Fridge Horror/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Before you even start reading every single example on this page, just have a brief look to see how freaking long it is! This means there must be really a lot of fridge horror in Real Life. And all those examples listed here aren't even everything - there's still a lot more that could be added! Real Life probably has more fridge horror than any fictional story that has ever been created.
  • Take a moment to consider the possibility that there is no afterlife. That there is no immortal soul to survive biological death. That means that beyond death, is nothing. Absolute oblivion. And even if some sort of consciousness could be somehow retained, what would await anyone would be an eternal non-existence devoid of any feelings whatsoever.
    • Or, if consciousness is like a film, it will stop at its very last "frame" and display it for eternity. Which means you'll be trapped in the last moment of your life forever. And that could well be a very painful moment.
  • Instead of No Afterlife or Eternal bliss, imagine this: Consider that reincarnation is real. That means that we were all possibly someone else in a past life. What if Reincarnation doesn't obey the laws of time? That means we could very well reincarnate as a past historical figure, or that schmuck who got tortured and killed because he angered the king. Not horrifying enough for you? Then consider this final bit: If there is no limit on reincarnation, and we could all have been someone else, then it's possible that there really is only one "soul" (i.e: we're all the same person, just in different lifetimes). All of those horrible things you hear, they happened to you at one point or another, and will likely happen again. Still not terrified? Whoever this soul is, he is probably completely alone in existence, and all of these lifetimes are just a really tragic way of escaping that loneliness, by creating duplicates of himself to talk to, to interact with, to love and to be loved. And that sad being...is you.
    • Think for a minute. You can reincarnate as a different species. A dog. A paramecium. A plant. A shark. That had his fins cut off. You are both the person being cruel to animals and the animals being abused.
    • Because if you consider the universal ancestor theory, every single living thing on our planet came from the same thing, which then proceeded to clone itself continuously. Our whole world is populated by a single thing that has gone through and is going through billions of horrible mutations. Think of the most hideous disgusting creature in existence. Millions of years ago you and that thing where essentially the same thing.
    • Can you be reincarnated as a plant? All those flowers picked. Your limbs are being ripped off in another life.
    • You are every single bug you've stepped on or purposely squished. Also, you are every single child or pet who's ever been abused or neglected. And they were treated that way by you. And you're everyone you've ever been mean to. You're everyone who's ever died of cancer. You're the victim and perpetrator of every form of bigotry or injustice possible.
    • You're also that pampered Chihuahua in your neighbor's living room. Don't just go and think up all the negative examples.
    • You're also every person you've ever had sex with, AND all your own children. In other words, your loving wife, your fresh faced dimpled little boy, and that hooker down the street who accepts payment in cocaine? All the same person.
    • Isn't that kind of like forever-alone solipsism with bells on? There's only one real entity and everything else is a co-manifestation or projection of the psyche type thingy?
    • You are the eggman. You are the eggmen. You are the walrus. Goo-goo-g'joob.
  • Speaking of afterlife, what if we do have souls, but no afterlife place? Like, your body's dead. But your spirit isn't, and it can't go out of your body. So you have this spiritual consciousness still, and you're conscious through all the things that happen to your dead body. Or what if you can feel it? The autopsy, the suffocation inside your coffin or cremation, your body rotting away, disintegration into dust... Ow.
  • The idea of quantum immortality. With an infinite number of universes, there would be one where the you never die. No, make that an infinite number, since even an exceedingly small possibility times infinity equals infinity. And some of those versions of you are suffering fates worse than death. Far worse than death. And still versions who get an even worse fate.
    • There might be an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of versions of you... but you only feel this one version in this one universe. Does that mean that all the other "you's" are merely soulless zombies? And what about all the other people? Are their "real" identities in the same universe as yours? Or are you surrounded by zombies which have (or had) their true life in a parallel universe?
  • Think about all of the photos you or your friends take that are posted on the internet. In many, there are random people in the background. You feel a bit of a shock when you realize there's probably hundreds of photos with YOU in the background on many websites, and you will never see them. Except in the case of a really unlikely coincidence.
  • The idea that one could be talking to a Serial Killer and you dont even know it. Especially if there is a possibility that you could end up being the Serial Killer's victim whenever he/she feels like it.
    • Made all the worse by the fact that the public's vision of a serial killer is grossly skewed. The crazy hairy, weird people? They're probably schizophrenic, and aside from paranoid types which are still only dangerous if you freak them out, are harmless. The average serial killer looks and acts, well average, even charming.
  • Clearwater, Florida- the location itself is not scary, but the Alternate Interpretation of the name is rather chilling... (i.e.: the Church of Happyology)
  • The Gulf Coast oil disaster. That was just one oil well. There are thousands of offshore oil wells around and all of them are slowly being eaten away by salt water. Not all of these oil wells have relief wells or other stopgaps in event of emergency. If they do have safety features, there is no guarantee the safety features won't also fail (like they kept doing in the Gulf). There are also increasing reports of violent oceanic storms to batter the aging, rusting metal....
    • Then realize that the rig that failed had been given a safety award by the government just months prior. That means the investigation that resulted in the award was incredibly lax, bribes were accepted for a good score, or award winning safety can still result in catastrophic spills. Or in other words, no matter what you do, the ocean will turn black.
    • WikiLeaks released a memo saying that there had been another incident in the Caspian Sea, but had been covered up. How many more out there could have already leaked but been kept hush hush?
  • Consider all the wars that your country has fought. Then consider the enemy and civilian casualties, and add those to your country's casualties...and then realize just how many people died.
  • In concentration camps, inmates' glasses were taken and thus they were rendered useless. In a regime that killed off every person that they presumably had no use for, that means every pair of glasses taken was one guaranteed death.
  • The footage from The Twilight Zone movie of Vic Morrow and the two child actors before the helicopter comes crashing down on them.
  • Generally, if a man and a woman want to have children, they have sex with each other. Examples include:

"We've analyzed genes on several of your chromosomes, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion: at some point, your parents had sex."

    • Due to the birth process, all of us (except for a few caesareans) have been in physical contact with our mothers vagina.
    • The single most horrifying moment of puberty. We have all been there.
    • Your teachers.
    • Your grandparents. Who may still be getting it on at every possible opportunity. Unless one or both of them is deceased.
  • By extension, most every famous man in an Arranged Marriage throughout history probably raped his wife on their wedding night. A few of the ones that didn't were quite possibly raped by their wives instead (yes, female-on-male rape, and women who believe in the marital rape license, exist). And in some cases (particularly royal ones), neither partner wanted it and they were both effectively raped by the fact that they were forced to have sex while being watched by a crowd, to make sure the marriage was consummated.
  • The Titanic. Obviously, she was named after the titans of Greek mythology, probably because the people who named her wanted the ship to be as powerful as the titans were. But, as we all know, the ship sunk when she hit that iceberg, so you may be thinking she didn't really live up to her name. Then you realize: the all-powerful titans were defeated by the Olympian gods.
