Chixe

Predestination is a lousy thing. Sorry Scrivs... I'll expand on that.

Say, for example, you were told today that you would die in exactly 7 days -- no sooner, no later. A considerate person might go about finalising all their business and making preparations like their own funeral but all the other people might see this 7 days as a chance to be complete hedonists, even maniacs.

Once you know nothing you do will kill you because your death is predestined for now + 7 days, you lose one of our largest natural behaviours: survival. Losing that amount of inhibition is only likely to lead to madness.

As I said, there would be considerate people but I think the nutters with machine guns would ruin it for the rest of the living.

There is also the immensity of the depression that you're going to be leaving the world on your shoulders for those final 7 days. It might seem nicer from a outside perspective as you can say goodbye but dealing with it, especially if you have dependants, could be nightmarishly stressful.

I think, overall, the aggrieved loved ones would like this predestination system more than the dying would.

Did anyone ever see the movie Big Fish? There is a serious possibility to abuse this information if you knew.

In the movie the father knows exactly when he is going to die so he doesn't have to fear death up until that moment.

It would be an awful thing to know for a variety of reasons; it would serve no purpose. I live my life the way I think it should be lived daily and hopefully no regrets.

I prefer to live without knowing.

I don't fear death; I fear the death of loved ones more than I fear my own death.

When it is over, it's over. I don't find that too frightening.

Did anyone ever see the movie Big Fish?

That film makes me cry like a baby. I'm not proud.

Here's the kicker though -- All of us are going to die at some moment from now. Every one of us optimistically assume that we will die at a point that meets our convenience some 20, 30, 50 or more years in the future.

The fact is however, nothing is guaranteed to you beyond this moment right now. Not next year, not this summer, not even the next minute

Given this, why not do those things you suggest now? Live life to the fullest, stop doing stupid things, tell people the things you need to tell them.

Live today as it is your last -- because, honestly, you have no guarantee that it's not.

That's true that there's no guarantee , but that doesn't mean you should expect to die at any moment. Of course you should still live life to the fullest though, but isn't it a different mentality if you carry around thinking "this could be my last day?"

So I don't normally go by the saying "live today as it is your last" because if it was my last day here, I wouldn't be going to work.

To answer the question though, no I don't want to know when I'll die. And when I do die, I want it to be quick and seamless.

Right. I'm not suggesting to go around grim with the whole thing. I mean, if you're young and healthy chances are in your favor that, healthwise, you'll be around for a while. Of course, we still have to live in a world where people like to blow things up on a whim, or think they can use your money wiser than you can, or drive drunk...

/grim

Anyway, the point is to live and enjoy today. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow isn't promised. We spend too much time worrying about what happened or what might happen. Just take care of the now, everything else will work itself out.

Live each day as if it were your last / Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

It's a balance, optimistically speaking.

Hell no. It would take the fun out of life.

It's like watching a great movie but you already know the ending. Sure, you might not know the little twists and turns, but those twists could lose their meaning if you know it was all going to end with your knowledge.

I don't mind knowing when I'm about to die because death really doesn't scare me. To tell you the truth, once you come to grips of almost dying more than once. It changes the entire perspective of life.

For me at least, it's better to know when I'm going to die (rather than how) so that I can do whatever I can to live life and not regret anything after that.

I'd never want to know for the reasons mentioned... but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to live life like it's the last day.

Maybe I should or maybe it's not prudent. In any case, I want to live every day hoping there's a tomorrow. In accounting we call that a 'going concern'. Why do anything today if you're not anticipating tomorrow coming around?

Quite often, people do know they only have one week, or one month to live, due to some unforeseen diagnosed disease, etc. You hear of it all of the time, people waiting to go see a doctor, and when they finally do, they are told they have 6 days, 6 weeks, whatever, to live.

By this point, most of those people are too ill to go out and live life as if it was their last day. By then, most people can just about manage the energy to take care of their final affairs.

I know from where I speak, my father was in this circumstance, and at that point, beyond an ability to go out and live, he was hospitalized, and found out he had a few days to live. He was 45, and certainly never expected he would die so soon, his life was cut short, as it were.

On a lighter note, this guy tried to make the most out of his time. In one of those crazy "dude" ways.

there was a reason why this thing is god's secret. imagine knowing that you will die tomorrow / next week?

Yeah...if you knew, wouldn't that mean you could do anything you wanted?

You're going to die anyway, might as well not hold anything back.

