To be or not to be
As many in the past have reached this conclusion more or less, it all comes down to the most simple of questions. To be or not to be?
Some live good lives even though they know that life is ultimately pointless.
So what keeps you alive, and why? Do you have any tips on how to get past nihilism?
Some live good lives even though they know that life is ultimately pointless.
So what keeps you alive, and why? Do you have any tips on how to get past nihilism?
Comments (77)
Dead Poet's Society. Applied science is how we live, and what poetry addresses is why. In one word, love. We love what's on this side of the grave, even if it and we are mortal, and perhaps even more because it is mortal, because there is no one meaning that dominates all the rest.
I'd say look beyond categorization and try to remember some of the best moments of your life with people, or some of your best moments this last week with people. A great example is a couple of lovers pillow-talking, smiling and joking with another. They don't experience much of a sense of separateness. The boundaries between the so-called self and the so-called other break down in moments like this. Philosophy is maybe weak where poetry is strong. The categorizing-analytic approach tries to break a continuous whole (life as it is lived) into nice little fragments. A nice example is a bicycle. Let's say you take it apart and stare at the parts individually. This isn't really a bicycle anymore. It doesn't work unless all the parts have a living relationship. Similarly life as it is lived resists being trapped in our categories.
When all is going well in life we don't even think to ask for some abstract justification of its value. We live that value. And if we question the value of life, we are even then living the value we find in questioning and being analytical.
I like Camus. I hope the old boy is indeed smiling down (surprised to still be conscious, if so.)
That's true. And really sometimes life is hell. I think hope and fear keep us hanging on through those hellish times.
As far as 'the poetic' being absent most of the time, I think that really varies. I think we can become more generally open to life (a thing of the heart and the body as much as it if of the theoretical mind) so that it is more often poetic. In my own experience, I got better at staying in that poetic state of mind. That doesn't mean that one ever escapes the possibility of more hell. Nor do I claim to have a theoretical justification or cure for life. I'm just saying that love is at the center of why we bother to survive, despite the possibility and actuality of 'hell.' (Not that we should or should not 'carry on,' but only why we usually do.)
I know I focused on romantic love, but friendship can be powerful. Just having coffee and taking a long walk and talking about everything heavy and grand and terrible can be pretty great. And really there's a lot of pleasure to be had alone, pursuing one's hobbies. Finally (and I'm serious) watching good TV is not be dismissed. In some ways it is hyper-real. It is poetically denser than ordinary life.
i understood what you meant by love, you basically mean loving something, and love doing something, a passion that paints color on the canvas that our lives are on.
but the question is, is that truly all you can hope for in this life? (i dont know what else im hoping for but i quite feel that there's gotta be something else)
and the other question is that what if you love something that's considered wrong? hitler loved killing jews and it was wrong
The very notion of point, of purpose, stems from wanting, from feeling a desire. Something has a point because you want it, when you don't want it you don't see a point. It's not that life is pointless, it's that it appears pointless to you when you don't feel desire.
Death does not make life pointless, unless your sole desire is to live forever. And even then you can escape that pointlessness by believing that death is a new beginning.
The quest for purpose is a quest for desire. When you don't feel love you ask what's the point of love? But when you feel love you see precisely the point.
We think that feelings are meaningless while it is feeling that gives meaning. Physicists want us to believe that we are a heap of elementary particles devoid of feeling, that feeling is an epiphenomenon, an accident that has no influence on anything, then you discard your feelings and you find life pointless, but see that they're wrong and focus on what you feel, and then you'll see the point.
The first thing to come to mind is that nobody actually knows whether life is pointless or not. There are opinions on all sides of that issues, but nobody KNOWS. And so perhaps the question becomes, how practically useful is a particular opinion?
Quoting Rhasta1
The best I can offer for the moment is to ignore such questions until at least age 50. Stop reading books about nihilism, stop trying to come to a decision, stop thinking about it. Put it down and walk away. Until age 50 just assume that life is meaningful and preferable to the alternative, even though there is no way to prove that.
Apologies, but most such questions on philosophy forums are being asked by young men in their twenties. Through no fault of their own such folks simply don't have enough experience to usefully grind their gears on such questions. Maybe nobody does, but certainly not a 23 year old, no offense intended.
I don't think that life is ultimately pointless. I just think that under a rock is the wrong place to look for a point. It's like looking for orange juice on a coral reef. You need to look in the right place for the item you're questing.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards."
As we all know - Camus point was the absurdity of men looking for meaning in life, where there is none. So like Sisyphus - why do we continue to push the rock up the hill, only to have it always tumble back down. If there is no greater purpose.