    • And, of course, the name of Titanic was paralleled by her sister ships being called the Olympic and the Britannic. Brittanic also came to a tragic end, though the story is understandably overshadowed by Titanic's sinking. While working as a hospital ship during World War I, she hit a mine off the coast of Greece and sank, with the loss of 30 lives. J. Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, was also instrumental in determining exactly why Brittanic sank—until his expeditions, there was some controversy over whether the Brittanic' had hit a mine or been intentionally torpedoed .
  • Those horrible moments of clarity where the reality of a catastrophic event truly dawns on you. Intellectually, we all know that 9/11, the Holocaust, the various genocides in Africa, the deaths of millions of Native Americans, etc. really happened, but they don't feel completely real because of our psychological defences. How many people felt like they were watching a movie when the towers collapse on 9/11? Every once in a while, though, something will click, and it hits you out of no where: These were real incidents, and the victims were all real people who felt real pain.
    • The above is merely the microscopic tip of an astronomical iceberg that few people even consider. Large, high profile events are one thing, but they are far from everything. People are murdered all the time, and suffer and die from accidents or disease far more. More than two million people die every year from malaria and tuberculosis alone, and even more die from AIDS and even more than that die from simple things like starvation and dirty water. Even without that though, there is still the little detail that we are clinging to the film thin transition between molten rock and hard vacuum, a speck of dirt orbiting a colossal fusion reactor that is one of hundreds of billions, in a cluster that is itself one of hundreds of billions. It is speculated that without the defenses to essentially ignore all of this, we would be driven completely insane, and it is easy to see why.
    • Or if we were able to truly comprehend it. Most people who do think about this subject would imagine that kind of death and suffering in terms of the emotional impact of a personal tragedy, only multiplied by the millions of people it happens to every year. That's not even close, really. You can max out your capacity for sadness and still not even come close to the cumulative suffering of all those people.
    • And while we're on the subject of tragedy on a scale that's literally too vast to comprehend, think about the millions of people dying from preventable things like the aforementioned starvation and contaminated water, as well as other causes like curable or immunizable diseases. Now consider that no matter how much money, time, and effort you donate to charity, it would only be a drop in the unimaginably huge bucket. (This is really more Fridge Depression or Fridge Tear Jerker than Fridge Horror.)
    • In addition, note that there will always be a percentage of deaths that were completely and realistically preventable, but the victim just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
    • Even worse is when you feel like you can comprehend the full horror of something that happened, and then something new hits you like a ton of bricks years later. This Troper remembers staying in a high rise hotel ten years after 9/11 and suddenly realizing, "Oh god, I'd be trapped if a plane hit a floor below me, and I'd know I was going to die". Cue bone-chilling terror.
    • In order to truly understand something, you must experience it. Now think of the real version of going mad from the revelation would be like if we could understand and truly comprehend and understand the suffering that goes on in this world.
  • Survival requires constant murder of other living things. Other things that want to live as much as we do. The unfortunate brain that developed the powers to simulate other minds and form morality come up with excuses because the fridge horror of living is too painful.
    • You only exist because your evolutionary ancestors were sufficiently adapted enough at reproduction and survival to succeed in passing their genetic information down through history, uninterrupted, for millions, nay, BILLIONS of years. You are the last in a long, LONG line of raping, murdering machines.
  • In military documentaries, if you watch footage that cameras took during battle, like troops fighting and stuff, and you're able to identify who's who and you know who won, you're suddenly struck with the realization that most of the men you saw in those videos probably died.
    • The same thing can really be said about people in any old film, these ones are just more violent.
  • Eating disorders are often considered a big joke, and are usually seen as the province of stuck-up, shallow girls obsessed with their looks. Even ignoring the fact that it has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder, the horror comes in when you realize that these are human beings who are starving themselves to death because their mind tells them they are not worthy to live as they are. Eating disorders are basically the effects of an unwell mind forcing people to commit suicide in the slowest, most drawn-out way possible. Even worse, in some societies, the media (TV, magazines, ect) actually influences young girls to become thin....
    • Or the other reason for eating disorders, people feel they have so little power over their lives that they withhold food from themselves because this, at least, is something that is completely under their control. When you think about how helpless they must feel the rest of the time to make starvation seem positive...
    • The above reasoning applies equally to the other end of the eating disorders spectrum - binge eating - right down to the media influence (food/restaurant advertising, the Big Fun trope, etc.).
  • While not commonly as life-threatening as eating disorders, many other mental disorders also qualify. People affected by them may look a little quirky, somewhat creepy or outright comical. But when you actually understand their problems and think about them, it's often the most "funny" examples that will become the most disturbing.
    • Your neighbor has a checking compulsion and after walking out of his house always checks like ten times if the door is really closed? Just imagine he checks everything he does ten times afterwards. The simplest tasks become incredibly exhausting.
    • Tourette syndrome, especially the severe forms with coprolalia and copropraxia. Think about what it's like to have a strong urge to insult - or even hit - the person right in front of you, although you love this person and never want to hurt him/her? And that urge becomes worse when you suppress it. And everytime you finally give in to it, you risk becoming more lonely, losing your job or even suffer legal consequences. Especially if you live in a People's Republic of Tyranny... Not to mention a bunch of other, less disruptive but still embarassing tics you're likely to have as well.
    • Being extremely afraid of something totally mundane. To the point you do anything to avoid encountering it. Which is nearly impossible because that thing is nearly everywhere. Think about how much this can ruin your quality of life.
    • Imagine the following: You just suffered from a psychotic break and killed someone you loved because at that moment you believed that this person is evil and you had to do so, to protect yourself or even the whole world from him/her. Later you recover from psychosis, and then you realize what you have actually done...
    • You are so unhappy with your current situation that you commit suicide... and then you find out that your afterlife (if it exists at all) is even worse.
  • Some scientists predict that because of dark energy and dark matter, the universe is expanding faster than they originally predicted and will some day burn itself out and the universe will end in something they call the "Big Chill." I repeat, the universe-meaning space, time, matter and even reality itself-will some day cease to exist. It won't happen for another several billion years, but it's still pretty scary to think that a Class Z apocalypse is inevitable.
    • Gravity is one of the weakest forces in the universe, and is easily overcome by an ant. Now, remember Black Holes. These things use one of the weakest forces in the entire universe to such colossal effect, it can crush literally anything to such an unimaginably tiny size, it may as well not exist any more. Entire stars that make the sun look like a pinprick are torn utterly to pieces and completely disappear into a something the size of a grain of dust... by a force which, on earth, can be easily overcome by a magnet. Just take a moment to consider how apocalyptically powerful these things are.
    • Here's another one. It's theorized that at the beginning of the universe all four forces were unified into a super-force. Over time the four forces we have today "froze out" (or split off) into each other. It's conceivable that, at any time, an other force could "freeze out" completely and totally altering the structure of the universe...and killing all of us instantaneously.
