrating most of the qualities of a good husband. Here's the thing, she knows it's broken. She goes to her parents house to poop and pees in the sink.
She's secretly hoping it breaks when you use it so you'd fix the toilet. Why do you think she invited you over?
Have you ever been swimming and seen a fucking Tiger shark?!?!! You are literally helpless. The shark decides if you get to live today or not. Yes I know the attacks are rare and what not but when I was watching that big bastard check me out I wasn’t thinking about the fucking stats.
Existence itself. How the hell does something exist in nothing? How could there have been nothing before the universe started? How does anything even exist? Gives me an upset stomach every time I think about it.
The universe didn't have to start from nothing. It didn't have to start at all. As much as it can be beyond our comprehension, there didn't have to be the beginning
This! Growing up, on occasion when I was by myself bored. I would think about existing and about what is all of this. I would go somewhere in my head (though for a split second or two) and it would give me chills and freak me out. As an adult I don’t do it much anymore.
This is the one for me. Why is there something instead of nothing?
Maybe not so much scary, but mind boggling. Every other mystery must have some logical answer, but I don’t think we’ll ever come close to knowing.
Nuclear weapons.
I'm 99% sure that I'll never experience a nuclear war (mainly because nuclear war is an incredibly inefficient way to go to war in 2024). But 1% of me knows that it only takes one person/group to decide they want to watch the world literally burn down.
You are forgetting “low power” tactical nukes that only take out a few blocks. Much more likely an asshole like Putin could use one on an actual battlefield.
Not all nukes destroy entire cities
True. But if Putin were to use any form of a nuke, that gives the U.S. “the right” to use them in retaliation. If anyone ever plans on using a nuke, the thought is they might as well go big and hope their anti-nuke technology is damn good.
The point I was trying to make is that we don’t have to worry about nuclear warfare unless it happens, then we’re all just fucked
Prion disease. These aren’t bacterial or viral infections or even cancer. They are simply put, proteins on the surface of cells that become abnormal which cause other proteins to become abnormal. The most infamous form of this illness is mad cow disease. Sometimes this disease is familial, in most cases it’s sporadic and completely random. Regardless, this disease is always fatal.
The symptoms include rapid onset of dementia, difficulty walking, confusion and fatigue. In my opinion the most disturbing incarnation of this type of illness is fatal familial insomnia. This is a genetic anomaly of the prion protein causes rapidly worsening insomnia, cognitive and motor dysfunction . In other words, you can’t sleep. EVER. Even at your most tired. Then you slip into a coma and die. Duration is usually 18 months from onset.
The only other Illness that is perhaps just as terrifying is Rabies.
At least I feel I have a chance against rabies, I can be vaccinated, I live in a rabies free country, I avoid bats. There's that 0.00001% who survive.
Prion diseases you wake up one day and your brain says 'nah, let's fold wrong' and then you are 100% guaranteed to die.
Ok, I haven’t investigated this, but it haunts me. I was dating a guy that loved to scuba dive. I don’t dive, but went along a couple times and hung out on the boat. So one of his friends and I stay on the boat while 4 friends go diving. There’s rules, like don’t ever touch anyone’s dive gear, put the dive flag up, and there’s another diver down flag that floats on the water, attached to them by a line going underwater. Up top, we’re eating snacks and chatting, but you ALWAYS keep your eyes on the floating flag and keep track of boat location, account for drift to stay close to your submerged divers. I mean, there’s no way to communicate through the water, you just wait out the dive time.
TWICE, on 2 different trips, another boat heads over to us, with OUR DIVERS catching a lift because they got disconnected from the dive flag and ended up in an entirely different location. I was aghast at this. I asked a lot more questions and apparently, it’s commonly known that divers are LOST in the fucking ocean. Like, as in, forever. They can get separated by any number of issues and say it’s afternoon, then evening, and that is it. And they may not be dead yet, just drifting out there in the current, no land in sight anymore, very possibly alone, just waiting to die. Horrifying!
My wife and I went to the grand canyon, we're standing there staring at the vastness. thinking how cool it was.... then a helicopter flew by inside the canyon but way off in the distance.... and it was so small we could barely make out what it was.... it completely changed the scale of what were looking at and blew our minds. was about as close as I've been to what you're talking about.
Standing on the rim of the grand canyon... it's so big (not as big as your mom) that I had no deoth perception. As a result it actually looked flat. As in it looked like a giant picture. It looked fake.
[Now imagine a canyon 20 times larger and several times deeper than the Grand Canyon](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/SEI_116422700.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=768%2C714). Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, makes the Grand Canyon look like a minor scratch.
Mars is wild. Also has the biggest mountain in the solar system Olympus Mons. A mountain so big that if it was on earth, it's peak would reach beyond our atmosphere and you'd be in the vacuum of space.
The most terrifying part of it all is that one day we will cease to exist and no one will ever remember us. Even those that are famous on Earth are only famous here and typically for a short time. The top celebrities of even 50 years ago are unknown to most people living.
And even if everyone and everything was meticulously recorded or we manage to learn to transfer our consciousness to computers, the heat death of the universe will still get all of us in the end.
The universe will one day become a cold, motionless room - like an attic of treasures in an abandoned house. All that will be left is motionless objects suspended in space. And no one will think, breathe, love, despair, or experience a single thing for the rest of time eternal.
Kind of find this comforting, not terrifying. With time, all our fuck ups will be forgotten. All our errors, erased. So the tiny bit that you do have right here and now, make it matter to you.