Camus' answer was a type of existentialism acceptance - his absurd hero, who knows there is no higher meaning - but finds or make his own meaning in life.
Camus would suggest that those who believe there is a greater meaning, are committing a philosophic suicide, believing in a falsehood.
I have given these 2 positions some thought, and I do not see any philosophic difference at all in believing there is no meaning, and there is a meaning.
see, there are things we do in life, we eat, we sleep, we love and we loathe. and we do each and all of our actions because of something, we eat because we dont wanna starve. little things in life make sense, theyre not pointless. but life itself, ultimately is pointless. lemme explain better
imagine youre in a car and its 2 am, youre driving somewhere you dont know. you turn on your headlights cause you dont wanna crash, you put on your seatbelt cause you dont wanna die, you listen to music on the road cause you dont wanna fall asleep.
But the grand question is, why are you going in the first place? you dont know that. your trip is pointless but the little things you do on the way or not pointless
you understand me?
I do a lot of things simply because I want to do that thing. I do not need a reason other than that.
I understand your question, but that is the question of a particular mood. When we are joyfully immersed in some form of love (from flirting to constructing philosophical systems to making our best pot of chili ever), it never occurs to us that something is lacking. We might say that the mood that asks for more is like the chain slipping off the sprocket as we ride our bike.
As I see it, my entire notion of 'Heaven' or 'transcendence' is derived from actual experiences that I would just like more of and perhaps at an even higher intensity.
In some way searching for an explicit justification of existence (what it is all about) is like wanting life to take on the linear structure of a video game. How does one 'beat' life? There is something wrong with life because there's no final 'boss' to defeat.
Quoting Rhasta1
Bingo. Think deeply about this. The question dissolves as we try (and fail!) to imagine what kind of answer would satisfy us. Examples: let's say there is God. Somehow you know this without a doubt. Moreover, He or She or It has rules for you. Do this and get rewarded. Do that and get punished? Does this really illuminate anything? Or is this just a familiar human pattern? Another parent-child or employee-employer relationship with no new depth. The only 'meaning' that really matters, as far as I can tell, is in the realm of feeling. But feeling is temporary, right? And that's not good enough. Why not? And what can we learn from our terror in the face of our mortality? Does mortality 'force' us to see that what dies with us is not what is essential? That what is best in us also lives in others? In the children that replace us? That therefore (in some special sense) we do not die? (Or not until the species dies, but our interest fades out as we scan the distant future.)
To look for an existential answer in terms of a metaphysical equation is like looking for ice in the desert. The 'truths' that matter are hidden in 'music.' At their best religion traditions (understood metaphorically) point to possibilities of experience-as-a-whole, things that are 'only' 'subjective.' Along these same lines, there is no final or deep explanation of existence. This concept is related to that concept. The 'presence' of things as a whole, mysteriously disclosed so that we can sketch these relationships in the first place, cannot be captured by such a relationship, since there is nothing outside of the 'whole' to put the whole in relation to.
I hope some of this helps. You are wrestling with fundamental issues. All I have done is shared some of tools that worked for me.
Yes I understand. Are you satisfied with the answer "you live because you want to live"?
Everything you experience makes up your existence. Within that existence you have desires, things you want. It is wanting to not crash that gives rise to the point of turning on your headlights so that you don't crash. It is what you desire that gives rise to point, to meaning. You ask what is the point of your existence, so you are asking what desire you have that your existence helps you attain. If you do not desire anything then your existence has no point. If you desire anything then the fact you exist is what allows you to have that desire at all so that you may attain it.
You're focusing on the whole of existence and are asking what desire the whole allows you to attain, but everything you desire is part of the whole, and everything you may attain is part of the whole, so it is meaningful to speak of point and purpose within the whole but it is meaningless to speak of point for the whole, since there is nothing to put the whole in relation to, everything is part of the whole.
Then the question "what's the point of my whole existence?" is itself meaningless. With words you can construct sentences that are meaningless, that do not refer to anything you can experience. Another example of a meaningless question is "what is the smell of existence?". The concept of smell does not apply to the whole of existence just like the concept of point does not apply to the whole of existence, they apply to parts of existence.
We don't know what happens when our body dies, maybe our existence goes on in a different form or maybe it just stops. If it goes on the whole of existence would include what we experience after our body dies, and applying the concept of point to the whole of existence would still be meaningless. The whole of existence might be seen as a journey without a destination, but that doesn't make the journey not worth traveling, when you feel desires and follow them you find all the point you want.
What in god's name is a "poetic" state of mind?