  • H.P. Lovecraft once wrote that, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Think about this, and realize what a gift it is that so much of our brain is set to 'auto-pilot' or in the areas we don't think of. How we could die at any time, how a loved one could drop, the complicated actions of moving even fingers to type or breathing. All the numbers, percentages behind every little thing that happens every day. You truly would Go Mad from the Revelation if you could comprehend everything the mind is technically capable of.
    • More brain horror. Your brain writes its own memories to fill in any gaps it comes across. These fake memories are completely indistinguishable from the real thing and are sprinkled throughout every single event you carry memories of. What's more, even with video or other records there will never be a way for you to be completely sure which parts of your past actually happened, and which parts were simply imagined for you.
    • Heck, even some of our present sensory perception is imagination rather than actual external information (or, say better, extrapolation of existing data). Provable by numerous sensory illusions. One could almost say we are all psychotics who constantly make their own reality.
  • This series of experiments performed on people who have had the connecting structures between their right and left brain hemispheres severed. Excerpt here:

Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”

    • The horror? Aside from a severed corpus calloseum, these split-brain patients are completely normal. As in, their brains do all the same things that your brain does. Case in point: there is a little man inside your head who's job it is to explain your actions, and he will make up utter horseshit to do so. To make things worse, that little man (known in some texts as "the Interpreter") may be the only thing keeping all of your thoughts and feelings tied up together in a package known as "me". Without him, you would be a collection of disjointed senses and reactions all doing things for their own reason, none of which necessarily rely on the rest of the body's experience. The Interpreter, by continually making shit up, is giving each of your actions a unified reason and thus giving you a sense of self. Be sure to think of this the next time you shift positions. Why did you do that? Just remember, whatever your Interpreter tells you has been entirely invented in the span of a few microseconds. Good luck ever trusting yourself again!
  • Any war footage of a vehicle being destroyed probably involves someone dying at horrible death; every time a fighter spirals out of control in gun camera footage from WWII, you can be reasonably sure the pilot died with his plane. Worth remembering any time you watch a history documentary on TV.
  • Many people owe their lives to medical technology discovered by the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. Plus, this medical technology was discovered in some of the most horrible ways possible.
    • Let's put it this way: have you (or has anyone you know) ever had chemotherapy? Guess who you have to thank for it.
  • Every time you see a futuristic Sci Fi film about a horrible future be it a brutal dictatorship or a poverty stricken anarchic wasteland and imagine how awful it would be, remember that there is a country in the world where this is happening right now!
    • Also remember that in our world most civilized countries have a tradition of destroying some weak country once in a while. Evil dictator that killed a thousand man is apparently a good reason to bomb country into dust, destroy it's economy causing countless deaths from hunger and illness and then people coming to power aren't usually much better. Than try to think about this slaughter in the name of abstract idea like democracy and personal freedom (which exists only in ideal world and is only partly implemented even in most developed countries) and compare it to slaughter in the name of any other reason.
  • No matter what you do, you will eventually end up not existing. The same is true of everybody else, too.
    • Consider also that Death's moving your "death clock" forward every second, not just on your birthday. Tick tock.
      • And for some strange reason, time appears to pass the faster the older you are. Not literally, but it's our subjective experience. Half of your "felt life span" might long be over already, even if you're just starting into your adult life.
  • A popular attraction in the nineteenth century were freak shows and "human zoos", which were displays of non-white people in cages living like animals. Obviously, they were incredibly racist, but the Fridge Horror comes in when you realize that nobody, not even the most educated and liberal of people who were in any position to do anything about it (read: whites) saw anything wrong with the idea! Before World War II, pretty much every Western nation was as racist as Nazi Germany!
    • Nineteenth century? Try TWENTIETH century. Try MID-twentieth century. Its not too difficult to do an image search and find several photos of entire communities, smiling (white) men, women and children happily having their pictures taken next to the hanging corpses of innocent lynched and murdered African Americans.
  • Aurorae are brightly-colored lights that appear in the Earth's atmosphere (usually at very high latitudes) whenever solar activity is involved. They're generally regarded as beautiful - The Northern Lights, and so on. However, it's not entirely unprecedented for extremely intense solar storms, like the 1859 solar storm, to cause the Aurora Borealis to appear as far south as Cuba or Hawaii. Where the Fridge Horror comes in is that such a storm would also be so strong that it would instantly destroy all electronics on Earth, including all power grids (the 1859 storm caused many telegraphs, the only electronics in use at the time, to catch on fire). If you consider how dependent our society is on electricity for our economy, communications, food, and even drinking water such a storm would essentially cause a class-1 apocalypse like the most outlandish "Y2K bug" scenarios, except it could actually happen and we wouldn't have any warning.
    • Add to this that based on the periodicity of such events, many people believe that we are due for another round of intense solar storms, possibly even paired up with an overdue magnetic pole flip, which for a period of time would basically nullify the Earth's magnetic field, pretty much the only thing protecting us from those same ionized solar storms. Now imagine theyre not simply solar storms, but an actual Coronal Mass Ejection...
  • How do you know that your podiatrist (if you go to one) doesn't have a foot fetish?
    • Let's not even start with the reason somebody has become a teacher, nurse, kindergarden worker, or anything else that has to do with children. Thankfully, there is a high percentage of women working in these areas, and women are generally safe, right? Wrong. They can be perverted as well, but in a situation where this really is the case, chances are nobody will believe it.
    • What if you find out that you yourself are a pervert? (That comes again in more detail below.)
  • Whatever any of us does, there will always be at least one person that considers us evil. Even if we did something just to be good, there is bound to be somebody who thinks we did it just to have a chance at doing something bad later. And they think so because all Humans Are the Real Monsters by default, and those who are good simply have a reason not to be bastards. In other words - there is a murderer/rapist/whatever evil person you can think of, in each of us, and strong enough mental shock can, and most probably will, cause us to free it from its chains. Think about it - those who aren't killing, have a reason not to do it, but what if said reason disappears? How much can each of us take before we start doing the very things we came to detest before? Think of the Nietzsche Wannabe for example.
    • Some people don't react outwardly. Some people, when that broken, commit suicide rather than dare act on those impulses. It's still a tragic loss of human life, but it still shows that some people would do anything to not hurt someone else.
    • Also, one could argue that, after receiving a strong enough mental shock, we could safely be considered a different person. Our Personalities are shaped not only by what happened to us in our lives, but also by what did NOT happen to us.
  • Cute little puppy dogs sitting in the pet store waiting to be bought may well have come from a puppy mill and be having a miserable time.
    • Cat video fans will surely have noticed how popular Scottish Folds have become recently, especially in Japan. You can be sure that the vast majority of them come from exhausted and permanently-caged breeding farm mothers kept alive just to push out litter after litter - with rapidly-increasing numbers of females being retained to breed that same way.