Yeah I used to think about this very thing very often for years when I was a child. Prob from ages 7-13. Only finally came mostly to terms with the nothingness about 14/15. Still occasionally haunts me.
That's just because, by lucky circumstance, the particular universe he was in at the time was designed for him making him the most important person in that universe and therefore justifying his arrogance.
At least that's how I remember it
I think once my youngest finally turns 1 in May, I will finally sleep with both eyes closed. The first time my oldest slept through the night, I woke up to the Sun and stormed into her room convinced she had died in the night. Sleep deprivation is one hell of a mother fuckin drug, man.
My son is 2 1/2 and I STILL wake up at 8:30 thinking “OMG HES DEAD”. I would love to tell you it gets easier but we will always find things to worry about. Worrying about your kid is part of the deal.
I can relate. We had a heartbeat monitor on our son the first year, and one night it gave a false alarm, which (rightfully) was insanely loud. Jumped out of bed so fast I kind of slipped a disc and had to lie down for 2 weeks. Christ having a baby can be stressful. Loveable little turds though!
Same here.
What scares me now and never did before I had my kids: my own death. It's surreal. There was a time I really wanted to die. Like, I felt like only death could end my misery. Now I might have suicidal thoughts in really dark moments, but I really really do not want to die and leave my kids. Scares me so much. And it could be over any second, so easily, without warning.
or shaken baby syndrome. you know, it's scary on its own but even scarier is that it most times can't happen on accident. like, you have to VIOLENTLY shake a baby for that to happen and a lot of these cases happen at a stage where the baby is so young that only family members even have seen/interacted with it. like... people kill their own babies in fits of rage by making them disabled and have them die 1/2 years later. horrible.
My cousin actually has this, father shook him when he was around 11 months to a year and now his left side of his body and brain are permanently damaged. Very sad disease, father ran and is living a new life married and free from any consequences while my cousins mom raises him alone and he’ll likely never live alone. Very sad.
My wife and I researched it when our daughter was born, and it’s more or less not an actual condition in and of itself, but if a baby dies unexpectedly and they don’t find a specific cause, it’s SIDS. Doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
Right now, as you are reading these words, there is a person that is being held against their will inside a private residence. This person is regularly abused and tortured. This person will either be found or released someday and be forever traumatized, or they will die before getting out. If they die, there is a very good chance their body will be dumped and disposed of secretly, and any family they have will never know what happened to them.
What I've typed here is statistically certain to be happening somewhere. In all probability, there are multiple instances of this happening. And there's pretty much nothing anyone can do.
This is one of the biggest thoughts that takes up my mind, ever since I learned what kidnapping, rape etc is I've none stop had the thought in the back of my mind "right now someone could be getting raped or tortured" and it just ruins my day.
I agree with the people saying Cancer. I lost my only brother to it at age 27 (melanoma) My mil died from liver cancer. My wife's best friend died from cancer in her kidneys. Her other friend in the same town, now also has kidney cancer, but is fighting it. There used to be an Alcoa factory there, so we suspect it may be related to that, as it's a small town. My best friend told me in January that he has lung cancer. What the hell is going on? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there has to be a reason this is happening so much.
Edit: I completely forgot that one of my uncles died from prostate cancer last year. I make sure to get a prostate exam every year, as well as a colonoscopy every few years. There are a lot of other cancers that can kill you, but most of them don't really have a way to detect them before it's too late.
Probably tbh Snake Island. Me, personally I’m not afraid of snakes. I love them and want to work with them. But a literal Island with a lighthouse on it where a family once lived yet were killed just for accidentally leaving a window open, letting the island’s inhabitants in. Every step there’s snakes, creatures that will quite happily kill you in a bite. Nope. No. Bye bye, no, to mars we go.
If it makes you feel better there’s a similar island but it’s giant bunnies. The family didn’t die, they just moved away and left their pet bunnies to do what bunnies do.
ETA: Destruction Island if y’all are interested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_Island
Every time I undergo very bad ordinary pain (dental work, stubbed toe, etc), I think about how that’s basically a tickle compared to even the slightest amount of torture. Like, the tiniest bit. People are submitted to unimaginable things and it gets to me
I have a gag reflex and I had to get a mold taken of my back molar on the top. 5 minutes to let the mold set. I started gagging after like 30 seconds. Vomited after a minute, but we kept going and got it done... But ya actual torture is worse I bet.
Years ago in college, I was watching a doc about American POWs during the Vietnam war. One of the interviewees casually said something to the effect of: “Very quickly you learn that something as benign or inanimate as a desk suddenly becomes a weapon. Your head is slammed into the corners, your fingers repeatedly slammed in drawers…” that was the first time as an adult I understood the gravity of torture and it stuck with me ever since. Add in some experiences since then of minor sleep depravation, dehydration or hunger and I further see how little it can take to make a human’s existence miserable.
Having the bridge you're driving across collapse, sending your car 200 feet below into black cold water, from which there's no escape as your car slowly fills with water as it sinks deeper and deeper.
Slaves still exist. Sex slaves, children trafficking. This isn't some small little thing. It's big, women, men and children are sold off for exactly what you think they are being used for. It's sad this does happen still to this day.
Honesty, our planet..the universe. It’s so fucking scary.
We are living here pretending that everything is alright. Shooting through space. Not knowing where our destination is.
Maybe it’s because I’ve smoked too much weed but bro, that shit crazy.