Quoting macrosoft
I think Marshall McLuhan had something to say about that.
Oh, sure we do. It quickly becomes a site of ghastly decomposition. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out -- literally.
Life after death is just like death before life. Do you remember what you were doing those billions of years before you were born? No. Because you didn't exist in that time. You don't exist; you exist; you don't exist. That's the whole opera in 3 acts.
Come now. Do you like Patti Smith's album Horses? I think she and her band were there.
The written word alone can get there too:
[quote= Auden]
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
[/quote]
Then there's the state of mind in which one writes poetry. Even philosophical prose can catch fire. Some of my favorite passages from the therefore-greats are passionate and (conceptually-metaphorically) visionary. For instance, consider this interpretation of the Christ personality. Is this love or hate? It's in The Antichrist.
[quote= Nietzsche]
What the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit... A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort... But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics, an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all.
[/quote]
I agree. Well said.
Quoting leo
While I don't think physicists (in general) want us to believe that, I do think the modern vision of nature as a blind machine that doesn't care about us takes some time to process. What comes with that vision? Our deaths and the toppling of all absolute authority. 'All is vanity,' despite what the self-deceived and the lying manipulators who 'also see the void' say. This dark 'truth' (vision of existence among others) has the appeal of at least some kind of brave honesty. On the other hand, the same vision mocks every brave pose. And maybe some people don't get a conscious thrill from facing it but instead are simply horrified, when they aren't eating a sandwich like everyone else.
Anyway, one just adapts to this background nullity of all things. To agree with and paraphrase what you say, 'feeling is first.' Desire imposes a structure on the world. To be in love (requited or not ) is to find life almost too meaningful (at least when one is younger and hasn't settled in to a warm, reliable buzz.)
I agree too with what you imply. It's our philosophical interpretation of science (and for some politics) that drives us to despair, angst, etc. Under or through a different interpretation that same view of the blind machine has a bitter beauty. Something like our freedom and dignity might even depend on it.
You see with your eyes what happens to others when their body dies. But what you see with your eyes is not all that is. If you look at me with your eyes you don't know what I feel or think, yet I feel and think, experience all kinds of things you don't see with your eyes. You're just assuming that everything that is stems from the world you construct out of what you see with your eyes, but that's a peculiar belief, which sadly has taken hold of many people, and led to a world where what matters is appearances and not what we feel.
Indeed what we desire shapes the world in many ways, through how we see the world, through how we feel, through what we do, which impacts what others see and feel and do. We separate 'reality' from 'imagination', but they both shape each other, they are a whole rather than two separate parts.
Some of the more vocal physicists do want to push the vision that all our existences can be summed up into neat mathematical equations, that it's just a matter of finding the correct ones. But their equations are fundamentally devoid of feeling and can never account for the experience of feeling, they are missing something fundamental. From being taught this vision many come to see their feelings as irrelevant, which as you say drives to despair and angst, instead of seeing what these equations say as irrelevant for their feelings.
We carry out science as if what is seen with the eyes gives us access to the fundamental stuff of existence and as if what we feel is a byproduct of that stuff, instead of noticing the fundamental character of what we feel in shaping everything. We focus on the seen and so construct a world where the seen is what matters rather than the felt, instead of focusing on the felt and constructing a world where the felt matters. And such a world could, I feel, be much more beautiful.
but seriously, i've tried what you said, i tried to distract myself, but no matter how long i keep my thoughts at bay, they find their way back in at 3 am when i wanna sleep
we probably turn to dust but there is the possibility of something else happening
I'm not saying that, I say finding a point requires feeling a desire, and that it is meaningless to try to apply the concept of point to the whole of existence, I don't say that if you don't find a point you should kill yourself.
Why should you kill yourself if you don't find a point? Is life really so unbearable to you that you prefer not to live if you don't find a point? If you suffer then why don't you try to find what it is that makes you suffer? It's not the absence of point that makes you suffer, there's something at the source of that.
In another thread of mine I argue that fear and false beliefs are the source of most suffering. And I believe you hold false beliefs which you haven't uncovered that make you suffer.
You could put it this way: "My credo is that if I don't have a point, I should kill myself..................but wait, that's a point, so I guess I can't kill myself after all."
19 is kinda young to be declaring things impossible.
can you explain what you mean? you might be right.
and yes, life is unbearable without the fun
point is something that you feel
As I stated earlier, 19 is too young to declare things impossible. Maybe you can't help it because you haven't tried. Maybe you can't help it because it takes time to learn. Maybe you can't help it because you don't want to learn it. Maybe you like the drama and don't wish to give it up. Maybe lots of things. Time can help sort through the pile.
