My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
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> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
Before Wittgenstein, Epicurius:
> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
It’s the same with sleep.
I thought about this a lot. I tried comparing going to sleep and sleeping to being put under. The only differences I have is that after waking up sometimes I have a recollection of having dreams. But if something happened and I died in my sleep I would not know any better.
Just because you don’t remember after doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing in the moment.
That's right. This is true for regular sleep and for anesthesia.
Depends on the anesthesia. General anesthesia actually does knock you out for real -- literally shuts down the parts of the brain where we believe consciousness resides.
I've had various forms of anaesthesia, uh, five times in the year or so.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
I understand how people can get addicted to it.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
That was my exact thought the moment it was injected as a painkiller after a surgery. World went from pain to bliss with frightening speed and ease.
The crazy thing is that fentanyl doesn’t even have that much euphoria, heroin and oxycodone have a much, much stronger feeling of euphoria than fentanyl does. Fentanyl is very sedating in comparison.
> It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
If you really care that much about making "every worry in the world disappear" from your mind by entirely artificial means (even to the point of remarking that you understand the POV of those who get addicted!), you might benefit from learning about how to live your life with more equanimity. It's a vastly healthier approach to coping with the challenges of a stressful life than any kind of strong narcotic. The topic is explored in great depth in both Stoicism and Buddhism - and via the latter, in more generic "mindfulness" approaches. (It can of course be useful to cross-reference all of these philosophies; they tend to have complementary perspectives.)
Needless to say, therapy can also have very similar benefits, and many people will derive even more benefit from that kind of highly structured approach.
I think you're interpreting
> I understand how people can get addicted to it
as
> I understand how people can get addicted to it and I endorse it as a route to making all your worries go away.
I'm going to put words in the ops mouth here and assume what they were communicating is more akin to: "It's absolutely terrifying how quickly, easily, and thoroughly fentanyl can erase your sufferings and worries, replacing them with a feeling of total peace."
I'm assuming they didn't immediately become a fentanyl addict, precisely because they understand how destructive a path to equanimity it is.
Meditation and therapy are great, but addiction disorders often come with comorbidities like (or are comorbid to) PTSD, ADHD, MDD, and bipolar disorder. These are all things that can make establishing a habit like meditation difficult to impossible. Combine that with a lack of life skills and limited access to healthcare (or a complete unfamiliarity with navigating that system re:life skills) and therapy feels impossible as well.
In the last two years I've lost two very close family members to fentanyl. We scheduled therapy sessions and drove them there ourselves, we helped try to find rehab centers, we worked with them to find jobs, walked them through buying cheap transport on craigslist, helped work through medicaid paperwork with them, connected them with people we know who've gone through similar things, and in the end, they didn't make it.
I'm going to guess you're getting down-voted because your response interprets the OP as being against or unaware of meditation and therapy as tools for healthy living; it reads as lacking empathy and a recognition of the realities of addiction.
I'd encourage you to look into the literature in that area and read through the stories of people who have gone through it and survived. I find that for me it was especially helpful to find the stories of people who had life circumstances similar to mine, and still fell into addiction.
I also have strong opinions on the likelihood that meditation and therapy could mimic or match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl, but the whole topic is draining for me. I hope you'll forgive me for passing on it. I think it might be worth your time to specifically research the physiological mechanisms as well, though.
It's less a reading of "GP endorses it as a route to making all your worries go away" and more one of "GP thinks it should be especially salient to us as a route to making all your worries go away". This is where I disagree. If the thought of erasing all your worries from the mind is tempting to you to the point that you "understand" the addictive potential of a narcotic drug through that one lens, your first-line approach should be learning about equanimity and structured therapy, not strong narcotics.
Also, clearly we don't need to "match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl" (though there are newer substances like suboxone, now approved for medical use in the US and the EU, that seem to have some limited potential wrt. this), we only have to offer genuinely viable and sustainable approaches (which of course fentanyl isn't) to the narrower issue of dealing with the stressful worries in one's life.
You misinterpret me. I have never taken fentanyl outside of a surgical setting and have no intention of ever doing so.
But because I have experienced it (in a surgical setting), I have a better understanding of the motivations behind people who are addicted to it.
No amount of therapy or Buddhism will make you feel how fentanyl makes you feel and to claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.
With all respect, I would encourage you to investigate this more deeply, and the swipe is unnecessary.
I realize it sounds preposterous. I spent the majority of my life holding a similar view. I mentally categorized meditation as another religious affect not much different than prayer or the bliss people report about their personal relationship with some deity.
My view changed when a confluence of life circumstances led to an experience that opened my mind to the possibilities and I ended up going down a meditation rabbit hole where I found that I could access those states at will. What I found was entirely unlike my preconceptions, and made me realize that I’d been summarily dismissing (and judging) people for something I did not understand.
There’s a reason that many people find meditation through prior drug experiences. More commonly psychedelics, but dissociative anesthetics as well.
