Ask Lemmy

Every day I try to do one thing to make the next day a little better

Feeling good feels good, so I decided to make it the foundation of My ethics. I'm trying to make a world where we can all feel really good and don't have to feel bad.

Surrender.

Not resignation. Surrender.

(Several years of reading philosophy, meditation, Zen Buddhism, resolving mental health issues, trauma work, therapy, psychedelic therapy, going through my personal hell, dropping self-hatered etc. but you can skip the hard stuff and just accept that all you ever amount to is the dash between your birthday and time of death. It's very liberating once you stop believing the idea that you, or anything really, is "supposed" to be special. Or indeed that there even is a "you" - that's just another way your mind is keeping busy. Vast majority of people take the long way around though.)

Beer works pretty well. It takes back in interest, sadly. Ain't no existential crisis like a hungover one.

I've just kind of grown comfortable with the idea that there is no real point. I'm fine just floating through my time here seeing neat shit and hearing cool stories, and doing what I can to make things a little better for the people around me. Sort of a cozy or optimistic nihilism, though I'm probably misusing that word.

Joss Whedon is problematic in a lot of ways, but nevertheless this scene from Angel has always stuck with me: If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

Optimistic Nihilism

Sounds like you need more than hobbies, jobs, family, technology, entertainment, science and religion.

What would make you feel more fulfilled?

Do you need a cause? Try volunteering at a food bank, or animal shelter.

Do you need a goal? Plan and train for a multi day hike.

Do you just want to escape the treadmill of life under late stage capitalism? Know that you're not alone. Do what you can to get yourself out, (or at least somewhat protected) and then try to find fulfilment

The bad news is there is no great meaning or purpose to any of this. The good news is that there is no great meaning or purpose to any of this, so you get to decide your own purpose and define your own meaning.

Well, kind of. Just sitting there, waiting and thinking about how you'll eventually die seems quite boring. Might as well kill some time with fun things in the meanwhile.

"everything we do is really just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end."
if you believe this to be a hard fact instead of a viewpoint among many others it'll be harder to change things up. especially if you consider that to be a negative thing.

The same way I deal with my OCD, try to distract myself with horror games and movies.

It mulled in the background for about 30 years to process, and then I came to the conscious conclusion that out of all the possible equally pointless reasons to hang around, for me satisfying my curiosities and improving the world for my fellow experience-capable-beings are the ones I want to do. Of course I still slip into mind-numbing distractions a lot, that's just being human in the world we live in.

That, and that practically, what are the options anyway? No point in ending it early, or wasting your finite life on something you don't actually want.

My choice of philosophy is absurdism, honestly because I think it sounds more fun than "optimistic nihilism" or "existentialism". IMHO there's a whole host of philosophies that basically suggest the same guide to living well, with different emphasis (for example):

1. Figure out what you want (<- 20th century existentialism)
2. Do it the best you can (<- stoicism, confucianism)
3. Don't let the other stuff distract you (<- stoicism, buddhism)

Excapism: Watching TV shows, movies, anime,

Writing... my life story... sometimes fiction... sometimes poetry...

Watching youtube videos about random stuff, sometimes gameplay, sometimes educational, sometimes irl stuff (the less depressing stuff fun stuff)

Just to let you know, I have double the normal existential crisis since

1. I wasn't even supposed to be born. I was during the One Child Policy of China but I was the second child... its a rare chance that I'm even alive

2. As an immigrant, I have constant identity crisis. Not American enough to be American, not Chinese enough to be Chinese. I want to embrace my language but I keep getting traumatized by it. I keep thinking about the alternate timeline where I had to live in China behind the stupid firewall bullshit.

3. I also nearly got kidnapped since I ran away from home when I was 6 years old due to a fight with my brother so I got scared and ran. I keep reliving that memory and just think what a horrible life that'd be to be trafficked somewhere.

I don't think it really goes away, you just have to deal with it.

Watching movies that makes me cry is very powerful, endorphins feels SOO GOOD. Its hard to explain. Endorphins is the best natural drug there ever is.