Any "should" is necessarily a way that someone feels.
As I recall Hamlet was pondering this while on the point of suicide.
Aquinas' God has placed us here for some purpose.
To void that purpose by one's own hand is defiance of that God.
To make an enemy of God is the greatest failure a person could commit.
While I do not fault anyone in extreme pain facing terminal death to end their own suffering, I would say anything short of that would be a moral crime and in defiance of God.
its highly ironic to me that god gave us this life that sucks in every level and get mad if we don't play by the rules
People are too busy just living to think about living. It's like the situation where you're in some crappy deal but it's too late for you to change your mind. So, you simply follow the path that lies in front of you - hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
I refer you to my reply to Schopenhauer1's recent thread, entitled:
"It is life itself that we can all unite against"
Michael Ossipoff
9 Sa
Not all Theists believe that God is responsible for making there "be" this physical world, &/or our lives.
The Gnostics don't believe it, and I suggest that they're right.
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If you're contemplating suicide, then maybe it would be prudent ask yourself what you expect to gain by it. I suggest that, with loss of waking-consciousness, you'd have the vague but horrific nightmare knowledge something really bad has happened, and that it was done by you.
There's no such thing as oblivion. You'll never experience a time when you aren't. Then how do you want it to be?
Action to gain something can at least be justified in some way. What about action to achieve nothing? Can that be worth the trouble needed to do it?.
..action whose only purpose is to separate you from opportunity to deal with what you mistakenly thought you could escape? You'd feel rather silly, and that's an understatement.
If you're discontent and in unrest now, do you think it will be otherwise just because you die?
By the way, self-deliverance from a genuinely unacceptable and irreversible medical condition (injury or disease) isn't suicide. But it's suicide if done without such a medical need.
Michael Ossipoff
9 Sa
¯\_(?)_/¯
Quoting Rhasta1
¯\_(?)_/¯
I was crying because I was in the middle of an existential crisis, but then you made me laugh. Thank you good sir.
I'd love it if you could tell me why you think that oblivion is nothing but an illusion.
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Are you saying that because the horrific nightmare knowledge that something really bad has happened would comprise our last moment, that a lack of oblivion would somehow perpetuate this subjective moment into eternity?
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I guarantee that there’s no such thing as oblivion.
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You’ll never experience a time when you aren’t. How could you?
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When your body has completely shut down, the doctor will declare you dead, and your survivors will know that you’re no more. But you never experience that time.
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Death completely separates the dying person’s timescale from that of his/her survivors.
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So, what then do you experience? Ever deepening sleep.
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Approaching nothing, sure, but never getting there.
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So no, you can’t get away from yourself. You can’t get away from being. By electively (not by physical necessity) destroying your body, you can’t get away from being; you can just make it bad.
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During that deepening sleep, you eventually won’t know that there were ever, or even could be, such things as worldly-life, a body, a physical world, identity, individuality, time or events.
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Because you won’t know that there is, was, or even could be time or events, it’s reasonable to say that you’ll have arrived in timelessness.
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Yes, your body will be about to shut-down, but you won’t know or care, because you’ve arrived at timelessness.
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That, happening in the normal course of events, normally is something good, but, by suicide, you can make it bad.
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As I said in my reply to Schopenhauer1, that I referred you to:
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Death doesn’t interrupt life. Life (temporarily and briefly) interrupts sleep.
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Sleep is the natural, normal, usual and rightful state-of-affairs.
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The time in this life is limited, and so one might as well enjoy it while one can. You’ll be out of it soon enough, in the normal course of events.
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I emphasize that the end of life is normally not a bad thing at all. It just crucially depends on how and why it happens.
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Say you eventually die naturally, or by physically-necessary auto-euthanasia or requested-euthanasia, because of a disease or injury that spoils your quality-of-life. That isn’t suicide, and it isn’t a bad death.
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Then, during the ever-deepening sleep that I referred to above, additional things that you won’t know that there ever were, or even could be, include:
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Problems, adversity, menace, need , want, lack, dissatisfaction, discontent, and incompletion.
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But I’m talking about a death that’s natural, or by physically-necessary autoeuthanasia or requested-euthanasia, due to a disease or injury that spoils your quality-of-life.
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If, instead, it’s by suicide, all bets are off, and I can’t guarantee that the nightmare knowledge that something really bad has happened, by your own action, won’t color that timelessness.
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No, because there’s no such thing as oblivion, because you’ll never experience a time when you aren’t.
