> 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.

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.

> 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 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.

> 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 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.

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.

I had the same experience when under anesthesia. It feels like the time before I can remember being alive.

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

   ― Robert Frost

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?