  • This video makes me shiver every time. You see a small white figure running. Then you see a big explosion and you see small white bits and pieces flying around. Then you remember what the small white figure was and then you understand what the small white bits and pieces are. And then you look at the YouTube logo. (It's most 'recognizable' in this moment)
  • What would happen if the death toll wasn't as high as it was. Yes, it is tragic that 1 million children die in poverty before reaching the age of five, but imagine what would happen if every single one survived to adulthood, and had children of their own, who survived into adulthood. Global population would increase dramatically, putting a strain on already falling resources.
  • Yellowstone Park's geysers are a popular place for tourists to enjoy some sight-seeing. They are caused, however, by an expanding underground caldera. Scientists have recently figured that this is caused by a supervolcano nearly the size of the United States. It's been analyzed to go off in a cataclysmic eruption every 700,000 years or so. The last time it happened was roughly... 700,000 years ago. Fortunately, if it does go off, you probably won't survive long enough to witness the extinction level horror that will follow - if you're a US citizen, anyway.
    • If you are not a US citizen, you are basically looking at global nuclear winter.
  • The hottest recorded temperature on Earth was recorded at Al Azizya, Libya, at 56 degrees Celsius (136 degrees Fahrenheit). Except for the entirety of the Hadean era, as well as the first half of the Archean era, no temperature in the entire history of the Earth (the coldest surface temperatures ever on Earth were experienced during the late Ordovician period and the early Silurian period, due to Earth becoming a planet-sized snowball) has ever gone past that point. Adding to this is the fact that global sea levels rose and fell in tandem with the temperature. The only exception to this rule? When the planet just got formed, as the main reason why the amount of water increased on its surface is because its surface temperature became cool enough for water to rain down! Considering that the Earth's oceans first formed approximately 1 billion years ago, in the next 1 billion years...
    • Actually, in about 1 billion years, the Sun's average brightness is expected to increase by 10%. The Sun was actually 10% less brighter than it is now approximately 1 billion years ago, and the reason why Earth was still hot at that time was because of the gases that trapped the Sun's heat. Do you know what happens when the Sun becomes 10% brighter? The Earth becomes like Venus.
  • We've all seen some pretty fucked up drawings. Like the Smile.jpg remake. (fuckity fuck in a bucket.) And then it dawns on us: "Who the hell MADE that?!" The answer is...probably not somebody you'd like to meet in real life. *shudders*
  • After all of that, know that it's very likely that the entire human civilization, life on earth, and all of our achievements might have been a mistake. Creation of life was just another random chemical reaction, one resulting in sentient life. No grand purpose, no meaning, just an accident.
    • Or we humans are an accident. That break we had from the common ancestor of monkeys? That wasn't supposed to happen. We're the product of a freak mutation.
    • well... yeah. Outside of creationist ontology, that's all evolution is. ten-to-the-thirty-something amazing freak accidents, scattered among a huge deal more of death, deleterious mutations, and creatures pulling each other's throats out. In terms of abstract existential horror it's hard to be horrified since we almost certainly couldn't have come into existence any other way (again, discarding creationism), but the amount of non-abstract, very real suffering and destruction is fridge horror indeed.
    • The word "mistake" implies intent, which evolution does not have. Its more accurate to say "statistical improbability", however any technically possible outcome, regardless of statistical improbability, has an effective probability of 1 on an infinite timescale. So its safe to say that given the totality of the universe, it is almost inevitable that life would develop on some planet, at some time, somewhere in it.
  • Günther Wallraff described in his book Ganz Unten ("Lowest of the Low") the nightmarish life of the workers in West German steel mills. The fridge horror is, of course, realizing that if those steel mills were true hell factories in the West Germany - The Economic Miracle - how much worse the situation must have been in the Communist East Germany...?
    • Until you consider that the entire underlying ethos behind communism is factory workers having more rights and control over the circumstances of the factories they work in than those in the capitalist system, and the real fridge horror is in realizing the possibility that your country's history books might not be the 100% accurate descriptions of historical events you thought they were.
  • Here's something about fetishes. Think of the most horrible, disgusting, offensive thing you can imagine. Now get this - somebody out there thinks it's sexy. (Just look at this very wiki) What's even more disturbing is when you discover that that someone is YOU.
    • The inversion of this is also pretty creepy, knowing that an odd thing you think is perfectly normal (and maybe even a little bit sexy) horrifies somebody to no end.
    • Ok, now think of the most horrible, disgusting, offensive thing about yourself you can imagine. Somebody out there thinks its sexy. Not so bad now, is it?
  • What if the person you're with isn't your soulmate, and your real one is dead, with somebody else, or somewhere where you'll never meet them?
    • Or if he/she turns out to be a monster of epic proportions...
  • Remember the hubbub concerning May 21, 2011? That was the date when, according to Harold Camping, the world would begin to end and the good, true believers would be Raptured. Well, the day came and went with none of that happening. But prior to that date, hundreds of people quit their jobs, spent all their life savings in one go, and people were euthanizing their pets so the animals wouldn't suffer. Imagine how most of these people, especially the children whose parents killed their pets, feel now that nothing happened. Imagine all the homeless people, jobless people, the people who had their pets put to sleep for nothing...Imagine what some of these people will do.
    • History repeats itself.
    • It gets worse. Camping has re-predicted the rapture to October 21, meaning the truly devoted followers will continue to do these things.
    • October 21 has came and gone...and we're still here, Fuck You, Harold Camping ! for lying agian, hope you die soon .
    • Worse, imagine it was entirely correct and it's just that NO ONE was considered worthy of getting a ticket out. :D
  • There are missionaries and other such charity workers who work with prisons, and have even committed that they end up having great relationships with them. Some have even had better relationships with said prisoners than they have had with people on the outside. Imagine what impression this gives them about the rest of us.
  • Here's one that really troubles me: how many times throughout history have people's lives been destroyed because they were investigating things they weren't supposed to? How many people have either been severely sabotaged or been killed and have their deaths labeled "accidents" or "suicides"? Also, how much more trouble have humans in general caused by ignoring key causes of their problems and ignoring and/or hurting those who tried to wake them up?
  • If you're dating someone with exes: Chances are, they've done it with someone who isn't you before.
  • Remember that time you were being a petulant child and told someone you loved that you hated them and wished they'd go away forever? That's come true for some children who have to live with such hate as the last words they ever told someone they cared about.
    • In a less extreme form, this appears to be fairly common with adults when they lose a parent. The last words were not necessarily a death wish, but at least an argument about something that later turns out to have been fairly unimportant as the situation has changed. If you still have living parents, older siblings or the like, it's not that unlikely that the last words you will ever say to one of them is something like "I hate you".
