Dreading existing, an intense sense of nihilism.
Well, there is a problem with that. It’s not that it’s wrong, but that it’s technically uncounterable and not many want to admit that life is meaningless due to
1. Being perceived as mentally unstable
2. It’s scary to think that after life, often they are just forgotten, and almost nothing can change this.
I guess it’s because death is uncertain, and animals want to live both in their thinking and in their systems (like reflexes) themselves. And that there’s a good thing at the end of school hours: freedom. And after secondary school, even more freedom.
Additionally, basically, many people’s actions or goals come down to reducing human suffering. Death is pretty much peak human suffering. However, living a life that the person doesn’t want to still has a high level of suffering. And that is why, rarely, if there is too much additional suffering, brains go haywire.
And in the end, the point of being conscious is to decide on the body’s own actions, eat, sleep and such. Physiology, but also the feeling of being alive, could be a factor.
Often, it goes like this:
Why am I studying? Why am I sleeping? Why am I living? Why am I
writing?
(Doubting the significance of things, because he may realize that there
are few people like him and he won't go THAT popular unlike celebrities,
which paradoxically makes him quite lonely and dread why he exists.)