Is human connection possible?

General Discussion
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Not really, the point of seeing through something is that you cannot go back to the way things were. They don’t always lead to building meaningful relationships either. When you see social interaction as theater you doubt folks intentions.

Going deeper when you realize “who they are” or their “self” is more just a phantom, nothing but memory and nothing really about them. So when you hear “them” talk about “their” life it’s hard to take it seriously because it’s just a fiction, a story being told, it’s not real.

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That’s your decision. It is not the point. How did you make up that there is a point? You’re doing the very thing you say is fake; deciding how things are based on something you heard.

That’s what you do. If everything is theater then how do you know what ‘not theater’ is?

It’s the same unsolved dilemma. How do you know there is something else that’s real if you see everything as fiction? I don’t have a solution to hard Solipsism so I’m just pointing it out. It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum, but doesn’t offer much in terms of a way to live.

If you’re looking for an ultimate source of wisdom or guidance or something more real, Solipsism is an end. If you’re looking for what to do with the limited time we have and the power we have to create, it’s a beginning.

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@inthedarkness

The questions in the above are intended as open questions, for discussions. They don’t have easy answers. I’m not challenging you, I’m inviting you to consider them.

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I’ve been learning about Candace Pert yesterday and this morning, It helped me recall that I’d actually read about her work, back in the day, and I can recognize how it definitely impacted my thinking moving forward, before drifting into the purgatory of forgotten thoughts.

Now she’s another one who belongs on my list, in solid foundation for appreciating the actual factual reality that your body interacting with the world is the only stuff producing your thoughts, including philosophy and theology and gods, and so on.

Now Candice was quite a woman, driven by two polar passions, and apparently a touch of mental illness. (Like who isn’t, at least among the interesting people.)

So with that background, I think of you and how everything resolves into nothing. And nothing anyone can say, dispels that unsettling reality.

I realized what you are missing is that life is all about making something out of nothing, be it on a grand evolutionary scale - or that naked little newborn human, where biology and environment build something out of nothing.

Take Candice Pert life, she rode the extremes and you can bet she tasted the best and some of the lowest times. She I can relate to, though to use Arthur Uptown colorful language, I and my life, isn’t a bootlace to her, intellect and accomplishments. But that’s okay, we came from different stock, with different lives and different hurdles.

So we add up positives and negative and it added up to zero, nothing. Eh?

So what is the purpose of life?

To make something out of nothing! Even if it is only a fleeting moment that will dissolves back into the nothing.

You’re okay, you think deeply about your thoughts, perhaps too deeply, thus not recognizing the dog chasing tail, but hey, what do I know. You have resolved your truth that you will dedicate your energy to obsessing, or is it worshipping, the ultimate emptiness that is. People revere monks who lived their lives in caves and seclusion. What you are doing is as morally acceptable, so far as I’m concerned, now that I think about it (love those long walks following Maddy around).

Like they say, you do You.

I appreciate that it’s meaningless that I shared the above for you,
but it feels good to me,
to be able to understand the conundrum that your persona
has been for some of us over here at CFI,
well, enough to finally crystalize it into words - so I share.

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I think I’ve mentioned Jonathan a few times. In his latest long article, he notes that meaningless is trending. Maybe worse, a conservative circle can protect a young person from those feelings. It doesn’t protect them from the distractions, from the erosion of wisdom, or from turning everything into a marketplace. Those of us who have lived through the decline will recognize the trends discussed.

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It’s not theater if you stop performing.

This isn’t solipsism but rather recognizing that the things that matter are just stories we tell ourselves. The social constructs that only exist because we all pretend they do and that they matter.

I looked through that and the supposed “Destruction of next generation” (apart from the red flag of asking chatgpt for ANYTHING) is that everything he described is pretty much waking up to how reality really is like instead of the construct we have made to believe is how things are.

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That’s one of the more insightful things you have said. But my question was about the other things you say. You say that it’s all theater. This is not a revelation that only you see, given Shakespeare put into eloquent prose. It’s something people are aware of in different ways. Some say “playing the game”, or “putting on a face”, or “faking it”. I’m not asking my questions because I need you to explain it, I’m asking how you handle this.