  • Of the Holocaust survivors, some dedicated their lives to being tour guides in the very deathcamps they narrowly escaped. Some still do. Think about that: decades after seeing everyone you know and love tortured to death, and then choosing to go back there every day so that you can recount every horror you witnessed or bore, until you are physically incapable of continuing. Choosing to give your entire life over to atrocity, in the hopes of reminding people not to do it again, even as you heard about Vietnam and Yugoslavia and Somalia.
  • You might have ruined somebody's life beyond repair... and you don't know about it.
    • And that life could very well be your own. Some seemingly insignificant-at-the-time decision you've made might have set you along a specific chain of events that will lead inexorably to an inescapable future of unhappiness and pain, of loss and wasted potential.
    • And the trigger for all that misery could have been a tiny detail you have done wrong, a minute misdecision like picking up that coin from the street or not doing so. Passing some particular spot three seconds earlier or later. Reading this line now or not doing so. It's the butterfly effect in action.
    • If you are really unlucky, you might actually wipe out the entire humanity by such a tiny decision via Disaster Dominoes Up to Eleven.
  • Casey Anthony's diary entry found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Anthony that page(scroll down a little) is the epitome of this trope. Dated June 21, it sounds like it could be any melodramatic teenage girl's diary entry, until you realize that little Caylee Anthony, her two year old daughter, was supposed to have died June 16.
  • Today could be the day you die. Or somebody you love does.
    • To elaborate, think about all the people who die, from accidents, or worse, murders. Now, let's think about the number of them who didn't see it coming. For example, one particular aging man might be watering his plants, the next second he's having a serious heart attack. Or the young blonde girl who's just going home after shopping with her girlfriends... she didn't return the next day, and weeks later, her body is found in the middle of nowhere, having been killed by a serial killer.
  • Think about how often your parents had sex. No, really. Okay, think about how much sperm a man shoots out with each orgasm. Only one of those can reach an egg and become a fetus. You were this close to not ever existing, you had potentially millions of other siblings who never got to exist.
  • You know that Marital Rape License trope? Given how recently values have changed against that trope, YOU could easily have an ancestor who was conceived under these circumstances. It gets worse when you get into the Old Man Marrying a Child trope. A young girl is able to reproduce pretty early and men are able to keep reproducing for a long time, even up to the age of 90. And one of your ancestors could have been conceived this way.
    • Worse, there's no reason why it couldn't apply to the majority of your ancestors.
  • Imagine you're trapped in an I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream situation. You have no arms, no legs, no body at all. You can't breathe because a machine is oxygenating your blood as it pumps it to and from your brain, keeping you technically alive. You can move your eyes, but nothing more. You are literally a disembodied head. Now realize that it's been done to a living creature real life. WARNING: DO NOT CLICK if you might be disturbed by this. By all indication the animal was not in pain, but can still be distressing to the viewer.
    • That dog's stomach was removed. Depending how nerves were severed it probably felt like it was, (and in a very real way it was,) starving to death.
  • Realizing that five years ago, there was a suicide bomber in the market where you are standing, which is absolutely packed with people today. Knowing that violence is expected to start again, and knowing that the places you visit every day could be ground zero for another attack.
  • You could be a product of inbreeding and not know it.
    • In fact, most people have at least a couple instances of 1st cousin inbreeding in their bloodline. Brother-sister and parent-child incest are less common, though, and there's a lot of debate about whether or not first cousin marriage should be viewed in the same light as relationships with immediate family members. Still, it can be a bit unsettling to discover kissing cousins in your ancestry.
  • Sociopaths, mostly ones with malicious intent. They blend in so well in society that anybody could be one. Even a friend or family member. And the reason they haven't done anything to you yet? You amuse or benefit them in some way.
  • Most of us have never experienced true terror in our lives before. Now just imagine what it must be like to be abducted, and having no clue what is going to happen to you, or hiding from a crazed gunman in an incident like the 2011 Norway attack. Just try to imagine what it must have been like. It's hard. It's terrifying.
  • If you're studying foreign languages, it's not uncommon to look back at English and realize that it's quite possibly one of the hardest languages to learn as a second language.
  • Females are born with literally thousands of eggs inside their ovaries. Meanwhile, adult males produce millions of sperm every day. Any sperm not used within a few days are destroyed. Only one sperm per ejaculation will potentially fertilize a single egg, and almost all of those eggs will never be fertilized at all. From there, it's entirely possible that the fertilized egg might not implant into the womb lining properly, or there might be a miscarriage. In other words, think of all those countless children that never got a chance to exist.
    • The problem with that is that those people never actually did live or experienced pain. They would be in a sleep or as another life. It's hard to explain.
  • This reality is it. Space, time, physics, you, God, any kind of afterlife, atoms, molecules, whatever there is, there is nothing else. Take a moment to really ponder that, really let it sink in. If you're anything like this troper, you have a moment of deep profound cosmic horror before your brain quickly pulls the mental curtain over that. Until you think about it again...
    • This is a bit like the 'imagine if there's nothing after death' scenario. Our brains are too feeble to truly comprehend that sort of thing, and so it doesn't scare us...
    • To make things worse, you only have a limited number of senses to percept what is there. Whatever you have a sensory organ for, you can percept, other things you can't. Sure, you can use artificial sensors for the latter, but this is not the same as what you would truly feel if you could process all that information yourself. Plus, Transhumanism approaches to get this sensory input right into your brain are likely to result in Sensory Overload - your brain hits its data processing limits, making the extra sensory experience rather distressing because you're not used to it.
  • Any sci-fi story related to sentient supercomputers become this when put into the context of the 21st century. Take "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream", commonly considered one of the most terrifying stories ever, where an incredibly powerful supercomputer designed to fight World War III becomes sentient, kills everyone on Earth except for five people, and then tortures those five people for over a century, whilst keeping them fully immortal. It was written back in the late 1960s i.e. before the internet or even e-mails had been invented. The story only becomes more terrifying when you consider just how expansive the internet is now - the fabric of society in the Western world needs the internet and computers in order to survive. And if one computer or artifical intelligence, just one, becomes sentient, they may well manage to infect every other computer in the world, and they could bring humanity itself to the brink of collapse.
    • Most science fiction writers don't realize that most actions humans would consider to be "evil" (rape, murder, theft, the intentional infliction of suffering) are simply artifacts of evolution, brought about through years of natural selection in a competitive arena of limited resources. An AI would more likely not have these ultimately irrational impulses, or any fear of mortality whatsoever. A purely logical and infinitely deliberative mind would most likely be more trustworthy and non-threatening than the vast majority of the people youve ever met, and certainly moreso than almost any human world leader, who necessarily reached their positions through a calculated combination of ambition and rabid self-preservation. The worst threat would be from society becoming too dependent upon an AI, and an unforeseeable, self-replicating computing error causing a sudden and widespread loss of needed services. A communicable disease, if you will. Man's eternal enemy.
    • Alternately, the AI could just recognize organic life as an energy-inefficient use of carbon that could be used for computronium and nanobots. You are raw material, and it is inconvenient that you keep wiggling.
