I don’t think so. Ever since I read about nihilism I can’t really get around it without feeling like I’m lying to myself. The responses I read from existential philosophers avoid it or don’t go all the way with it.
I do care in the sense I want nihilism to be wrong but I can see how it is. It’s led me to wondering why I’m bothering. The default is that life is worth living but the people who say that are usually idiots who haven’t thought hard enough on it. When I ask them further questions on why they usually don’t have a response because they don’t expect to be pressed on it. I have nothing I really wanna live for, ever since I was a kid. I just hung on because you’re “supposed to” and people made promises of it getting better. But it didn’t.
I think you have this precisely backwards. It is the people who have thought about it who have made “informed” decisions about the challenges and opportunities life brings.
When yo say that you have no interest in anything life has to offer you are practising “resistance”. The trick is to “overcome resistance” and allow yourself to find something that interests you and that will give you a measure of satisfaction.
If you want to see what real suffering is all about and how humans can take action to correct something that is really wrong, and how rewarding that can be .
Watch this and weep. Then smile when the ultimate result is a triumph shared by different species in a symbiotic relationship.
You either have an answer, or you don’t. But meanwhile, that you are trying to work through it is the actual struggle. Maybe you can’t find The Answer because there isn’t one. Like I said, how you handle it is personal. We all have our ways. Some are wrong. Many are not. Not harming others is a good rule to start with. Someone probably could do better with your help, so just hanging around is valuable. Maybe you’ll come up with the thing that becomes the next big thing.
It’s not resistance so much as acceptance of the inherent meaninglessness of life.
I saw that video but it would have been far kinder to just put the dog out of it’s misery.
That’s not really a solution as there is no meaning in helping other people. It’s not so much a struggle as it is denying reality, that nothing matters and making meaning doesn’t actually create meaning but just deludes you a while longer.
But did you see the end of the video, where the dog is a happy dog playing and enjoying it’s life.
Would rather have it die never knowing anything but misery.
What is the use of that?
If you have the power and use it to make 1 life better, it is it’s own reward.
It’s not. The dog would have been spared had they just put it out of it’s misery. Far kinder than what they did for it. If it died it would have been at peace.
not true and not always. Though the universe is deterministic so it’s not like we have any say in our actions.
When you started here, you were asking for responses to the Happiness website. Often, when people come with questions like that, they quickly switch to defending the thing they ask about. You took an unusual path. You kept saying they were wrong, but asking for strategies to talk to them.
Now you’ve expanded that to the ultimate questions. It’s the same logic as religion, that we don’t know where the universe came from and don’t have an explanation of why we are here, therefore…
Religion fills in the “therefore” with a made up answer, something outside of space and time that has a story that we are part of. You, and some philosophers fill it in with how the lack of meaning, means something. You expect others to be terrified by this realization. Both of you say that if we disagree then we didn’t do our homework, we need to go back and read, “face reality”, the really real.
It’s all tiresome. You claim there’s logic where there isn’t any. The reaction to what we know about evolution, history, our brains, emotions, etc. is our own. Humans developed survival strategies long before the knowledge. We’ve inherited those by culture and birth. No one gets to tell me how I should feel about living or dying. Definitely not random guy on the internet.
It’s not a matter of religion, I truly think that if people think that “nothing matters” doesn’t bother them then they haven’t really thought it through that much. Most people don’t and those who have when you question them about it learn that they really having given it much thought beyond “life is what you make of it”.
But they don’t understand how that isn’t an answer and why it doesn’t hold up.
Most people develop an answer to the question, right or wrong.
But it is you who doesn’t have an answer. You are the one aimlessly groping in the dark.
Usually a person selects an avatar that reflects a world view. Yours is well-chosen.
Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it because you can’t know. You can’t ever really know the meaning of your life. And you don’t need to. Every life has a meaning, whether it lasts one hundred years or one hundred seconds. Every life, and every death, changes the world in its own way. You can’t know. So don’t take it for granted. But don’t take it too seriously. Don’t postpone what you want. Don’t leave anything misunderstood. Make sure the people you care about know. Make sure they know how you really feel. Because just like that…It could end.
But if he did he’s not right. No life has meaning, neither does any death. Your death won’t affect the world neither will your life. You can know, because we already do. No matter what happens the globe will turn, if humanity dies out it will turn. The sun might eventually engulf the Earth but even then it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if your life could end. Nothing does.
They don’t, not really. If you poke at it even a little it crumbles. That’s what I meant when I said that they haven’t really thought it through. The world, society, how all of it is just rules and shit we made up that only seems like something because everyone agrees to it. But in reality it’s just a play, a performance, and we have to keep the act up because otherwise we’ll find out what life really is. That we’re just kidding ourselves will all this, overinflating our own importance and impact to shield ourselves from the unyielding void of reality.
Whether you will a sports game, get married, lose your job, etc, none of it actually matters. It’s all a game, pretend, imaginary. It’s not real, it doesn’t matter. But we all have to pretend, like that quote I mentioned earlier said. We have to pretend it’s real, because the alternative is soul crushing.
And chaos theory is founded on that principle. A butterfly flaps its wings…etc.
There have been several stories of dogs saving their master or providing eyes for the blind or protecting its human family, or just be a loyal friend that will faithfully wait for days and weeks, for their master to return.
And here is a human person who seems unable to relate, or even care, to such a beneficial symbiotic relationship.
I could understand it if a person was severely autistic and was just unable to relate.
But it seems that I have been talking to an intelligent person who actually can define and describe his inability to relate and/or care, even in face of the most tragic hardships endured by a “man’s best friend”. Most curious and sad…
Yes, and it seems you are caught in that trap yourself. Don’t you understand that your misery is also a play , a performance?
By your own words your misery is a meaningless emotion and has absolutely no effect on the world except perhaps annoy some people who have realized that if you play by the rules, there is often a real reward and satisfaction at the end of the journey.
“You reap as you sow” is one of the few biblical verses I agree with .
And from a scientific perspective, energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be directed to be used for exploring the universe.
Why do you use the internet to vent your disenchantment? Why not spread a positive humanistic message that CFI was actually designed to do?
The quote was from a movie I just watched, called “Remember Me”. I recommend not going for spoiler alerts on this one. It was next in a suggested list, so selected totally at random. A rebellious 21 year old, super rich dad, precocious smart little sister who is into Greek tragedies, guy meets girl who also has a messed up life. Everyone in the movie has good reasons to be angry at life and they all take it out on each other in various ways. Each one has something worth saying and something to apologize for.
In the end, the world turns in exactly the way it always has. Some things reconcile, some don’t.
BTW, smarty pants, wikiquote says the quote is disputed. The first line was first seen on a T shirt in Mother Jones magazine. There are other ways I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed, so I’m not taking it down.
I don’t want my actions or words to be remembered forever or to change the course of history. There’s a lot more that I’ve done that I’m hoping people will forget. I want to be like an ancestor of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso whose name has been forgotten and details of their story are lost but the tribe lives on and still honors the people who passed it on to them.