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But yes, the timeless ever-deepening sleep at the end of life normally brings peace-of-mind.
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…unless the death is by suicide, in which case it’s a whole other ballgame and all bets are off.
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Unnecessarily ending one’s life by destroying one’s body would be the ultimate device-malfunction, self-denial, self-hate, and misery-preservation. …attempting to end misery and discontent, but instead bringing it with you.
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Oblivion is a logical impossibility, because you can’t experience a time when you aren’t.
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But, yes, there will be ever-deepening sleep, and that can be a good thing, when it happens in the normal course of events.
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Michael Ossipoff
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9 Su
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I’m not talking about a moment. I’m talking about ever-deepening sleep. …timeless, because eventually one will no longer know that there ever were, or even could be, such things as time or events.
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But yes, I’m saying that maybe that nightmare knowledge that something really bad happened, by one’s own doing, would color and define the nature of that timelessness. I can’t guarantee that it wouldn’t.
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If the horror of that nightmare-knowledge, is persistent in that timeless ever-deepening sleep, that wouldn’t be a good thing.
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I can’t guarantee that it wouldn’t be. Why take the chance?
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Michael Ossipoff
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9 Su
Everything is pointless. But even though I'm of the opinion that there's nothing behind the beauty that exists around us, I find there's even more beauty in the idea that the randomness and probabilities of the universe settled on something that can perceive its own beauty. Even if it's just probability, it's truly mind-boggling and epic. I don't need fantasies to experience the grand awesomeness of everything, I think it in itself is enough.
Other than that, what else is there to living than to live the life you have? The other option is to never have lived, which is pointless as it cannot perceive itself not living. The question of pointlessness just becomes absurd as there's nothing to compare to. You have a pointless existence, and it's more than not existing at all.
If you don't have any wants, then why would there be a reason to do anything?
Michael Ossipoff
10 Tu
all the things that you mentioned prior to this sentence were true and made sense, but i dont understand their correlation with this statement "Approaching nothing, sure, but never getting there"
Why has there gotta be anything but blackness and simply ceasing to exist?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
But I'd like to argue that euthanasia, self-requested, is a form of suicide nevertheless. See, people who take their own lives, teenage girls or unemployed dudes, are suffering to an extent which is indurable for them. They don't kill themselves because their boyfriends broke up with them or they lost their job, they suffer because the value of their lives, which was based on careers or a loving relationship, shatter and they seem unable to find any reason to why they have got to continue the futile existence. And in my opinion, this kinda existential crisis is far more painful and excruciating than any kind of cancer or disease, and only a madman would linger on their lives.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I just don't understand why people have got to hate themselves to commit suicide? I don't understand this notion at all
I quite haven't figured out whether life is incapable of satisfying me in any way, or there's something out there that will make me more at ease. And I'm searching to see if the latter could be true
what beauty are you talking about exactly?
I've just found these 2 message,s and it's too late to start one of my (usually long) replies tonight (I'm in the -8 timezone), so I'll reply tomorrow morning (February 27th, reckoned at my longitude).
Michael Ossipoff
10 W
It's often the last thing people hold onto when going from belief to nihilism and understanding the meaninglessness of life. People who believe in religion or some higher meaning attach an aesthetic beauty to existence which they feel would be pointless as well if they accept that all else is. My point was that I find this to be misleading for them because they have no concept of the aesthetic beauty of existence and the universe, outside of the idea that it was in some way designed. I'm referring to the mathematical precision and aesthetics of how we perceive everything around us. It can feel like it has some higher and spiritual beauty, but we have a programming that makes us see the world in a way that changes our emotions, that's all, but also in of itself a kind of beauty not to be missed.
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How would you experience a time of no experience?
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Yes, from the point of view of your survivors, they experience that you’re gone when your body has shut down. But we’re talking about your own experience.
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Of course. “Suicide” is often merely defined as causing one’s own death. I don’t consider that a useful definition, because there’s a distinction to be made:
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Is there or is there not a disease or injury that spoils their quality-of-life?
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At the opposite extreme, would be if it’s done or spoken of for no reason whatsoever, other than a belief that it will cure existential-angst. …or because of a contemptuous opinion of life, necessarily accompanied by an exalted belief in oneself as someone who can be sure that he can “fix” the situation by destroying his existing situation. …like someone who works on his car without sufficient training.
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…usually accompanied by a fallacious belief that one can achieve oblivion.
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Of course there’s a gradation between those extremes.
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In my usage, it’s “suicide” unless there’s an irreversible disease or injury that spoils the person’s quality of life (in their own opinion).