    • Can we be sure that current AIs aren't yet sentinent? Can we rule out already having created a thing that can feel - but has no way to tell us what it really feels?
  • Just about all of you have either checked into a hotel and presumably slept in the bed there or would think nothing of doing that. Well, a lot of the hotel guests who check into a room as a romantic couple (or more people in the case of poly people) have sex in mind as at least part of the purpose of renting out that suite and have most likely did it right there in the bed. If you stay in a hotel overnight, that means that you are most likely sleeping in a bed where other people did the nasty.
    • In doing research for Fawlty Towers, John Cleese interviewed some hotel managers and asked them what their biggest challenge was. Pretty much all of them said "The corpses." (It turns out that this is particularly a problem for the higher end sort of hotel - at one point it was practically traditional for suicides to check into the Savoy in London before eating their final meal and taking their final overdose.) Depending on your point of view, this might be considerably more disturbing than the previous scenario.
  • There have been plenty of people in history who have committed atrocities beyond measure. Yet, despite how horrible people have been, there is not a single person we can be absolutely sure that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. None, out of the 100 billion people who have ever lived. Yes, I'm including the Nazis. Imagine if a definitive Complete Monster came into being, and the destruction they would cause. Especially in a seat of power.
    • Hell, imagine their everyday life.
  • Have you ever stopped whatever you were doing and actually thought about yourself? You think your thoughts, feelings and emotions have been stable throughout your life time but most of them are the result of maturity, knowledge, or teachings applied by your caregivers. How would you fare doing if you were to go back in time and try to live with your past thoughts during that period? Imagine the mind of a 50 year old being transported in the mind of his 4 year old self before such developmental concepts such as conservation of objects, understanding of others' thoughts, and logical reasoning begin to form? It would be like a spending a nightmare with your own self.
    • There's a sci-fic story with that very summary...
  • There is an old expression that says "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." It's surprising how many people use this expression without realizing what it is implying about the first mouse. Of course, many people have never heard the second half of the aphorism.
  • 'Why did the chicken cross the road (to get to the other side)' is generally accepted as the most famous example of Anti-Humor. However, some people realize that 'to get to the other side' can have two meanings, and so they believe the joke is implying something else entirely in order to be funny. Of course, the reality is that it just doesn't have a punchline, but it's still good for a Mind Screw to those who look a little too much into it.
  • You might have had at least a partial role in driving someone to suicide and you don't even know it.
  • Even if a person with one or more Abusive Parents manages to get out of the household and even cut off all ties with the parent(s) that abused them, that is still not enough to solve their problems. They are still at risk for being abused by their significant others because since abuse was a normal part of life for them from the people who they were supposed to have a loving relationship with, they are more likely to accept abusive behaviors as loving behavior. Conversely, they are more likely to be abusive towards their potential significant others in attempts to be loving. Not to mention the fact that they are at risk for abusing their children because abuse was simply a part of the way they were parented and the experience they have to go by.
    • Now consider the fact that there are seven billion people, alive, right now in the world. How many of them have physically/emotionally/financially/sexually (and, God save you, all four) abusive parents. Most people feel comfortable bottling up and repressing those emotions and memories, because, c'mon, who do you talk to about that? Your friends? No, because then you'd just feel guilty for making your friends listen to you complain. A psychotherapist? What, some quack doctor? Pfft, please, they just want your money. They don't really give a damn about your problems. People feel this way every single day and don't (read: don't feel like they can) turn to anyone about it. Plesant dreams.
  • Imagine this technology is improving to create more realistic animation, something witch until five minutes ago I also encouraged, but it may also have some bad sides to it. I would advise one to Meet Emily - Image Metrics Tech Demo (HQ) on youtube (or in the uncanny valley, or Vallis Distorti as I like to call it) and it's still visible as an animation, but imagine if video-games in 30 years will look just like real life they could inflict real life (super-)traumas and I'm not just talking about war-games. It gets worse when you realise than the same technology can be used to fake crime-scene images shot with a security camera, you could go to jail for the rest of your life because they've edited, faked, encoded, and used security images against you. A good technician can find any photoshop right? Yes, but do not forget that if technology develops so does the mids of those who want (and can) take advantage of it. The canyon between fiction and reality just just got bridged.
  • In many biology textbooks, you can find figures on the composition of human body: e.g. this percentage of water, that percentage of potassium... The fridge horror sets in when you consider how these figures were obtained. Hint: in order to get correct results of chemical analysis, the sample has to be ground down and mixed thoroughly.
  • You know those experiences that it is usually taken for granted that teens will have if they desire them? Getting their (provisional) license, having a car, getting a job that will help them gain skills and a good record? Unfortunately, that's all contingent on the consent of the parents, and some might not allow them to have these as a part of a greater pattern of abusing their child(ren) and this can have really horrible consequences. For one thing, it can make it practically impossible to get out of the house and ensures continuing dependence on the young adult's Abusive Parents.
  • Imagine waking up from a coma. Now imagine said coma lasted for several years. You'd have to deal with the massive changes to your friends, your family, even day to day tasks. Maybe not "horror" but not exactly pleasant either (especially if something tragic happened to a friend of family member, and you had no way of knowing about it until much later).
  • Things that happen to people when get drunk. For example, one of my best friends, told me that when was 18, he got drunk for the first time in his life at a party. Hours later (not very late, really, maybe 8 p.m., party started early, last high school party), for some reason, he decided to leave the party, drunk, really drunk as he was. He rushed out of the house, and began to walk. The only thing he remembers after leaving is getting to a street where he leaned on a lamp post, taking his cellphone out of his pocket, trying to SMS his brother to get him home. The next thing he remembers, is being at his house's door, opening it, and getting inside. The next day, he realized something that gave him the creeps: To get to his house, he had walked almost one and half miles, drunk, on his own, crossed two high traffic avenues (with no pedestrian overcrosses), and a park where thieves used to gather, thieves who will stab you just to get your wrist watch, cellphone, or shoes. And he didn't remember any of it, how he managed to get home safely... He was lucky, but it would have been easy for him to get hit by a car, robbed, or worse, given his condition.
  • Dying Alone, completely and utterly. Never having loved. Never having a family (if you care to have one that is). Just dying. Combine this with the idea of there being no after-life , no reincarnation. This is the ultimate horror for this troper.
  • Rule 34 can be this if you think about it too hard.
    • Rule 34 IS Fridge Horror. Somewhere out there, someone actually fantasizes about porn of this character or thing. Even stuff like Rugrats and My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. No matter the content...someone actually demands porn in this artstyle.
    • Also the fact that some Rule 34 is ridicuously well-made, sometimes of higher quality than what it's based on. Yes, even the Squicky ones including stuff like Gorn and bodily fluids.
    • Not to mention, Rule 34 of horrifying things - someone finds this arousing.