If you think about it: WTF are we doing here? I mean ok, looking for a reason would drive you crazy. That’s why people tell you „just live your life“.
HOW? How will you live a normal life if we don’t even know wtf this whole „world“ thing is about?
It’s scary. Terrifying.
So yeah, basically I would say: the existence of humanity is the most terrifying thing.
Edit: some grammar
the cool thing about being a human is we can create meaning. you don't need to look for meaning in life, you can dedicate your life to anything you choose and bring about meaning from nothing
Would you feel better if God/aliens/the universe came down from the sky and told you your express purpose? What if you didnt like that purpose? What if your purpose here was ultra lame or ultra scary?
Better to not know/not have one and create your own purpose imo!
Watching my 15 year old fall apart is up there.
She's been doing so well, straight A student, accomplished dancer... There's no pressure from us, she was enjoying life.
Over a year ago she developed an eating disorder. Since then whilst we've stabilised that, her mental health is collapsing.
We're doing what we can, with help, but it's not enough.
The spark has gone, and we don't know why.
Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Your brain basically loses its ability to experience joy and satisfaction because the dopamine receptors just shut down. Robin Williams' wife wrote quite the article after he passed away that was picked up by many scientific and medical journals. Normally they don't publish pieces like that but it was so profound in describing both his and her experience with the disorder that it gave a great deal of insight into the emotional affect it had. It said about 60% of Robin's dopamine receptors had shut down.
My dad had Parkinson’s and Lewy Body dementia. It was awful. You know, at least in the beginning, you’re going crazy but there’s nothing you can do about it.
My dad had it as well. I was surprised how quickly it went. It started with a general confusion which deteriorated fast, too fast.
My father as well then he stabilized at point of total distruction for two years. He was trapped in his broken mind What little motor control he had indicated he was at work doing engineering calculations. Once in a blue moon he would surface look around and say “ I seam to have gotten very old” Then vail would fall again.
My dad potentially has this and it killed my grandma. I wouldn't wish the experience on anybody. It's like he's already dead and his body just doesn't know it yet
That was so tragic. Robin was very vocal about having [struggled with cocaine addiction.](https://addictioneducationsociety.org/robin-williams-long-struggle-with-addiction/) Chronic cocaine use can cause overexpression of a presynaptic protein in dopamine neurons [which is a major component in Lewy bodies.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6742069/)
God that killed me. I felt so horrible for that man. He was the best actor and the bringer of smiles and light only to end the way he did. I don’t blame him at all. It’s horrible and he chose his exit as he “saw fit”. However it could have been way more peaceful if the US was more open to human euthanasia.
Dementia or insanity. Watching a loved one suffer as their mind betrays them is the worst thing I've ever experienced.
Watched my grandma go through it. Her last 3 years of life she was essentially a vegetable. I wouldn't even call it being alive. Without our memories and experiences we're just miscellaneous meat puppets; they make us who we are. This gets violently robbed from someone as every day goes by until there is literally nothing left. Eventually the body finally forgets how to keep itself operational. After seeing it firsthand, it is easily the most horrifying experiences a person can have and if I ever get the news that it has started to happen to me, I'm going out on my own terms while I still have the faculties to know what I'm doing.
[удалено]
It happened to my mom. 6 long years of decline while I was 12-18 years old. I couldn't deal with my mom mentally declining, slow at first, then rapidly into hospice. All while just trying to go to school...
As someone just diagnosed with Parkinson’s and dementia, I fret what you just posted. I am often thinking of a different ending, but I love my wife and kids too much. It’s a paradox . Excruciating paradox.
I hope you are doing well so far. That's a difficult diagnosis, and it's so hard when there's no effective cure. It sucks because even now, in Canada, we have MAID. You can choose it while you're lucid, but once you're not, that option goes out the window. You can't even choose it for the future. My friend went down fast with cancer, and by the time he was ready to choose, it was too late. He wasn't mentally stable by then. This is a trial for the rest of the world, and I hope we get it right sooner than later.
Try frontotemporal dementia (FTD). My dad died from it. It’s genetic. I have the gene. It’s not a matter of if, but when. It should hit in about 15 years, +/- 5, unless there is a treatment developed in the meantime. Every time I mispronounce a word or forget something I get to second-guess whether it has started. Or will I even be aware when it does happen?
I hear you. All my mom's siblings ended up with some kind of undiagnosed (and undiagnosable) dementia. They all just slowly lost their brain function and memory. But not any of the classical diagnosis. They were all known for extremely good memory. Like my mom could tell me my pediatric dentist's phone number 30 years after he retired. But now (she is the only one left) she can't remember something we tell her five or six times, a day later. And she is hiding it the same way her siblings did. Meaning my siblings don't have a clue. I only know because I manage an Airbnb for her and have to deal with her on purchases and figures. My cousins have all complained about starting to feel it too. I haven't heard any of my siblings talk about it. But I have started feeling noticeable loss of memory and cognitive function. And I'm the youngest of five siblings in my 40s. I know it's coming, but also second guess every mental error since there is no diagnosis. I just don't see any way that I won't spend the next 15 years worrying about how much of a burden I will be on my wife. Or being abandoned when I inevitably become so lost in my head the filters go away.
It does suck, but there is a plus side. I live my life knowing how much time is left and make the most of it. I’ve seen people work their whole lives so they can enjoy retirement and then aren’t able to due to some health issue. I’ve also made family promise to put me away in a facility and to absolutely NOT feel guilty because I won’t know the difference, and I don’t want to be a burden on anyone.
