Best Tricks to Stave off Existential Dread

Listen, we’ve all been there. The inevitability of death. The madness of money’s iron grip on society. The fact that eating ice cream makes you gain weight. Having been born. Taking a sip of soda when you thought it was tea. These are the myriad reasons we can think of right now that a human might feel distress at the nature of being. Fear not! Generation upon generation that came before you has scrounged up a sizable cache of coping tactics that will help cool your head-noodle out of its terrible moments of clarity.

Hereunder lie our best suggestions. Observe: the wisdom of the ages.

• Eat a spoonful of peanut butter.
• Watch Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Order a mushroom, pepper, and onion pizza and then eat way too much of it. You’ll be so miserable you can’t think about how miserable you are.
• Invite friends over to watch a cinematic masterpiece that exhibits the height of human ingenuity, such as Spy Kids.
• Breathe precisely one unit of fresh air from the outdoors.
• Find a robust system of personal meaning that allows you to weather life’s trials and accept that human suffering is universal (easy peasy).
• Grow your own tomatoes and basil.
• Fashion a corrugated palace out of your Amazon boxes for a tiny fluffy creature.
• Willfully misunderstand people for comedic effect.
• Fart, our inbuilt system for cosmic relief.
• Pat your friend on the head. Do not stop. Keep going. 
• Make a cuppa. Cuppa tea, cuppa joe, cuppa hot cocoa, cuppa mulled wine, cuppa the skulls of your enemies, whatever floats your boat. Sniff it. Drink it. Twist it. Bop it.
• Smooch something. Anything at all. With permission, of course.
• Channel all your negative emotions into a questionable relationship with creative endeavors.
• Tap-dance, regardless of whether you know how. The more publicly, the better.
• Invent a grandiose cosmogenic yarn that you can pass on to future generations to create a sense of immortality and continuity.
• Root for a sports.
• Become a being of pure energy, preferably with sick abs.
• Eat a piece of cheese spicy enough to reduce you to your most basic sensations.
• “Play video games or something, I dunno.”
• Definitely don’t scream into the void. The void likes it when you do that, and fuck that guy.

How do you get along? What tactics do you have for the unbearable terror of existence? Let us know in the comments. But don’t read them.