Early Morning Panic

[Kavik]

Does this happen to anyone else? It has been a long while since this has happened to me, but it did this morning.

I wake up during the twilight hours of the morning, typically one or two hours before I actually need to get up, and I can't fall asleep again because my mind starts pondering all the existential questions in my life that for some reason are immediately so important as to prevent sleep: Am I wasting my life? When will I do what I actually want to do? Am I too old to have kids? Would I have free time if I had kids? Would kids preclude following my dreams (which I won't follow anyway)? How much longer do I have to enjoy loved ones before they die? How will I cope when my dog dies? Will I be the last person in my bloodline? Will I ever be able to retire?

These are questions that concern me to some extent in daily life, but I've mostly suppressed them, or they just don't bother me as much when my brain is fully awake. This used to happen much more frequently when I really, really hated my job and life in general. What's funny is that today, I woke up and thought, "I used to have trouble falling asleep when the sun was coming up because I'd worry about everything", and then I actually started worrying about everything.

I eventually was able to distract myself by listening to a Lindybeige video causing me to fall asleep again for a couple hours.

[tp4tissue]

Once you get some more life experience, < go 2 collage + secs w/ lots'o'grils >, then graduate to full adult,  you'd realize living as a modern human is no different than being a rat in a cage. @ about ~Age 25, you'll have seen it all. Once you've seen it all, the existential qualm is resolved, a rock is a rock.

Yea, some of your neighbor rats may have access to more food/drugs/secs late game,  but items/experiences such as those don't stack, and they're no different than what you've already come across (by that time).. 

If you are very technically inclined, consider signing up for dream teams like Tesla/Aerospace/Weapons contractor stuff. You'd be there for the science and the dreams, not experience.

Experience is really just a sensor system, it's suppose to keep you alive and replicating,  but for the majority of modern humans,  this is a non-issue and irrelevant.

For example, even if you have no progeny, india will make 5+ for your -2, as will african countries. Humanity is quite secure, and Nature will reset humans if they screw up too-hard, and even that is OK. Nature operates on Geological Time, and sooner or later, there will simply be a new intelligent race rebooted.

[fohat.digs]

Humanity is quite secure

Um, I don't think so.

https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

[tp4tissue]

Humanity is quite secure

Um, I don't think so.

https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

Again, Humans are quite secure,  there will be MUCH fewer humans come catastrophe, but we are still more fit to survive than any other animal.

Meat-Consumption is the #1 cause of deforestation, climate change, lifestyle diseases such as cancer,heart disease, diabetes,  and PANDEMIC potential disease through zoonosis, covid / smallpox / flu / typhoid / HIV

[Findecanor]

Does this happen to anyone else?

Yes. But I have things to panic about.

Usually happens after I have woken after a dream that made me start thinking.

[funkmon]

Old English has a word for this. Uhtcaru

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uhtcaru#Old_English

This literally means "before dawn worry." It's exactly what you're talking about. So feel comforted that not only is it common, Old English, over a thousand years ago, had it as a word that is describing exactly what you've got right there.

It was found only once in the corpus, but it was there, in a poem called The Wife's Lament. I'm getting a tremendous sense of deja vu, like I've posted this exact thing before.

ærest min hlaford gewat heonan of leodum
ofer yþa gelac; hæfde ic uhtceare
hwær min leodfruma londes wære.
ða ic me feran gewat folgað secan,
wineleas wræcca, for minre weaþearfe.

First my lord went from his people
over the waves; I have pre dawn worries
where my lord in these lands is.
Then I left myself to his followers seek
A friendless pilgrim, for woeful need.

I probably translated that badly but you get the picture.

[fanpeople]

I drown that **** out with podcasts.

[Kavik]

Old English has a word for this. Uhtcaru

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uhtcaru#Old_English

This literally means "before dawn worry." It's exactly what you're talking about. So feel comforted that not only is it common, Old English, over a thousand years ago, had it as a word that is describing exactly what you've got right there.

It was found only once in the corpus, but it was there, in a poem called The Wife's Lament. I'm getting a tremendous sense of deja vu, like I've posted this exact thing before.

ærest min hlaford gewat heonan of leodum
ofer yþa gelac; hæfde ic uhtceare
hwær min leodfruma londes wære.
ða ic me feran gewat folgað secan,
wineleas wræcca, for minre weaþearfe.

First my lord went from his people
over the waves; I have pre dawn worries
where my lord in these lands is.
Then I left myself to his followers seek
A friendless pilgrim, for woeful need.

I probably translated that badly but you get the picture.

That is pretty cool. Literature is always useful for putting into words ideas or feelings I've never expressed or thought were my own because I've never heard others talk about them.

Also, Old and Middle English are always very interesting to me as a student of German and Danish; though, I've never studied them to see anything beyond the surface level similarities.

[TacticalCoder]

I don't think there's any reason to panic, these seems to me like pretty normal and healthy thoughts/questions 

You're saying it yourself: you're not constantly thinking about that. Next time simply think: "These are normal questions, I must be either tired or not fully awake".

Am I too old to have kids?

I got my kid at 42 years old! Note that around 37/38 I thought I'd never have any kid and I was okay with that.

Will I be the last person in my bloodline?

I clearly remember thinking about that.  And I kinda liked the idea: it's poetic too to be a leaf and not a branch!

Funkmon: TYL, that is very interesting, thanks for that!

