If you don’t mind me asking, what is your age? It may play a factor in your thinking.

Not having a fear of death is not the same thing as trying to avoid death when faced with “personal annihilation”. For example, I try to take care of myself, exercise, eat well, and not put myself in situations that would kill me (e.g., drive 150 mph with no seat belt while drunk) because I don’t want to die earlier than I need to. I am not trying to die faster.

The existential crisis that is triggered when we contemplate our own deaths just began to fade away as I got older. The same thing that happens to all of us – that inability to comprehend\accept the void of nonexistence. Existential anxiety.

If you are under 25, it is very common to have Existential anxiety. Some people need therapy to stop having that anxiety, and that is fine. We’re all on this rock together, and we all progress and deal with things at different rates than others. Life is too short for us to worry about what we know will happen though, so it is better to focus on the now rather than the reaper later on.

Boring, but I looked at my desk and saw a rolodex and a cisco switch. DEX CIS to DEXSIC

The article mentions the types of people who left these states, but I am more interested in the economic activity in the years to come with all this movement. This is a classic example of people voting with their feet. Reagan spoke of this stuff back in the 80s.

[…] this is one of the—the built-in guarantee of freedom is our federalism that makes us so unique, and that is the right of the citizen to vote with his feet. If a State is badly managed, the people will either do one of two things: They will either use their power at the polls to redress that, or they’ll go someplace else. And we’ve seen industries driven out of some States by adverse tax policies and so forth. - Ronald Reagan, November 19, 1981

We have yet to see how all this movement will impact the individual states themselves or the country as a whole yet. For example, we do not know how all this will all play out economically for the red/blue states. COVID mixed with Remote Work has upended a lot of the soft lines that kept people within a state to begin with (for many, but not all). Truly wild times we are in.