I'm not at all afraid of my own death but I am afraid of being in severe pain before death. I'm the type of person that would make sure my will and important stuff was available and in order, not the 'sky-diving-mountain-climbing' sort.

I've been dealing with this for a while now. I have 30 days to live and I'm so frustrated. I've only told two people in my life because I don't want to upset certain ones in my life like my mother etc. Knowing when you are going to die has it's advantages, but in general it sucks. Sure you get to try and tie things up, but I've been trying to do just that and it seems like I'll never get everything done that I want to do before I go.

So in a way, its a curse. The main thing if you don't know is to love each and every day and to love all the people around you since we have no idea what tomorrow may very well bring. If we live this way, then knowing when death will comes is pointless. I for myself truly wish I did not know when I am going to die.

The question scares me, for I experienced it early this year.

A doctor told me that I might have a nasal cancer. Thunderstruck, I had no mood to eat or talk to people for days. My family members finally noticed a big change in my attitude. They were more upset than I was when I told them the truth. I had to calm my mother by assuring her that what the doctor had told me might no t be true.

I flew to a neighbouring country to have a second opinion on my health in a hospital. To my relief, the doctors there told me that mine was not a cancer, but only a nose allergy. After a month, i returned to the first doctor and he finally ruled out the possibility.

I can remember the terrible experience well within that month-fear, anxiety, anger and tears.I did some silly things too. I videod my own singing and my strumming of guitar.Some are still available on youtube! LOL.

I nearly died about six years ago, from a previously undiagnosed congenital disorder called Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis.

I was admitted into Emergency completely paralyzed with a heart rate of 45 and dropping. Everyone at the hospital did a good job of keeping me from realizing how close to death I was, except for an orderly who was assigned to sit with me while the potassium drip was being administered. No one told him anything, so he assumed that I knew everything about what was happening. I told him he could leave, that everything was fine, but as you might imagine he insisted that he would stay with me.

Because I am painfully slow-minded even at the best of times, it finally dawned on me that there might be a reason he was staying beside me. Since I knew by then that my paralytic attack had been caused by a sudden depletion of potassium, I asked him what would happen if I were to receive too much potassium too quickly. He basically said that it would be the inverse of what I was experiencing earlier, but that the result would be the same: I'd become paralyzed, have a heart attack and die, and they would be unable to revive me because the excessive potassium would still be in my system. A little woozy at the thought of all this, I asked him if it would be painful. "Oh no," he said, "you'd pretty much just go pop like a light bulb."

In the end I spent about 30 hours in ER and a total of three days at the hospital before I was sent home. Since then, I'm not as fearful of death as I used to be--I mostly worry that I'm going to leave some mess behind (finances, possessions, taxes, burial/cremation/organ donation) for someone else to clean up. I have to get to work on that.

Knowing a precise date and time would give me a deadline (pardon the pun) to work against. But in the end it probably wouldn't matter. I'm late for everything these days.

Well I would definitely want to know when I was going to die so that I could take care of some things that need to be dealt with like telling some people that I love them or taking one last ride down the coast with the wind in my hair. But I wouldn't let it bother me, when it's your time it's your time.

Then again, it could be the trip down the coast that kills me but if that's how I have to bite it I'm ok with that.

Oh, and I so would tell those creepy door to door people to come back in a week.

My name is joe and i have a dream. To day is my birthday im seventeen years old and my dream is the world, to rule it, to look after it and to make sure i make an impact on this world. why am i telling you this you may be thinking because i have thirty three years left to live, months, days and hours are unknown. imagin if you knew when you were going to die what would you do. many people would go made, enter a killing spree but not me because when i was eaight years old i wanted to make a differance to make my name rememberd. people say to me why do you do this, people ask me this because they dont know what i know and this is the first ive spoken of it since my fathers death at the age of fithty. people also say, people my age say i carnt do that i carnt be big and rich because i live in the slums and ive had no motervation, no one to look up to but they still dont know. i was eaight years old when my father died later that year my mother had a nervous break down whilst me and my sister were put in to foster care for three years but its ok my sister who is three years older than me looked after me since she was eaight years old, she was like a mother to me, a better mother than my birth mother but its still ok because even though i go through all this bullshit i know that i can do anything i want and so can all of you who are reding this right now because if i can rule the world for the greater good, so every single person can be happy nomatter who you are after all the shit i whent through so can you. dont wast life its all every one has to remember you by so live it to your fullest.

Of course, dying in your sleep would be awful. Like someone taking a book off you before you read the last chapter.
Mark