I’ve heard that people who lose their sense of smell experience something like an odor of burning rubber. The scent of nothingness is noxious.

Migraines have taught me that nothingness looks like boiling chrome, not darkness.

The absence of all desire is felt as ennui.

The incapacity to love is felt as depression.

These nothingness experiences are akin to phantom limbs: a seeming something where there is nothing.

Phantom experiences are afterlives summoned by human nature’s abhorrence of vacuums.

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If it is possible to know nothing about nothingness, these phantom experiences of nothingness suggest that this ignorance is unlikely to be experienced as a lack of knowledge.

Is it possible that something in our common sense knowledge — something we all think we all know — is actually a phantom knowledge — a something standing in for an inconceivable nothing?

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Let us hope none of these experiences indicate what it is like to become nonexistent.