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Briefly, regarding one point in that gradation:
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Well, alright, what if life became impossible for someone for drastically, prohibitively, extreme societal/economic situational-adversity? Then, too, I probably wouldn’t call it “suicide” either, though then the justification or need would be less than the abovementioned disease or injury, because there might be an avenue of survival that the person hasn’t found, doesn’t know about. …as when refugees are accepted somewhere.
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There are other points in the gradation, but that would unnecessarily lengthen this reply, because, here, we’re probably talking about the Nihilist extreme.
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Because it’s difficult to compare things so different, we can just agree that they’re different, and agree to disagree about which is worse.
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The psychological reasons you describe above are in the gradation, between the extremes, that I referred to above.
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…not physical justification, but not frivolous existential-angst either.
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I agree with the person who pointed out that it’s the other way around.
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We’re talking about a drastic irreversible destructive action, usually without a clear non-fallacious expression of what it is believed that it will gain.
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…an elective action, chosen for psychological reasons. …as opposed to something that physically happens to someone. That’s the simple and clear distinction that I make in my definition of “suicide”. Did it physically happen to you, or did you choose it?
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Alright, I’m not a mind-reader, so I shouldn’t say “self-hate”.
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But yes, it’s undeniably self-harming, choosing to actively, electively, end one’s life by destroying one’s body.
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…with only a vague notion of what it’s supposed to gain… other than a fallacious notion of achievable oblivion, nothingness.
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I also commented on that above in this reply.
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Yes, life doesn’t have a reason, purpose, or meaning. What’s wrong with that?
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You think you have a way to fix that? Destroy your body to gain meaning and purpose?
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Your being in this reasonless, purposeless, meaningless life is something that just happened spontaneously and (I claim) inevitably.
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Adding, to that, the purposeful destruction of a body, to send yourself into the final stage of that life that you never asked for. …you’ll still be in that experience that you didn’t ask for—just the final stage of it instead of its waking-life part that you were born to. In other words, you’ll still be in the reasonless, purposeless, meaningless life experience, but now its final part.
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The reasonless, purposelessness and meaningless will remain, with the addition of a purposeless transition done by you (as opposed to your birth, which merely happened to you).
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Still purposelessness, but now purposelessness by you.
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Your watch isn’t running well? Let me fix it, with this sledgehammer.
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And yes, when you destructively (on yourself) act-out your discontent, you’ll bring your discontent with you into death (in which there’s no oblivion).
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I remind you of what I said in my earlier post, regarding, after the loss of waking-consciousness, the nightmare knowledge that something really bad and irreversible has happened due to a self-destructive act.
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Given the irreversibility, how sure are you really that it will result in something better, and not worse?
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 W
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…and suicide might satisfy you?
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How?
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I don’t think complete ease is to be expected. Some anxiety and insecurity is a natural and appropriate part of life, regardless of what kind of societal-world we live in.
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I should emphasize that I don’t claim smug superiority in this matter:
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During the last half of my teens I, too, wanted to die*, but it was for a reason (…instead of due to Nihilism)
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*(…but didn’t, because I was very particular about reliability and comfort)
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Was it a good reason? No.
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In brief:
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Due to parental-bullying, I gave up on life long before kindergarten, long before any time that I can remember. By the time I was in elementary-school, that giving-up was conscious as well as subconscious, and I knew that there wouldn’t be a life.
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Though, in those days, it was entirely impossible for me to objectively regard and evaluate that giving up and how I’d arrived at it—it was subconsciously ingrained— and so I didn’t have a chance, I did nonetheless understand that I didn’t have a chance. So I was right about that much, while unaware of (and mistaking for fact) the parentally-taught false perceptions, attitudes, valuations and conclusions that that were the reason why I didn’t have a chance.
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A question:
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Is this just philosophical Nihilism, or is there something about your particular life-situation that makes your own particular life inadequate for you?
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 W
I believe that there's purpose to life and death. So I live and will die fulfilling that purpose. Hopefully I'm right and wrong about it.
Nihilism is the truth but we can always opt for temporary meaning. I'm at a train station about to leave the land of the living. Might as well make some people happy and scratch my name on the wall or smile at the old lady.
Imagine that you've just bought a new gaming console, with two brand new games. You put the first disk in. You get so immersed in this game that you don't notice how much time has passed, you are thoroughly enjoying it, it's been a long time since you've had this much fun with a game.
And now you put the second disk in. 10 mins in and you already know how much of a crappy and generic game it is, with no substance in it, it's just there for no apparent reason.