There is definitely a difference between what is going on inside my head, my thoughts, and how I express them, but that’s not a decision I made. I don’t try to pretend that I’m someone else when I talk. Usually, I’m trying to communicate how I’m feeling, my desires, but I come up short. I can’t tell my whole life story to make a point in the moment. People would cut me off, or I would get tired. That’s not acting, that’s trying to be real, within the limits of what language can do.

I assume this stuff is going on to some degree for most people, although some obviously don’t give it much thought, and just go with the flow, talk about the weather, whatever. When I say “solipsism”, I’m not accusing you of taking a position that you are the only being that you can know and it might be that everyone is a zombie. I’m saying whenever I ask a question you answer with something like, “not real”, “we all pretend”, “everything is a social construct”, etc. Those are all along the lines of solipsism.

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I don’t handle it, I don’t understand it no matter how often I play it back.

I do. It’s the only way I know to be. I’d be myself but I don’t know who that is and I’m too afraid of doing something wrong that I’m always trying to live according to “reality” and what is true, regardless of how I feel.

My point is more with the social construction of reality that we live in and how much of it isn’t for granted…I still cannot reconcile that. Even love (something I value a lot) is an invention:

Though some disagree: Is Romantic Love a Western Invention?

Did love begin in the Middle Ages? | University of Oxford.

And so I can’t tell who’s right or how to feel. What is the correct answer here? How do I be right? What is reality in this situation?

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Actually , love was invented by mothers. :face_blowing_a_kiss:

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That’s quite a conundrum. I have heard the idea that seeking what is true is a good place to start if you want to live a good life. I don’t want to walk through that right now, but you might think about it. This one sentence shows a lot of what you have tangled up, like how it seems you think that there is something you feel and something that’s true and those are seperate. Thing is, your feelings are part of what’s true. The part about being afraid is really important. We’re all afraid. We’re afraid of being wrong. We’re afraid of harming someone inadvertently. We’re afraid of how people will react to us. It’s a problem when that fear stops you.

I don’t have time to read these. I’m pretty sure they say something about the word “love”, or some cultural version of what love is. No poet, no philosopher, certainly no scientist, has ever expressed what love is in a way that everyone agrees. If you can reconcile that, you’ll have done something no one else has. You don’t need to, live with the feeling, find others who like to talk about it. You don’t need to figure everything out.

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Hello ITD,

I’ve run out of thoughts to share, but can’t seem to resist peeking on the continuing dialogue. Then this morning I read a fascinating short article by Aadarsh Aanand, over at Medium.com that has you fresh on my mind again.

How we rebuild meaning when we’ve stopped believing in it -

Nov 6th - Aadarsh Aanand - at Medium.com

Since I prefer believing you are sincere, and not a pointless troll, I feel obligate to share because I the feeling you will find this write up intellectually interesting because he eloquently speaks directly to your ongoing debate and frustrations with life and the meaninglessness.

Nietzsche called it the death of God — not as a blasphemy, but as a symbol of liberation. The collapse of external meaning leaves us in an empty field, staring at the sky. It’s terrifying, yes. But it’s also silent. And in that silence, something begins to breathe again.

Sometimes I think nihilism is not the end of meaning, but the exhaustion of false meanings. …

When the idea of “why” collapses, the ground beneath us seems to disappear. You wake up in the morning and ask — Why go to work? Why study? Why love?
And for a while, nothing answers back. …

But maybe it’s not purely negative. Because when the ground falls away, something else becomes visible — space. A strange, empty, open space where everything can begin again.

The Space That Opens Up …

Maybe that’s the secret the void was hiding all along — that meaninglessness is not emptiness, but possibility.

When the ground falls away, the horizon appears.

From Absurdity to Authenticity …

To live after nihilism is to live without needing justification.
It is to love because love itself is beautiful, not because it redeems anything.
It is to create art not to explain life, but to express that we are alive.

In that, we move from absurdity to authenticity — from demanding meaning to embodying it.

The New Horizon – Living Beyond Meaning …

I know lots of quotes, and lots more words & ideas between them. Check out the entire article, live wild, challenge the author with your concerns - I’ll bet Aadi might have some worthy responses for you to chew on.

Good luck

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