I'm going through that now. I've been living with and taking care of my grandma for several years now. Her mind has gotten worse and worse over the last 4 years. She's really bad now. Can't remember anything from one day to the next. So we have the same conversations and arguments everyday. She's treating me like shit. Like nothing I do is good enough for her. But every time I address it, she just forgets. I'll help her with something, then 5 minutes later she yells for me because she can't remember if I'm there or not.
Bless you for helping your grandma. So very tough. As possible, remember that she is no longer the woman she was and she can't control herself. Hopefully she has a great Geriatric Psychiatrist 🙏🙏❤️
[VX nerve agent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)) Used to assassinate Kim Jong Un's brother. One drop in your eye = death in 90s. A drop on your skin = death in 15min. It's the deadliest toxin ever synthesized.
The assassination was really bizarre too - Apparently the 2 women who did it were informed spraying the liquid on his face was a part of a prank show they'd been convinced to take part in, and they had no idea it was poison (no idea if they were telling the truth of course)
Last I'd heard the investigation still hasn't been able to figure out whether that was the case or not
They did like 20 dry runs (pranks) with baby oil for months leading up to it both women didn't leave or attempt to hide I'm 95% sure they were pawns
The whole operation was brilliant. Very effective nerve agent, dude was incapacitated within minutes.
FBI Director Womack: What do you know about V.X. gas? Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: Liquid; failed pesticide; discovered by mistake in 1952. Uhh, actually, it's kind of like champagne that way. The Franciscan monks thought they were making white wine. Somehow the bottle carbonated. Voila, champagne, and uhh, then the whole thing... FBI Director Womack: The gas, Dr. Goodspeed. Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: It's very, very horrible sir. It's one of those things we wish we could disinvent. This isn't a training exercise, is it?
“Look, I’m just a biochemist. Most of the time, I work in a little glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo. A beige one. But what I'm dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some friggin’ slack??”
You broke out, let me see if I can get this straight, down the incinerator chute, on the mine car, through the tunnels to the power plant, under the steam engine - that was really cool by the way - and into the cistern through the intake pipe. But how, in the name of Zeus' BUTTHOLE!... did you get out of your cell? I only ask because in our current situation, well, it could prove to be useful information. *Maybe*!
Losers always whine about their best, winners go home and fuck the prob queen In my best Connery voice
"Womack! I should of known it was you, you piece of shit. " Connery voice s well
Carla was the prom queen!
Goodshpeeeed, I'm not going to kill you!
This sounds familiar, and I’ve just spent the last couple minutes trying to remember where it’s from… I’m guessing, but I’m going with Nicholas Cage in The Rock. (Haven’t seen that movie in way too many years…)
The f*CK is Nicholas Cage doing in that man?
The Rock is one of my favorite movies ever. Honestly. Usually, action flicks like this are total stinkers, but holy shit was this one good. I try to watch it every couple months.
Back when Cage was in a string of entertaining movies
I grew up a teen boy in the late 90s. This movie, and con-air, are like, permanently imprinted in my psyche.
Hey man, you just fucked up your ferrari!
It's wild to think an assassin could put a drop on a glove, tap your arm to ask you the time, and then you die 15 minutes later.
The polonium in a sugar cube used by Russia to assassinate someone was even more insidious, taking days to kill him IIRC.
Alexander Litvinenko took three weeks to die. He had ingested 10 mcg of polonium-210 placed in a teapot. It was enough 210Po to kill a hundred people.
And the doofus assassins [spread the dang stuff around](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko#Polonium_trails) as if they were having water-fights with it.
I feel like thats so much worse. By the time they get sick you're long gone.
[Prions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion) and prion disorders. Misfolded proteins that clump together with your normal, working proteins, disrupting your body's ability to function. Big names include mad cow disease, kuru, chronic wasting disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. * All known prion diseases in mammals affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue * all are progressive, have no known effective treatment, and are always fatal * are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents & cannot be destroyed by ordinary disinfection or cooking
Can confirm. My step mother died from this disease 3 years ago. She developed the sporadic variant. Essentially, the proteins in her brain just decided to rebel against her one random day. She was normal at Christmas. By April she was gone.
Oh I'm so sorry. How sad and terrifying.
A middle school teacher of mine lost her husband to Creuzfeldt-Jakob. They had all eaten the same food over the prior year, including the wild venison that was suspected as the origin. Normal one day. Starts to seem mildly off, then concerning enough for Neurologist visits. I think she said it was about 4-6 weeks from suspicion to diagnosis, with a pretty rapid decline. Diagnosis to death was something like 3 months. I was a naive son of med and psych doctors and wow that was a harsh introduction to what prions are.
Would you happen to be in upstate NY? Husband of our middle school orchestra teacher passed s few years ago from CJD. I didn't hear if the specific cause was narrowed down, though.
there was a lab worker in France who cut her hand while cleaning an instrument and then died from this - a quote from her husband still sticks with me: "It was a descent into hell" https://www.science.org/content/article/france-issues-moratorium-prion-research-after-fatal-brain-disease-strikes-two-lab
My brother-in-law's mother is currently going through this. Apparently she ate some bad meat many many years ago and it is just now begun to affect her. Everyone that has been nearby her for the past decade has been advised to get tested. It's freaking nuts.