What would you do with the second video game? Keep playing it until you compulsively convince yourself that you like it? Or do you rationally delete the damn game?
life for some is the first video game but for most it's the second one
to answer that question, I think it'd be better if we chatted somewhere than here. Google hangouts is a great choice
I don't know, I might go to hell or heaven, the underworld of Greek myths, or eaten by Egyptian afterlife monsters, or even merely go from one folder to another folder, if we are inside a giant simulation. All I know is that, when you're not content with your life, and deem it too trivial to begin caring about, it's nothing but a big, yet brave, risk to take. It might get worse if there's an afterlife and we don't reside in blackness (I still don't understand how there can't be oblivion, you go there every night when you sleep). But it's only sensible to take action to improve your life, even if it ultimately ends up hurting you
I've sent a message to your forum-inbox, so just click on "Inbox" at the top of your forum-screen. When there, click on "Reply".
That's the convenient off-forum discussion-space that the forum provides. If Google hangouts would be better, then your reply could give instructions for accessing and using Google hangouts. (But I never sign in to any website that requires me to give my gmail password.) But surely this forum's off-forum PM inbox messaging is perfectly good.
Michael Ossipoff
10 Th
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The analogy doesn’t fit the situation.
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In your analogy, you’ve been playing the 1st video-game for a long time, and you know exactly what it’s like and how good it is. …and you know, when you play the 2nd game, that the 1st game is much better, because you’ve thoroughly experienced the 1st game.
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In the life-situation, you really couldn’t have any idea what suicide-death will be like.
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As I said, life is without reason, purpose or meaning, and what’s wrong with that? Your way of “fixing” that, is to add another pointlessness:
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So first there’s the reasonless, purposeless life, which happened to you not by your doing, and which you didn’t ask for. But then comes the pointlessness that you add. The pointless choice and forcing of a pointless transition to death. …and this time it’s your pointlessness, done by you.
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You see, that makes it a whole different kind of pointlessness. It will be your pointlessness, made and done by you.
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You didn’t ask for this life. You’re not responsible for the fact that it happened. But you will be responsible for what happens when you make it happen, when you destroy your body to force your death.
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Your pointlessness.
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Another thing:
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I mentioned that in the last half of my teens I wanted to die. Yes, but it wasn’t because of contempt or disdain for life, or because I considered life pointless. It was because I (thought that I) couldn’t have life. It was for a reason (even though it was a mistaken reason). There was nothing low about my valuation of life.
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In your case, though, it sounds as if your suicide would be because of contempt and disdain for life, and a belief that life is pointless. Not for any reason other than rejection of life itself.
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You reject life, and destroy your body, to force your death, because of, as an expression of, that rejection. Ok, now what have you then got? Rejection?
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Surely you see how dry and empty that would be for you. And that’s how you’d start eternity, with empty angry hard-to-please dissatisfaction, discontent, and an attitude of rejection. Does that sound good?
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As I’ve said, you’d be taking your discontent with you into death. …and yes, of course it obviously would remain with you.
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As Rajneesh pointed out, your death won’t be better than your life. …at least partly or mostly because you bring your life into your death. Death, that deepening sleep, is a continuation of your life. Why, then, would you expect your discontent to go away just because you’re dying? Your rejection-attitude, your discontent and hard-to-please built-in dissatisfaction, isn’t going to bring you happiness in that continuation of life during your death, any more than it is now.
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\But, returning to my own attitude during my teens:
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I wasn’t life-rejecting. I just felt that, if I couldn’t have life, then I didn’t want to co-operate with the social pretense of it, a phony non-life that was being imposed on me. (I was right about that part).
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I didn’t know what would follow, but (as an Atheist at the time, having been raised Atheist), I assumed that it would be, in some way, a continuation of life. (Though I was wrong about a lot, I was right about that.)
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In a better, enlightened, society, should they have given me the medicine for death? At the time, I thought so. But should they have? No. If it were an enlightened society, it would have been an easy matter to point out my obvious fallacies, and then the death wouldn’t have seemed necessary.
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 F
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I say that, after suicide, you’d be stuck with your discontent, anger, unhappiness and life-rejection, as you bring it with you into the eternal ever-deepening sleep. You can’t get away from yourself.
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If your suicide is by a method that could instantly end experience (but you’d be unlikely to achieve that, and death would likely be lingering and painful, if achieved at all), even then, do you really want your last experience to be one of doing traumatic painful violence to yourself?
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Do you call that an improvement?
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You can’t get away from your life. You can just irreversibly put yourself into a stage of it where you’ll be stuck with yourself and your discontent and there’s no longer anything that you can do about it.