Certain drugs basically guarantee you’ll experience these states, while learning to meditate “properly” is something that most people find difficult or confusing. I think this confusion comes from the baggage people associate with it and from the frankly terrible meditation and mindfulness apps, books and gurus that have flooded the market, and the “do thing, get result” framing that is common in western contexts. I don’t think most people’s pop understanding of meditation even scratches the surface.
I’ve experienced the bliss of anesthesia drugs. Achieving similar states through meditation is a real thing. This doesn’t have to be “Buddhism” per se. It just happens to be one of the most well known and structured paths for exploring this.
For the record, I’m a materialist and agnostic atheist. My views were formed based on experience, not belief. I think Buddhism is useful in a utilitarian sense, but there are paths of practice that don’t require all of the religiosity.
I try to respond to comments like yours because I see an earlier version of myself in them. I take some issue with how the original comment was framed, but meditation is the real deal and worth exploring.
That's right, no amount of therapy or Buddhism will make you an addict who might overdose at any moment with deadly consequences. I think it's quite sensible to care about that.
I find your lack of faith, curious. I’ve experienced stronger and more intense joy from meditation than from 200mg of MDMA
The beauty of meditation is that no faith is necessary. No belief. Just a willingness to explore one’s own mind in new ways.
All of the claims made by practitioners can be individually/personally verified.
> All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
I am in complete agreement. People literally carry out suicide bombings based on their belief system about the afterlife.
> the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
This is just another way of saying that you don't think people (meaning you) would be moral without the threat of a bad outcome (hell, bad karma, reincarnation into suffering, etc).
Most avowed atheists would tell you that the finality of death is precisely why we have a responsibility to each other, because there's no one up above coming to fix our problems or right our wrongs. That humanity has to *be* better to become better.
Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I am both an atheist and a strong proponent of individualism without disagreeing with your comments on how this naturally comes with responsibility, more than many spiritual constructs do where you can pass some of your responsibility to a third party such as fate or God or karma. Collectivism is a shared brain, individualism is a hivemind.
To not believe in an afterlife is also a belief. We cannot know. The truth is we don’t know.
> Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I like to distinguish between religion and spirituality, where religion is the organized form where you are either a member or not. Religion requires certain beliefs which are externally prescribed, so in joining a religion I hand over authority to somebody else than myself when it comes to values and rules. This in my eyes makes it inherently more collectivist than individualist.
https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/spirituality-vs-...
> We cannot know
You are an agnostic, not an atheist.
I am a strict atheist, but we cannot know. I faithfully believe that, finding no proof whatsoever, and the existence of a metaphysical/spiritual world coexisting with ours incredibly unlikely without some evidence, there is no god.
But, just like my faith in the supremacy of the speed of light, that's just my opinion, man... based on the combined knowledge of the human race and thousands or millions of experiments.
That's pretty much the definition of "agnostic". The gnostics literally claim to know and the agnostics say "Nope. Do not. In fact, we can't."
Agnostics can play the odds and base their actions on what they find more plausible precisely _because_ they haven't pre-committed to a specific answer.
I believe in the nonexistence of God, which in my understanding makes me an atheist, and at the same time I do not claim to know about the existence or nonexistence of an afterlife. There may well be one without necessarily including a God.
I had quite a number of procedures starting in early childhood and through my teen years.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
I understood it to be a self-centered statement (meant to explain, not judge). “Meaning” is something that exists in your head. You care about the state of the world because your cares are a state of your mind. Kill the mind, and there’s nothing left to do the caring.
The first objection is often “but I care about other people whom I will leave behind!” But yes, you care. Once you’re gone… there won’t be anyone left doing that caring.
Your caring will be passed on, that's the point.
How?
If you care about that little red-headed girl you knew as a nearly-bald kid, and you die in a cabin in the woods, how is your care passed on?
By your interactions with them. Sure, after-the-fact caring won't result in any external effects, but a lot of caring is expressed in interaction which is indeed left with people. Who in turn have other cares and interactions influenced by those who cared about them. It's a chain.
When I was put under anesthesia they told me it would be like no time had passed when I woke up, but this wasn't true for me. It felt like time had passed the same way as sleeping.
Odd. I feel that time hasn't passed when I am sleeping.
i wonder if they lied how long you were asleep how it would render after knowing the actual duration
I don't think the article tells us how we should live. The author had a peak experience and he shared that with us. I appreciate that.
- [deleted]
I had the same experience when under anesthesia. It feels like the time before I can remember being alive.
Replies like these are a clear symptom of how terribly sick our culture is. Nietzsche truly saw it coming.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
Choosing to not have a mystical outlook on life is not indicative of some kind of moral sickness. Being a materialist is not wrong, either, as you clearly imply. The parent "has no way of knowing" - as you say, and I agree with you. But neither do you, so why be so strident in your denouncement?
You seem very nihilist, and frankly, ugly inside. Why so critical of other's beliefs?