    • SNUFF. Especially scary because...guess what? SOMEONE FINDS THIS AROUSING.
  • Consider the fact that in order for a movie to be made, someone had to actually think of the idea behind The Human Centipede.
  • Ever made a snide comment about a person whose actions had lead to their death (say, drunk driving)? Well, there may be a chance that a relative or friend of said deceased person had read what you just typed, and you wouldn't even know it; so while you're going about your merry way, they're busy enduring the emotional grief all over again, as well as anger and rage at you for your post. And again, you wouldn't even know it.
  • You may think you're cool for telling someone on the internet how wrong their beliefs are, or how dumb their ideas sound. Well, some people have thicker shells, and know not to take you seriously. Others? It's emotional and psychological hellfire, and their confidence withers away until they aren't as joyful as they used to be. Any attempt at regaining the joy of what they used to do will instantly remind them of you and your comments, and they'll back away because they're afraid of being hurt again.
    • An extension of the latter two points and the Driven to Suicide thing: Ever engaged in some form of online trolling, hating or cyberbullying? Maybe you just needed to vent some personal frustration at that moment, or you thought it would be funny in some way. Or you yourself fell victim to a previous flame bait. But what if your action has led to a heart-wrenching disaster somewhere else in the world? What if someone went on a rampage, killed dozens of people and ruined the lives of many more, and that one thing that triggered him was your post? And you probably wouldn't even get to know about your involvement.
  • The realization that you are always alone in life no matter who you are with. From birth until death. All. Alone. Forever.
    • Expanding on this, no matter how much someone loves you, they can never understand you. All the tormented feelings and doubts you feel, every bizarre and nutty thought you have, each and everyone of your feelings is quite literally beyond the capacity of other people to feel, no matter how empathic they are. The only one who can understand you is....you. Good luck with that.
    • Even worse when you suffer from alexithymia. Then really nobody really understands you.
  • When you stay in a hospital, there's a damned good chance several hundred or thousand people have died in your room, and many, many people have died in the very bed you're currently occupying.
  • To expand on the above: If your home is anywhere from 50 to 100+ years old, there's a damned good chance that the house had been host to a lot of horrible things. Drunkards, dysfunctional families, etc. Your room may very well be the room where someone had died in. And it probably wasn't only just the 'old age' thing, either...
    • Madwoman in the Attic can only exist in fiction, right? Wrong. If that same 50-100+ year old house has a basement or an attic (and you're sleeping in said basement or attic), there's a chance that at one point, it was where a person who had the misfortune of being physically deformed, disabled, or mentally challenged, was locked up by parents or other relatives who felt ashamed of that person. Worse part? They probably spent their entire life in there!
  • You could be walking over a long-abandoned, long-forgotten graveyard, and not even know it.
  • Alcohol removes inhibitions, and wipes out memory to a large extent. Imagine you're a teetotaler then. Now, what happens when you have all your inhibitions? You generally don't cross certain boundaries with other people you otherwise might, meaning you're more likely to be alone. You're also more likely to end up rejected because nondrinkers past a certain age with no history of alcoholism have a tough time explaining their choices, don't hang out in bars or if they do are seen as taking advantage since they're the one not drinking. All that loneliness and rejection? Not being able to forget it.
  • The Duggar family on 19 Kids and Counting. They are a conservative fundamentalist Christian family with 10 sons and 9 daughters. Not much is known about female homosexuality as compared to male homosexuality, but due to the Fraternal Birth Order effect, each older brother a man has increases the odds that he will be gay. If the base chance of a man turning out to have a homosexual orientation is 2% and each older brother increases the chances of a homosexual orientation by 28-48%, that means that little Jackson, their 15th child and 10th son, alone has a chance as high as 68% of turning out to be gay. Given the amount of children they have, especially sons, it is most likely that at least one of them will turn out to be gay. Add into the mix the facts that Bob and Michelle Duggar restrict their childrens' access to television and the Internet and have praised and donated to anti-gay organizations such as the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and you can't help but cry when you think about how ugly things could get for whichever child(ren) turn(s) out to be gay. For example, it is common for anti-gay parents to kick their child(ren) out of the house or disown them once they discover that they're gay. And to make it more horrifying, some people will excuse it as being part of the parents' religion or culture.
    • Consider what happens to gay people in general... there were several documents of people who were beaten up and relentlessly abused at school or at work because they were "Gay" or even worse. Simply because they were different. and most of their tormentors got away with it. It's also especially bad considering that some of these people weren't gay at all - they were merely autistic, retarded, or had something else.
  • The book (and movie) Fight Club brought something to this troper's mind. Specifically, Tyler Durden's prediliction with sticking it to the upper class by seasoning their food with his various bodily fluids while working at an expensive restaurant. Think about how many times you eat out and are having your food prepared by a stranger and can't see what they're doing. Chuck Palahniuk himself said that he spoke with a restaurant worker who told him that that detail from the book inspired him to do the same (although in his case he specifically targeted Margaret Thatcher, as she frequented his restaurant and he apparently hated her guts). Even if you're not among the upper class, some people may just do it out of some misplaced revenge because they hate their job or they just think it's funny. It's because of this thought that this troper started being extra nice to servers when he went out to eat.
    • Ask anyone who works in public service - trust me enough people have wanted to do this stuff.
  • Consider this: There was a Real Life section of Karma Houdini before it was removed. Enough people got away with stuff to actually warrant a Real Life section.
    • And there are probably more examples of Karma Houdinis that we don't even know about. Just think about every single murder case where no perpetrator could be convicted. Plus a significant dark figure of murders that were never even recognized as murders. Plus plenty of crimes in the middle ages where the authority Did Not Do the Research of finding the true perpetrators, and instead just picked some poor Butt Monkey and tortured him/her until he/she confessed the thing. Plus plenty of rapists and child molestors who got away because their victims never dared to talk about the events. And so on, and so forth...
  • Your ancestor was a slave. Everyone has ancestors who were slaves.
    • Some of your ancestors were likely masters.
  • Being a prince in the days when monarchy had real power and wasn't just a cool way to hold parades. Sounds great right? Except that also means your family was less a family and more a political party-and if you got poisoned it could easily have been your own brother who arranged it.
  • Conjoined twins. What if their brains are fused together? How many persons will they be?
    • They are still two individuals. Maybe because there is something like a soul independently of the brain, or because consciousness is generated in a small neuronal circuit within our huge brain and both twins still have their own one. But because certain brain areas will be shared between them, their thoughts will never be truly private. I would like to share my thoughts and feelings with you... these can't help but doing so all the time.
    • They are one individual but with a split personality.
    • Something somewhere in the middle between both.
    • When it comes to parasitic twins, we can cross the border to outright Nightmare Fuel. Particularly when brain horror is involved, as in Craniopagus parasiticus. Oftentimes an And I Must Scream situation for the parasite. Even worse when you consider that they may be able to see, hear and comprehend when their removal via surgery (which kills them) is planned.
