Fridge Horror/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* 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.
** So if you're sensitive, [[Schmuck Bait|beware that some things you can read here]] [[Go Mad From The Revelation|may be rather unsettling to you]]...
* 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 Is Scarier|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 [[And I Must Scream|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...[[Tomato in the Mirror|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.
** 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.
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** 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.
** [[Hollywood Tourette's|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 [[Obliviously Evil|killed someone you loved]] because at that moment you believed that this person is evil and [[I Did What I Had to Do|you had to do so]], to protect yourself or even [[Omnicidal Maniac|the whole world]] from him/her. Later you recover from psychosis, and then you realize [[My God, What Have I Done?|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 [[From Bad to Worse|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 [[Apocalypse How|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.
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* [[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.
* [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/1932594019.html This] series of experiments performed on people who have had the connecting structures between their right and left brain hemispheres severed. Excerpt here:
{{quote|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
* 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.
** Even worse, DVDs of those documentaries (I'm thinking specifically of "World At War") [[Snuff Film|are available for sale]].
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* 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... [[But for Me It Was Tuesday|and you don't know about it]].
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* 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
** 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 [[And I Must Scream|no way to tell us what it really feels]]?
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* The [[Fight Club (novel)|book]] (and [[Fight Club (film)|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.
** 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?
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* 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 [[Paranoia Fuel|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 [[Never Found the Body|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
* 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 [[Unfortunate Implications|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 [[Humans Are Cthulhu|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, [[And I Must Scream|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 [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_helium#Helium-2_(diproton) 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... [[Explain, Explain, Oh Crap|Oh, Crap]]! [[Disaster Dominoes|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 [[Never Found the Body|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Lars_Mittank this young man] who disappeared during his holidays and has never been seen since.
** Heck, even [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370 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 [[Fate Worse Than Death|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. [[Captain Obvious|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.
{{reflist}}
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