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Would that unhappiness be eternal? I can’t guarantee that it wouldn’t be.
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As I said, death is continuation of life. …continuation of where you were before death.
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It is that. It’s also irreversible and final.
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So you kill yourself to express contempt for life, and then what? Then where are you? You’re still with yourself, your contempt, rejection-attitude and discontent, and you can’t get away from yourself.
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There’s more than one answer to that:
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1. Even if there were complete shutdown and oblivion in deep-sleep, it isn’t part of your experience. Likewise, the state of complete shutdown at death isn’t part of your experience.
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As I said, you can never experience a time when you aren’t. You can never experience a time when there’s no experience.
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Experience of a time when there’s no experience is a logical contradiction, a logical impossibility, a verbal self-contradiction.
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That’s important to these discussions, because advocates of suicide usually mistakenly believe that they’re going to achieve oblivion.
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2. Just because you don’t remember experience during deep-sleep doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any. …doesn’t mean that there wasn’t experience or consciousness of any kind or to any degree.
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You can’t really say that hurting you is an improvement.
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If it ends up as a horrifying irreversible mistake, trapped in horror, is that improving your life?
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 F
in my analogy, video game A wasn't death caused by suicide, it was a content worry less life, the type that you speak of, the promised life promised by our parents and our schools and the life camus promises by laughing at the absurd. The life where problems are tolerable, where at the end of the day, you and your significant other share a cup of coffee together and read books or whatever you're into, where you sense purpose and meaning. That's video game A compared to video game B of mine where everyday is a constant struggle to even get out of my room, not because I'm sad but because I'm numb.
And I don't wanna be depicted as a sad edgelord who fetishizes his own sadness, I'm really trying to elevate my life. By doing things that make me happy at that particular time, and breaking away from the system, I'm following through just so that I could get a glimpse of the life that you promise, but if this doesn't work either, well....
I never said it will hurt me, I just said that it might. you know you might not reach your goals but you wake up every day working towards them.
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Then of course anyone would choose A over B. No argument there.
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But I was just saying that that doesn’t match your situation that we’ve been discussing.
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For someone who says that nothing means anything, suicide is, ironically and suspiciously, a not-so-easy distinctly resolutely purposeful act. …the kind of thing done only to achieve something that _matters very much_.
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If nothing matters, then what would motivate a not-so-easy resolutely purposeful act?
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If nothing matters, then fine, you needn’t do anything. …including a hard, risky, resolutely purposeful act such as suicide. …to gain what?
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It wouldn’t make any sense. It would be even more meaningless and absurd than your birth here, except, this time, then you _would_ own the absurdity, purposeless and meaningless, because it would be your doing.
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How doesn’t it work. What’s the not-work scenario?
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There aren’t things that you like?
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You can’t expect every moment to be enjoyable. It definitely isn’t like that.
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I spoke of how there are “Shit!” moments, and how you didn’t choose to be born. Your birth was inevitable, reasonless, agentless, purposeless, meaningless, and definitely not your fault.
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Because you didn’t ask for or choose it, and it wasn’t your fault, and isn’t your problem, and you needn’t take it seriously.
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As I told Andrew4Handel, disown it.
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It’s dealt-with, and “problems” that are dealt-with are done-with
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No problem. There are (sometimes) things that you like.
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I refer you to my 3 most recent replies, to Andrew4Handel, in the currently-active Antinatalist thread whose title speaks of life as the thing to unite against.
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 Su
0516 UTC
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…and that makes it a good idea?
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What goal?
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You see, that’s the thing: Exactly what goal would suicide achieve? I told you the why the notion of reaching oblivion is a logical impossibility, a logical contradiction, a direct verbal contradiction in terms.
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Michael Ossipoff
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10 Su
0528 UTC
Suicidal Nihilists are trying to game the system. They can’t undo their conception and birth. They can’t achieve nonbeing. There’s no such thing for you once you’ve been conceived and born.
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They’re chasing a theoretical fiction.
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Is this societal-world bad? Shit yeah. Nothing can be done to fix it. You’ll be out of, it all in good time, when it’s time. If someone tinkers, by ending their life just because they decide that they don’t like it, without genuine urgent need to, they just make it a lot worse for themselves, because what you end-up in depends on your actions.
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Michael Ossipoff
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11 Tu
1828 UTC
Sounds like religious/karmic superstition.
Quoting emancipate
What a very odd thing to say. That we end up with what we do is hardly limited to religion.
Michael Ossipoff
11 Tu
1851 UTC
understandable. It probably sounded like a quote of religious doctrine.