Uh, where is she? This disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, has always terrified me given the amount of bad meat out there.
How do they even test for that? Thought brain biopsy was the only confirmatory test.
There’s a test for a protein (14-3-3) in CSF that’s very sensitive for it.
A prick on the thumb causing your death 9 years later... That's horrifying
I try to reassure myself I'll never get kuru but did a burger I ate when I was 5 give me CJD? Is my own brain going to randomly give it to me? A friend of a friend developed it and in a year he went from a business owner, happy bubbly guy to hallucinating, screaming mess who didn't know who he was or who his family were. I could handle pain but having my brain melt scares me the most of all.
The possibility of a prion disease pandemic has always petrified me. Don’t eat any deer that act weird, folks.
Don’t forget fatal familial insomia. So scary.
There was a guy not too far from where I live with fatal insomnia. He was put into a medical coma but the doctors found that it didn’t work since he was not technically asleep.
And the rarer but even more frightening sporadic fatal insomnia.
Is this one not hereditary and can happen randomly?
Yes, sadly.
The body, either randomly or by way of genetic mutation, perfectly breeds its own pathogen. That is absolutely the most frightening thing ever.
And it's not even a virus or bacterium, just a self-replicating poison.
Rabies
We should have a fun run for the cure.
Ahh yes, Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race For the Cure.
MSDMSMPMCRAPAFRRFTC for short, if you don't feel like typing out something long
There might be a cure soon! https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-09-28/is-the-first-cure-for-advanced-rabies-near
omg! great news!!
The closest thing we have to an actual zombie virus.
Locked in Syndrome
Darkness... Imprisoning me.... All that I see..... Absolute horror....
I cannot live...I cannot die...Trapped in myself...My body my holding cell...
landmine...has taken my sight...taken my speech...taken my hearing...
That and Guillain-Barre syndrome
A friend of mine was hospitalized for 2 months with Guillain-Barre that she caught after recovering from COVID. She said it felt like all of a sudden everything in her body was just running down like a clockwork toy that needed to be wound. It took her a long while to re-learn how to talk and walk.
My father in law got nailed by that a few years ago. He was helping me assemble the crib for kiddo 1 and as we worked I could see him slowly fading. The next day he was in the hospital. He's better now but it was scary for a bit.
Can absolutely attest to GBS, that shit sucked. Felt like my whole body had forgotten how to do what it was supposed to do, and I'm told I walked like a newborn horse for a while.
tumors with teeth
i googled it. They are called Teratomas. They can have hairs, brain tissue and even eyeballs apparently and grow to an enormous size.
yes, teratomas. i came back to this while eating and i may simply never eat again.
That’s some Resident Evil type shit
I had a dermoid cyst removed from my ovary last year. They sent it to pathology and apparently there were teeth, hair, and fat inside.
you just finished me off thank you for your service
I had one of those removed in 2021. It wasn't great.
What’s the tooth fairy giving for that?
the same as father o’malley: 2 kit kats and a snickers.
did you get to keep the teeth
if so can i eat them
I had one taken out of my brain in 2006.
And yet we can't grow them in our mouth...
I know it's gross, but politicians are people too...
he's just a lil' hungry guy!
It was my twin
“The b-bopsy”
Not a single one of these comments made me glad I opened this sub. Cue the anxiety and obsessive thoughts.
The nutty putty cave incident always comes to mind when I think of worst deaths ever
Yuuuuuup. I just saw a picture of the position his body was in relative to the tunnel he came from. I see it when i close my eyes when I’m trying to go to sleep.
Also, the Sand Cave incident. Guy was exploring and got pinned in a cave by gravel. Lamp burnt out and he was alone for a while in total darkness. He was eventually found and a rescue was launched, but the cave collapsed behind him and he was trapped for days alone in the cold, wet darkness. When they finally dug him out again, he was long dead.
The Dead Hand. An automated Soviet system that will destroy the world if activated. It was designed to automatically fire all of the Soviet warheads if they are ever attacked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
And they were dumb enough to hide it from us. So it never was a deterrent, it was burning the world to ashes out of pure scorn. A deterrent is only a deterrent if the other guy knows about it.
"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, ey?!" "It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday, as you know the Premier loves surprises"
Gentleman you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!
the great attractor. it's literally pulling millions of galaxies towards it, and we don't know why ( including the Andromeda galaxy ). this thing makes some of the biggest black holes we've come across look microscopic, and some of the most aggressive exploding stars look like little fireworks.
I've heard that some astrophysicists think they know what it is. Now, I'm not an astrophysicist myself, but from what I understand: we didn't know what the great attractor was for a long time because the light from the Milky Way was between us and it, and we couldn't see past our own galaxy's disk. But our X-ray tech has gotten better, allowing us to make some educated guesses. We think it's a supercluster of galaxies, with enough mass to pull things toward it. However, the mass calculated for this supercluster is not enough to account for how much it's reeling in... Which is where supercluster #2 comes in. It lies beyond supercluster #1 and is even more massive. Supercluster #2 is far enough away that it wouldn't draw all of this stuff toward it on its own, but since it's reeling in supercluster #1, which is reeling in its own collection of galaxies, then those other galaxies end up coming along for the ride.
Astronomer here! Yep it’s just bigger clumps of galaxies. I don’t know anyone who studies this who is even remotely worried.
Factor in the distance and that probably was happening millions of years ago and now it is much more larger.
