I remember when I used to fear the concept of death a lot more, it felt like a sinking weight of anxiety/panic in my chest. Pure fear. The reason we feel fear is to stop us from dying, so it’s reasonable and may even be good to feel some fear from time to time. The problem is when the fear spirals, and with the concept of death, as opposed to dying, there is no end to its extent. This is where one of our greatest gifts; the ability to appreciate our own finite existence, casts its shadow. Now we don’t just have death to fear but an eternity of non-existence.
That is an unfortunate trick of the way our minds think relatively about the absolute. Like trying to describe what a box looks like while inside the box, we find it hard not to think of death as us being somehow somewhere else, missing our own life. In absolute terms, your life is a tiny speck in space and time. In relative terms, there is only the present moment. Yet we often spend our present moment worrying about billions of years that have nothing to do with us.
Your life isn’t something that you can miss, so don’t worry about the billions of years that you wont.