Mostly weed. But also food.

I used to suffer from a lot of existential dread. Like, not sleeping because time spent sleeping was bringing me closer to the time I'd no longer exist.

Whether you worry about it or you don't, some day you will stop existing. Worrying about it frankly doesn't help. In fact, it detracts from the dubious pleasure of existing. In my experience, not having fun existing makes me no longer want to exist.

A lot of people advocate for distraction, although personally I think that's just a temporary escapism. I think we need to confront our eventual non-existence, accept it as a fact of life, and then move on by trying to find meaning in what we have left. Way easier said than done.

CBT is a school of therapy about restructuring our thoughts, and it has a lot to say about confronting the fear of the unknown. Cultivating spiritualism and religion is a traditional way of approaching the problem, although I'd encourage people to seek out and learn what other cultures are saying instead of blindly accepting what their parents' church says.

Personally, I had a religious experience while accidentally tripping balls on psychedelics. I'm not sure I'd specifically recommend that, it could just as easily backfire, but it helped me and you can find lots of testimonials with a similar story. Maybe it's better to start with therapy and religion

While I don't live it, I think human time should be spent farming/hunting/building/expression through arts, only what's needed.

....maybe throw some psychedelics in there....

A lot of us were taught escapism.

Meaning and just walking a path.

Lotsa shitty things in the world when I arrived. And anyone or anything living could be me, since I don't think anyone even chose to be human, nor when and where they were born. So it's in my interest to fix shit up and not make it worse -- I could be the next kid born into this world.

The comment of @bsit@sopuli.xyz is also important to me. as are some things @argumentativemonotheist@lemmy.world mentioned/touched on.

Contemplate the thought for a bit, then continue doing whatever it was i was doing. The world goes on

everything we do is really just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end.

Everything ends eventually. The point is to find joy in the moments you have, it's only really a distraction from boredom. You either do something or you don't, but no matter what we're all heading towards our end. Dwelling on it not only serves very little purpose, but it can actively take time away that you could have otherwise been enjoying.

I personally find meaning in doing what I can to make the world in general better. I view being a "steward of the earth", as it were, as being enough of a meaning to my life. Not for religious reasons, but because any bit of help I can do makes a difference to people and causes I care about.

In the era we are in now, with me being in the US, I am describing this feeling as being like a nurse in hospice. Several of my family have been either hospice nurses or patients, and it informs a lot of my view. Even if the little things I do don't "cure" or "fix" anything, it makes life more comfortable for someone who needs it. I do more when I can, but this helps me not feel useless during times I can't do more.

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

Kurt Vonnegut.

Seriously, yeah, its all for nothing as far as the universe is concerned. So why not have a laugh while we're here? Embrace the absurdity of it and live beautifully just because you can.

Some of what you mentiond is just bread 'n circuses to keep you deliberately distracted from what's important

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Juvenal originally used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority

and much of the rest is just infantilization

https://theconversation.com/the-infantilization-of-western-culture-99556

Living with purpose and helping others provides meaning.

Do you have an Internet Archive account

Everyone should have a "last will and testament." In the US there are books that can walk you through making one, dunno about other countries.

Aside from that, when I die it's someone else's problem lel.

Got a dog.

I've found setting an unrealistic goal (retirement at 45) but realistic goals that lead up to the unrealistic one so that accomplishments are made. Humans get a dopamine hit when we "check a box" or complete a task. Lean into that a bit with things you do. Small things help towards the efforts of larger things.

Other than that, escapism through keeping myself busy too.

Un-ironically this.

Also if if makes you happy, it's not just a distraction.

P.S. This also applies

I try stoicism in between bouts of panicking and crying.

I hate my life.

I asked myself what was important in life over a decade ago, what is both fulfilling and pleasant (the former without the latter is not viable, the latter without the former is pure, empty hedonism, which wasn't an answer for me but it might be for the more beast-like among us) and my answer has been pretty much the same ever since: each other. Making meaningful connections with other people, the deepest and most unique ones being the ones made with your partner and children.