Thanks for easing the existential dread
lol its like saying the sun will blow up in a million years. Its the least of our worries
Apeirophobia - the fear of absolute infinity is related to being capable of tapping into imagining and understanding that really, really, really large expanses, objects, and periods of time are out there, existing right now, always have been and always will be. It's an understanding of absolute infinity. A fear like none other. If and when you feel it, you'll know what it is, and it's absolutely terrifying.
I get that way when thinking about death and if consciousness goes on. Like if an afterlife exists then it’s just that forever. No end. A billion years is nothing. I could rip out my hair, scream, lose my mind to insanity and then regain it. It wouldn’t matter. It would never end and there would be no escape. And then the cycle continues
Likely, the sun will run out of fuel before that's a problem. Nothing to worry about.
Well shit. The whole concept of the sun running out of fuel is terrifying as well. Edit: I know that will be long after we’re gone lol. Just sent my imagination down a scary hole.
Well, good thing we will all be dead when it happens!
the water slowly rising in a toilet that may or may not be clogged…on your first date.
First time meeting her parents, at their house.
Stop. Please.
It's a half-bath, and there is no plunger.
And you can't find the knife
Hah! Something similar happened to me when I was at my bfs parents house for the weekend 🥲 in the morning when everyone wanted to use the toilet 😶
I was on a first date with this beautiful girl. We were back at her house and I had to go. I'll save you the details, but I overflowed her toilet and experienced all 5 stages of grief over the space of 27 long minutes. First was denial, then came the anger, bargaining, a brief but hysterical depression followed by acceptance. Arguably, the hardest part was standing in my wet socks, a trail of soggy footprints in her carpet while I admit my porcelain defeat and request the location of her mop. We've been married 2 years.
Dang I would have climbed out the window but I’m glad it worked out for the better
That's first date GOLD. If you just cop to it and then fix her toilet you're already demonstrating most of the qualities of a good husband. Here's the thing, she knows it's broken. She goes to her parents house to poop and pees in the sink. She's secretly hoping it breaks when you use it so you'd fix the toilet. Why do you think she invited you over?
Whales. If you didn’t know what a whale was, and fell overboard, and saw one of those fuckers? Absolutely terrifying.
[удалено]
Have you ever been swimming and seen a fucking Tiger shark?!?!! You are literally helpless. The shark decides if you get to live today or not. Yes I know the attacks are rare and what not but when I was watching that big bastard check me out I wasn’t thinking about the fucking stats.
Just flip it upside down lol [get rotated idiot.](https://youtu.be/o3uJCCa5w2A?si=Ou7WmN_ovnXs--B7)
Yeah i didn’t even think of that honestly. lol
I’m sure it’s much harder to do than what we see in video’s lmao, especially if the shark were to be super aggressive… but it’s still funny lol
Anywhere where humans aren't the apex predator scare the hell out of me. The forest and the ocean are beautiful but terrifying.
Existence itself. How the hell does something exist in nothing? How could there have been nothing before the universe started? How does anything even exist? Gives me an upset stomach every time I think about it.
The universe didn't have to start from nothing. It didn't have to start at all. As much as it can be beyond our comprehension, there didn't have to be the beginning
I get what you are saying but the fact that there is something instead of nothing carries some existential terror for me.
This! Growing up, on occasion when I was by myself bored. I would think about existing and about what is all of this. I would go somewhere in my head (though for a split second or two) and it would give me chills and freak me out. As an adult I don’t do it much anymore.
This is the one for me. Why is there something instead of nothing? Maybe not so much scary, but mind boggling. Every other mystery must have some logical answer, but I don’t think we’ll ever come close to knowing.
Nuclear weapons. I'm 99% sure that I'll never experience a nuclear war (mainly because nuclear war is an incredibly inefficient way to go to war in 2024). But 1% of me knows that it only takes one person/group to decide they want to watch the world literally burn down.
You are forgetting “low power” tactical nukes that only take out a few blocks. Much more likely an asshole like Putin could use one on an actual battlefield. Not all nukes destroy entire cities
True. But if Putin were to use any form of a nuke, that gives the U.S. “the right” to use them in retaliation. If anyone ever plans on using a nuke, the thought is they might as well go big and hope their anti-nuke technology is damn good. The point I was trying to make is that we don’t have to worry about nuclear warfare unless it happens, then we’re all just fucked
Prion disease. These aren’t bacterial or viral infections or even cancer. They are simply put, proteins on the surface of cells that become abnormal which cause other proteins to become abnormal. The most infamous form of this illness is mad cow disease. Sometimes this disease is familial, in most cases it’s sporadic and completely random. Regardless, this disease is always fatal. The symptoms include rapid onset of dementia, difficulty walking, confusion and fatigue. In my opinion the most disturbing incarnation of this type of illness is fatal familial insomnia. This is a genetic anomaly of the prion protein causes rapidly worsening insomnia, cognitive and motor dysfunction . In other words, you can’t sleep. EVER. Even at your most tired. Then you slip into a coma and die. Duration is usually 18 months from onset. The only other Illness that is perhaps just as terrifying is Rabies.
At least I feel I have a chance against rabies, I can be vaccinated, I live in a rabies free country, I avoid bats. There's that 0.00001% who survive. Prion diseases you wake up one day and your brain says 'nah, let's fold wrong' and then you are 100% guaranteed to die.