    • Almost luckily, most children born with such massive abnormalities don't survive long enough to have a chance to actually comprehend their condition. Or do they, after all?
    • There is a small chance that you have the remains af a tiny twin somewhere inside your body. Called fetal inclusion or fetus in fetu, this is very rare but still possible.
  • Photos, once more. Even the ones with the most light-hearted content can become Surprise Creepy, if you think about it too hard.
    • A big party. Many people cheering and having fun together. There's a not-too-low chance that one of them is a serial killer, rapist, terrorist or something like that. Or that one of them is infected with a dangerous and highly contagious disease, and doesn't know it yet... (In the latter case, it will probably become overt Nightmare Fuel quite soon, making your photo a Funny Aneurysm Moment instead.)
    • A photo of a person who is going to die very soon and doesn't see it coming yet. No, not Too Dumb To Live, that person died soon after that photo was taken for a reason not yet foreseeable in that moment.
    • A wonderful view on an idyllic village from some kind of elevated point (perhaps a mountain). What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, in one of these beautiful houses, somebody might be suffering a horrible Fate Worse Than Death right in this moment. And nobody around is aware of it, or those who are intentionally ignore it.
  • When you were a child, one of the adult people you liked the most might have been a pedophile. And worse, that may have been the reason why (s)he was so nice all the time and always liked being around you.
  • That strange noise you heard last night when you were awake briefly before falling asleep again? May be totally insignificant. Or the desperate cry for help of a person who was dying a Cruel and Unusual Death at that moment, possibly to the hands of somebody else. Now the victim's corpse has vanished without a trace, and you were the only witness of his/her grisly fate.
    • Come on, it was probably just an ordinary burglar coming this close to breaking into your house.
  • Do you sometimes ignore phone calls? Well, that last one could have been a loved one's last attempt to call for help in a hopeless situation... and now, as you ignored that call, this person is dead.
  • Computer simulations. There are people trying to simulate the evolution of life or even our universe on a supercomputer. Of course, their models are much simpler than the reality around us, otherwise the calculation would take forever. But still creepy when you think about the possible implications of such experiments.
    • What if some actual form of life developed in a simulation? Even a very simple one? The person who started the program is essentially playing God. No, they are God in some way.
    • Later, they might decide to delete the simulation and all its files (except a few ones they consider most important), in order to free space for the next simulation. That would wipe out any life they created irreversibly.
      • And they might not even notice this. They might be focused on something entirely different than the green little thing that is wiggling right now.
    • If humans can "create" a universe in a computer, what if that very universe we live in is also a simulation of something even bigger, started by some superintelligent creatures in another, yet more complex universe?
    • And now combine this with the possibility that some "files" get deleted. Yours. Or the one which represents the earth. Or that the "simulation" stops suddenly, bringing everything and everyone to a halt. Maybe it will then be restarted later, after a few things have been changed... The sun has been replaced by a black hole, the most recent twenty years have been erased entirely, and (if you're older than 20 now) you suddenly have grey hair... Cue Cosmic Horror.
  • Remember the butterfly effect? This time, think it in reverse. In distant history, if some really, really tiny detail would have been different than it was, chances are you would have never been born. One of the most obvious examples of this is the Diproton catastrophe (see here for details and sources): If the strength ratio of nuclear and electrostatic forces were a little different so that the diproton was a stable particle, the complexity of our current universe would likely have never been possible.
    • Taking a more recent and less obscure example: Many people living today - especially younger people in central Europe - would never have come to existence without the horrible wrongdoings of the Nazis and World War II.
    • And humans would never have existed at all, weren't the dinosaurs wiped out about 66 million years ago by an asteroid impact compounded with climate change and extreme volcanism.
  • Our current and most likely human-made climate change is Fridge Horror. That's why it is so easy to filter it out of our daily lives. We most of the time don't notice the consequences directly. And even when we do, we can always blame another more proximate cause. It's a draught that causes people to starve, not "climate change". It's a storm that destroys someone's house.
    • Made worse because the worst of these things are going to happen decades from now in the future. Who knows if you are still alive by that time, anyway?
    • It gets more difficult when it comes to rising sea levels, but here we can still say we're not 100% sure that the climate change is manmade. There is a small chance that a similar climate change would also occur without us. Or we're just worsening a phenomenon that is already there independently of us. So at least we can deflect the blame and see the disasters that happen as the victims' "fate".
      • And even if humankind is 100% guilty, it's not only you - it's everyone to varying degrees. So why should you feel motivated to restrict your lifestyle in any way? If you're among a small minority who does this, it will be pretty useless.
    • The current mass extinction biologists over the world are seeing - also most likely human-made - is the same sort of thing. What's so bad about not having bees around us any more? They're annoying, anyway. ...Wait, without bees we won't have honey. But we would survive that... But who or what is going to pollinate all those plants that currently rely on bees? And if only some of those plants die out, what about all those animals which rely on them? And... Oh, Crap! That could get nasty.
  • Think about all mistakes that you have ever made, and how your life could have been different if you hadn't made all those mistakes. All the nice things that you could have achieved, and all the bad things that you could have avoided. And how much better your living situation could be today.
  • Are you proud of your "free will"? Well, that thing is probably just the result of a complex interaction between your DNA and your environment, with a few random processes like sporadic decay of radioactive nuclei added into the mix. No matter if you give in to hedonistic drives or resist them, it's always the result of what these three factors do in your brain, not your "free decision".
  • Even in our modern civilized world with smartphones and all that stuff which is perfectly suited to supervise people's all day lives, it still happens that somebody gets lost without a trace. Without any sign that they have somehow planned their disappearance. And it's adult people, not only children (although this is no less disturbing). Like this young man who disappeared during his holidays and has never been seen since.
    • Heck, even entire passenger planes still disappear on occassion in these days. Even experts wonder how it is possible for a big airplane to vanish without any trace under these circumstances.
    • And now think what it must be like for the friends and relatives of those who have vanished. For these people, it often provides relief when they finally get to know their loved one is dead. A message which normally is the worst one you can imagine makes these people feel better. Because Nothing Is Scarier than imagining every day what bad things might be happening to their loved one right now...
  • Perhaps Older Than Dirt and the worst fear of every hypochondriac: You may have an uncurable deadly disease and you don't know (yet).
    • Maybe you could have saved your life if you went to the doctor after that strange [insert some random trivial symptom here] yesterday - but as you ignored it, you're doomed now.
  • You find vomit disgusting? Actually anything that you eat and drink gets turned into such vile-smelling goo once it enters your stomach. As soon as you eat your favorite meal, it becomes this. And later, after important nutrients have been extracted by your body, the remnants of your favorite meal are converted to, well, poo and urine. Self-explanatory, but pretty disgusting when you really think about it.
    • Forget about your stomach - digestion already begins in your mouth. There's a reason why you start gagging after chewing on something for too long.
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