So, if you don't really believe in anything besides the "certainty" there's nothing after death and God has no plans for us after our short time here (or doesn't exist at all), I think you should focus on the practical aspect of life and just enjoy your lovely interpersonal relationships. If you want to go through the philosophically pointless effort of trying to give your life a deeper sense/meaning without an objective determinant that precedes the universe and existence itself and created it all for real but unclear/unknowable reasons, you're more than welcome to try but you'll end up in absurdism or hedonistic nihilism, neither providing a sufficient alternative (Nietzsche recognised this in his society about a century and a half ago and things have only gone worse since then...).

Finally, remember Solomon (and "Solomonic" means "very wise" for a reason) and his "Ecclesiastes". Everything being meaningless has been known for a looooong time, with a prophet dedicating a whole book to it. And it ends simply in "fear God and keep his commandments". God gives our existence context and meaning, being a good slave of God gives us peace and happiness (keeping good relationships with your peers and being generous and helpful is a big chunk of being a good slave of God, ofc). And, without accepting the possibility of God, you can't even hypothetically leave the realm of the subjective. This might sound bizarre if you think faith is just something you can put on and take off like a t-shirt, or compartmentalize while you think and behave however you want when it feels convenient, but if you understand it as simply the background to one's ideology, the framework everything rests on (Godlessness being the other alternative), you can better comprehend how and why its effects can be so large.

@wabafee@lemmy.world

I agree with most of what you said, especially "everything we do is just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end". My only disagree, or partial agree, comes when you listed "religion" as a distraction. You'll understand why.

I'm someone who've been facing existential crisis since my childhood, I'm now 30. Oftentimes it becomes suicidality, other times it gets contained by its own numbness. These moments of emotional numbness is when I try to pursue knowledge, partly as a coping mechanism, partly for really trying to understand why.

Basically, this understanding ended up involving spirituality: after few religions and atheism, I eventually landed on esotericism, first by having participated on a Luciferian school, until I got a sudden gnosis to this hauntingly powerful feminine energy I never felt before, culminating in my departure from said Luciferian school to this now, quite solitary, idiosyncratic belief system that borrows specifically selected concepts and names from several different religions (trying my best NOT to culturally appropriate), such as Gnosticism (Dark Sophia), Thelema (Nuit, Babalon), Quimbanda (Dama Da Noite, Rosa Caveira), even the "long-gone" Egyptian (Sekhmet, Neith, Isis) and Sumerian (Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Lilitu) beliefs, among others, together with Luciferianism, with a focus on the chthonic feminine.

This detail is particularly relevant when it comes to the concept of Death: as in The Death, who I understood as ("who", therefore an omnipotence, and as) a powerful, feminine force (therefore a literal, all-encompassing Goddess), whose different names are manifestations from the same cosmic principle (akin to how Sephirots/Qlipphots are divine husks in Kabbalah) who I've taken to know and refer to as Dark Mother Goddess or, way more often, Lilith, the name that first resonated by gnosis when I saw Her.

And here's why I disagreed with your specific enlisting of "religion" as distracting: what I follow can also be called "religion"... neither a religion I founded (there's no temple, Gran Master or book to be followed), nor some existent and recognized religion, but still a religious endeavor nonetheless, involving rituals, candles, incenses, sigils, chants, etc.

So this is my approach. To literally worship and love (and fear) Death Herself. And, to be sincere, makes me feel relatively good when I do: once one accepts their own condition as a carbon-based lifeform with certain, inexorable mortality (Being-towards-Death) or, at least, tries to pursue this acceptance on a daily basis, they get to understand this Demiurgic existence is far from being a permanent place, and Death is far from good and evil; rather, She's True Home, the Home I've fearing and also longing for since this Demiurgic theater collapsed and I got to peek what's beyond the red curtains to the backstage: a dark, formless and void, Primordial Abyss, really terrifying, but beautiful Home, beneath Her Wings.