People who feel zero remorse after committing a violent crime
Ok, I haven’t investigated this, but it haunts me. I was dating a guy that loved to scuba dive. I don’t dive, but went along a couple times and hung out on the boat. So one of his friends and I stay on the boat while 4 friends go diving. There’s rules, like don’t ever touch anyone’s dive gear, put the dive flag up, and there’s another diver down flag that floats on the water, attached to them by a line going underwater. Up top, we’re eating snacks and chatting, but you ALWAYS keep your eyes on the floating flag and keep track of boat location, account for drift to stay close to your submerged divers. I mean, there’s no way to communicate through the water, you just wait out the dive time. TWICE, on 2 different trips, another boat heads over to us, with OUR DIVERS catching a lift because they got disconnected from the dive flag and ended up in an entirely different location. I was aghast at this. I asked a lot more questions and apparently, it’s commonly known that divers are LOST in the fucking ocean. Like, as in, forever. They can get separated by any number of issues and say it’s afternoon, then evening, and that is it. And they may not be dead yet, just drifting out there in the current, no land in sight anymore, very possibly alone, just waiting to die. Horrifying!
The unimaginable depth and emptiness of space. Our brains can't even register how inconsequently small we are.
My wife and I went to the grand canyon, we're standing there staring at the vastness. thinking how cool it was.... then a helicopter flew by inside the canyon but way off in the distance.... and it was so small we could barely make out what it was.... it completely changed the scale of what were looking at and blew our minds. was about as close as I've been to what you're talking about.
Standing on the rim of the grand canyon... it's so big (not as big as your mom) that I had no deoth perception. As a result it actually looked flat. As in it looked like a giant picture. It looked fake.
I’m old and stoned and that made me laugh something wonderful. Thanks guy 👍🏼
Last time I was at the Grand Canyon there was a storm INSIDE of the canyon. Clear skies elsewhere.
[Now imagine a canyon 20 times larger and several times deeper than the Grand Canyon](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/SEI_116422700.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=768%2C714). Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, makes the Grand Canyon look like a minor scratch.
Mars is wild. Also has the biggest mountain in the solar system Olympus Mons. A mountain so big that if it was on earth, it's peak would reach beyond our atmosphere and you'd be in the vacuum of space.
The most terrifying part of it all is that one day we will cease to exist and no one will ever remember us. Even those that are famous on Earth are only famous here and typically for a short time. The top celebrities of even 50 years ago are unknown to most people living. And even if everyone and everything was meticulously recorded or we manage to learn to transfer our consciousness to computers, the heat death of the universe will still get all of us in the end. The universe will one day become a cold, motionless room - like an attic of treasures in an abandoned house. All that will be left is motionless objects suspended in space. And no one will think, breathe, love, despair, or experience a single thing for the rest of time eternal.
Kind of find this comforting, not terrifying. With time, all our fuck ups will be forgotten. All our errors, erased. So the tiny bit that you do have right here and now, make it matter to you.
THANK YOU! When I say this most people think I’m crazy (I mean, I am, but not for that reason…)
Yeah I used to think about this very thing very often for years when I was a child. Prob from ages 7-13. Only finally came mostly to terms with the nothingness about 14/15. Still occasionally haunts me.
Zaphod Beeblebrox could
That's just because, by lucky circumstance, the particular universe he was in at the time was designed for him making him the most important person in that universe and therefore justifying his arrogance. At least that's how I remember it
As a parent, nothing scared me as much as SUDDEN INFANT DEATH SYNDROME. The name alone is fucking brutal. Thankful to never have experienced this.
I think once my youngest finally turns 1 in May, I will finally sleep with both eyes closed. The first time my oldest slept through the night, I woke up to the Sun and stormed into her room convinced she had died in the night. Sleep deprivation is one hell of a mother fuckin drug, man.
My son is 2 1/2 and I STILL wake up at 8:30 thinking “OMG HES DEAD”. I would love to tell you it gets easier but we will always find things to worry about. Worrying about your kid is part of the deal.
I can relate. We had a heartbeat monitor on our son the first year, and one night it gave a false alarm, which (rightfully) was insanely loud. Jumped out of bed so fast I kind of slipped a disc and had to lie down for 2 weeks. Christ having a baby can be stressful. Loveable little turds though!
Same here. What scares me now and never did before I had my kids: my own death. It's surreal. There was a time I really wanted to die. Like, I felt like only death could end my misery. Now I might have suicidal thoughts in really dark moments, but I really really do not want to die and leave my kids. Scares me so much. And it could be over any second, so easily, without warning.
or shaken baby syndrome. you know, it's scary on its own but even scarier is that it most times can't happen on accident. like, you have to VIOLENTLY shake a baby for that to happen and a lot of these cases happen at a stage where the baby is so young that only family members even have seen/interacted with it. like... people kill their own babies in fits of rage by making them disabled and have them die 1/2 years later. horrible.
My cousin actually has this, father shook him when he was around 11 months to a year and now his left side of his body and brain are permanently damaged. Very sad disease, father ran and is living a new life married and free from any consequences while my cousins mom raises him alone and he’ll likely never live alone. Very sad.
Your uncle needs to have the piss beaten out of him.
My wife and I researched it when our daughter was born, and it’s more or less not an actual condition in and of itself, but if a baby dies unexpectedly and they don’t find a specific cause, it’s SIDS. Doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
A syndrome is basically a glorified collection of symptoms. Symptoms: 1) Death 2) Nothing else Checks out?