[-Jerry-]

I used to get a lot of that when I was younger, general anxiety about lots of things and inability to sleep. The older I've gotten (granted I'm only in my mid-30s) the less I've found it happening and I think it's because having a kid keeps you so exhausted that your body refuses to give up what sleep it can get. My mind still doesn't shut down when I want it to, but ever since I used to rock my son to sleep with white noise, I've become accustomed to using rain noise recordings to drift off. Stick it on an hour timer, off I go. It really helps if you've got a three year old waking you up at 5am and you still need to get those last two hours of sleep to function.

[noisyturtle]

I've pretty much accepted no good happiness or luck will ever come my way. Makes these existential moments much less frequent. Helps numb the depression as well.
People might say you never get used to bathing in a vat of acid, but I beg to differ.

Just go full nihilist it makes things generally more acceptable 

[tp4tissue]

I've pretty much accepted no good happiness or luck will ever come my way. Makes these existential moments much less frequent. Helps numb the depression as well.
People might say you never get used to bathing in a vat of acid, but I beg to differ.

Just go full nihilist it makes things generally more acceptable 

But did you bring a laser gun for the ladle test ?

[strongly-typed]

Oh man, I've been getting this on and off for the last 8 years.  I thought it was just me, but sometimes I'll just wake up in the middle of the night, like 4am, and my subconscious will be blasting a quasar jet at my anxiety.

[funkmon]

Old and Middle English are always very interesting to me as a student of German and Danish; though, I've never studied them to see anything beyond the surface level similarities.

Same. I did get a degree in English Linguistics, but I never got to spend enough time with Old English to be comfortable with it, and my German is rudimentary at best from living in Luxembourg, which gives me a strange type of knowledge of the language. I remember when I went to college and tested out of the German classes. Their method was to give me the midterm and final exams from all the German classes they offered in a row, and whichever one I failed, that would be the class into which I was placed. Well, I did the first one and got a C. I thought "oh man this is not going to go well for me." I took the next one and I got a C. I took the next one and I got a C. I took the next one and got a C, and so on. Ultimately, I passed the exams for all the classes offered at the university, but still couldn't ace the first exam.

Anyway, the strange knowledge allows me a lot of insight when I look into older English stuff, but it also lacks a lot of insight I'd get were I a real German speaker. For example, I remember looking at "horse" and it's obviously a Germanic word, I recalled hros from Old Norse, but I didn't know it's still extant as Ross, a kind of poetic term for horse. So then I thought about pferd. Whence comes pferd? Dutch has paard, and Luxembourgish also has a version of that, so I figured it was another Germanic word which must have meant something else. Well, no, it's a loan word from Latin, the word being paraveredus. Now that's the most late-Latin word I've ever heard. That's a Greek prefix with a Celtic root and Latin declension. Turns out the Celtic root, veredus, ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root  which means to ride.

Which means in German, if you reitest dein Pferd, you're riding your ride! Just borrowed in at different times.

It also explains why Dutch has paard but English doesn't. By the time of Late-Latin, the Angles had already invaded England and the languages had branched, but much of what is now Germanic speaking Europe was still largely in contact with each other.

[strongly-typed]

For example, I remember looking at "horse" and it's obviously a Germanic word, I recalled hros from Old Norse, but I didn't know it's still extant as Ross, a kind of poetic term for horse. So then I thought about pferd. Whence comes pferd? Dutch has paard, and Luxembourgish also has a version of that, so I figured it was another Germanic word which must have meant something else. Well, no, it's a loan word from Latin, the word being paraveredus. Now that's the most late-Latin word I've ever heard. That's a Greek prefix with a Celtic root and Latin declension. Turns out the Celtic root, veredus, ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root  which means to ride.

This is the kind of stuff that I live for. It's a shame a lot of these ancient languages were never written.  I'm particularly curious about the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, especially since on the surface, languages in those families hardly seem related at all.

Still, it's not like they weren't written at all... and sometimes people do end up finding fragments and things.... which then makes me wonder how many documents are still buried in the ground which could be recovered if we only knew where to find them. Le sigh...

[Kavik]

For example, I remember looking at "horse" and it's obviously a Germanic word, I recalled hros from Old Norse, but I didn't know it's still extant as Ross, a kind of poetic term for horse. So then I thought about pferd. Whence comes pferd? Dutch has paard, and Luxembourgish also has a version of that, so I figured it was another Germanic word which must have meant something else. Well, no, it's a loan word from Latin, the word being paraveredus. Now that's the most late-Latin word I've ever heard. That's a Greek prefix with a Celtic root and Latin declension. Turns out the Celtic root, veredus, ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root  which means to ride.

This is the kind of stuff that I live for. It's a shame a lot of these ancient languages were never written.  I'm particularly curious about the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, especially since on the surface, languages in those families hardly seem related at all.

Still, it's not like they weren't written at all... and sometimes people do end up finding fragments and things.... which then makes me wonder how many documents are still buried in the ground which could be recovered if we only knew where to find them. Le sigh...

Same. This is cool stuff, Funkmon.

You two may be interested in Jackson Crawford's Youtube channel. He's a professor of Norse languages and talks about Old English, Icelandic, Old Norse, etc. As he puts it, a lot of this info is "locked in an ivory tower" because it's purely academic at this point.

[Kavik]

A relevant Facebook memory popped up the other day (from 2011): "Does anyone else wake up too early and become bothered by thoughts of things that don't normally matter, causing him not to be able to go back to sleep? This happens to me too often."

[tp4tissue]

A relevant Facebook memory popped up the other day: "Does anyone else wake up too early and become bothered by thoughts of things that don't normally matter, causing him not to be able to go back to sleep? This happens to me too often."

Sometimes, Tp4 gets dreams of taking math tests that he didn't study for. Kekekeke.