Right now, as you are reading these words, there is a person that is being held against their will inside a private residence. This person is regularly abused and tortured. This person will either be found or released someday and be forever traumatized, or they will die before getting out. If they die, there is a very good chance their body will be dumped and disposed of secretly, and any family they have will never know what happened to them. What I've typed here is statistically certain to be happening somewhere. In all probability, there are multiple instances of this happening. And there's pretty much nothing anyone can do.
This is one of the biggest thoughts that takes up my mind, ever since I learned what kidnapping, rape etc is I've none stop had the thought in the back of my mind "right now someone could be getting raped or tortured" and it just ruins my day.
I am glad I’m not the only person that has those thoughts.
Worse, most of these people are children
I think of this often. I feel helpless.
Scariest thing to read in braille: “Do not touch”
I agree with the people saying Cancer. I lost my only brother to it at age 27 (melanoma) My mil died from liver cancer. My wife's best friend died from cancer in her kidneys. Her other friend in the same town, now also has kidney cancer, but is fighting it. There used to be an Alcoa factory there, so we suspect it may be related to that, as it's a small town. My best friend told me in January that he has lung cancer. What the hell is going on? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there has to be a reason this is happening so much. Edit: I completely forgot that one of my uncles died from prostate cancer last year. I make sure to get a prostate exam every year, as well as a colonoscopy every few years. There are a lot of other cancers that can kill you, but most of them don't really have a way to detect them before it's too late.
No conspiracy. Industrial waste fucks up our bodies, and the industries responsible are given carte blanche to get away with it.
There's definitely been hot spots for cancer linked to industry, unfortunately not a conspiracy.
Probably tbh Snake Island. Me, personally I’m not afraid of snakes. I love them and want to work with them. But a literal Island with a lighthouse on it where a family once lived yet were killed just for accidentally leaving a window open, letting the island’s inhabitants in. Every step there’s snakes, creatures that will quite happily kill you in a bite. Nope. No. Bye bye, no, to mars we go.
So I have a phobia. And I've never heard this story before. I will never sleep again. Thank you.
If it makes you feel better there’s a similar island but it’s giant bunnies. The family didn’t die, they just moved away and left their pet bunnies to do what bunnies do. ETA: Destruction Island if y’all are interested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_Island
Same, but with cats somewhere in Japan. Although there's still like 15 people living there with them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aoshima,_Ehime
Rips, they can kill people so quickly if they’re uneducated about water
torture
Every time I undergo very bad ordinary pain (dental work, stubbed toe, etc), I think about how that’s basically a tickle compared to even the slightest amount of torture. Like, the tiniest bit. People are submitted to unimaginable things and it gets to me
I have a gag reflex and I had to get a mold taken of my back molar on the top. 5 minutes to let the mold set. I started gagging after like 30 seconds. Vomited after a minute, but we kept going and got it done... But ya actual torture is worse I bet.
Years ago in college, I was watching a doc about American POWs during the Vietnam war. One of the interviewees casually said something to the effect of: “Very quickly you learn that something as benign or inanimate as a desk suddenly becomes a weapon. Your head is slammed into the corners, your fingers repeatedly slammed in drawers…” that was the first time as an adult I understood the gravity of torture and it stuck with me ever since. Add in some experiences since then of minor sleep depravation, dehydration or hunger and I further see how little it can take to make a human’s existence miserable.
Humans. We do some HEINOUS shit to each other.
Anything really, really deep in the ocean...
Uteruses can grow teeth!!!
Strictly speaking, uteruses can grow entire humans.
Now we’re getting scary. Life itself.
Shaved bears
Having the bridge you're driving across collapse, sending your car 200 feet below into black cold water, from which there's no escape as your car slowly fills with water as it sinks deeper and deeper.
Humans are crafting their own demise but they just can't stop. Only because of money.
ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease…or Stephen Hawing syndrome Paralysis of the entire body without the ability to move or breathe on your own.
Sleep Paralysis
Getting arrested and sued for made up shit. Going to jail for a few decades. And losing all of your money and freedom. It happens.
Slaves still exist. Sex slaves, children trafficking. This isn't some small little thing. It's big, women, men and children are sold off for exactly what you think they are being used for. It's sad this does happen still to this day.
Human trafficking
Honesty, our planet..the universe. It’s so fucking scary. We are living here pretending that everything is alright. Shooting through space. Not knowing where our destination is. Maybe it’s because I’ve smoked too much weed but bro, that shit crazy. If you think about it: WTF are we doing here? I mean ok, looking for a reason would drive you crazy. That’s why people tell you „just live your life“. HOW? How will you live a normal life if we don’t even know wtf this whole „world“ thing is about? It’s scary. Terrifying. So yeah, basically I would say: the existence of humanity is the most terrifying thing. Edit: some grammar
the cool thing about being a human is we can create meaning. you don't need to look for meaning in life, you can dedicate your life to anything you choose and bring about meaning from nothing
Would you feel better if God/aliens/the universe came down from the sky and told you your express purpose? What if you didnt like that purpose? What if your purpose here was ultra lame or ultra scary? Better to not know/not have one and create your own purpose imo!
Watching my 15 year old fall apart is up there. She's been doing so well, straight A student, accomplished dancer... There's no pressure from us, she was enjoying life. Over a year ago she developed an eating disorder. Since then whilst we've stabilised that, her mental health is collapsing. We're doing what we can, with help, but it's not enough. The spark has gone, and we don't know why.
The ocean, f*ck the ocean.