Life into Perspective: A thought
Life is a futile, meaningless game where all action is about a neurochemical reward in one’s brain. Whether one is materialistic or spiritual is irrelevant. It’s all the same: neurons firing gratification patterns in one’s skull.
By merely existing the individual dictates terms of suffering and death upon onself and other sentient beings. Being vegan or ethical is irrelevant. Existence creates carnage around the individual. All political affairs aim to entangle the individual in a game where everyone is a looser. The individual will suffer and die no matter who one is or what one does in this life.
There won't be any lost loved ones or god(s) waiting on the other side of death either. All religion and promises of an afterlife is just the neurotic fantasy of petty doomed beings desperately trying to justify their meaningless existence.
The universe and all life in it has no intrinsic meaning. The only guarantee a sentient being has is that one’s brief existence will be replaced by the eternal void of no awareness after all bodily functions cease. Existence is Change’s bitch and there is nothing one can do about it.
The infant feels itself omnipotent, a God. It cries, and food and warmth appear from the void, self-created. Humanity is defined by this very transhumanist realisation whether it creates Gods, superheroes, medicine or technologies.
The child eventually learns the truth. It is a bag of flesh, bound by determinism, and subject to decay and death. This causes anxiety and dread.
To aid the child in escaping anxiety and dread, society teaches it the vital lies of Character and Culture. Character offers the means to function in society with self-esteem and confidence, through denial of one's fundamental human condition. Culture provides symbolic forms of meaning and purpose, a sense of heroism to serve as a bulwark against death, ranging from the high heroism of a Churchill, to the low heroism of a farmer.
With the vital lies of Character and Culture at hand, the individual often loses himself in the immediacy of life. He works, eats, procreates, and lives according to the symbolic ideals and meaning handed to him by society, with entertainment serving as an escape.
Some people are more sensitive to the dellusion of cultural life that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. These individuals harbor a need to break free from culturally constructed meaning as the basis for the meaning of life.
Historically, groups imprint potent ideologies that aim to sustain a group against another in this strive in change. Religious faith, which offered the sole means for absolute transcendence and political ideology as a minor upgrade from the law of the jungle. The modern, secular society's loss of faith in the soul, God and political leaders has broken down the primary cure for existential dread.
With selfishness and the breaking of culturally constructed meaning comes a recognition of the truth of one's condition. It is no strange that the most dreaded ideas of humanity revolve around anarchy, atheism and selfishness. Morality is afterall defined plurally.
With a recognition of the truth, the anxiety and dread of the child returns. The individual struggles to ease anxiety and dread by searching for legitimate sources of meaning and purpose to replace the lies of Character and Culture.
In the modern age many will typically turn to psychology and medication to cure their natural, neurotic despair. The promise of psychology and pharmacology, like all of modern science, was that it would usher in the era of happiness, by showing us how things worked, how one thing caused another. But now we come up against the fallacy of psychological self-scrutiny. The scientific victory of replacing religious faith with psychological introspection, causes more problems than it solves. We are once again caught in the cunning game of chaos.
Sin and Neurosis are two ways of talking about the same thing - the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyperindividualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself, his refusal to recognize his cosmic dependence.
Thus the plight of modern man: a sinner with no word for it, who seeks a rational explanation for his isolation in psychology, and thus only aggravates the problem of his separateness and hyperconsciousness.
Dread proceeds to categorically destroy all human (finite) ends and purposes, until all that can remain is the infinite. The school of anxiety eventually arrives at faith. A faith that despite one's true insignificance, weakness, death, one's existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force. Life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value.
-Kierkegaard
This was brilliant. I have had similar thoughts as you because I too, had absorbed the idea from psychological mainstream ideas that something was wrong with me individually. There still may be something wrong with me, however, I successfully deprogrammed some bad elements within my mind and have regained some key elements of health that most adults have lost from childhood. I devised my own system which was not associated with psychology or psychiatric drugs. My method was this:
I love thinking about all your points and as an atheist, and I would say voluntaryist, I agree with your assessments.
The existential despair aspect of life is wholly ignored in most people's consciousness. Most are too busy occupying themselves with the latest distraction (Pokemon Go) to even consider their own existential dread. In fact, I've been thinking heavily about the possibility that most humans are more like housecats. Most are completely unconscious about their existence and death.
For me, my mind deprogramming system began when I had suffered considerably by certain circumstances that were out of my control.
That was when I woke up. But what I woke up to was the prospect of survival: either I was going to find a way to provide for me and my child or I wasn't. Becoming dependent upon others for my survival for a short time allowed me to do 2 things: destroy my ego (partially) and become grateful.
Without going through a rock-bottom type of experience, I feel that most humans will continue to languish in a sort of lulled, complacency that leads only to more unconsciousness. There must, I feel, be a significant amount of suffering in order to transform a consciousness in any meaningful way.
But the traps when one is suffering are numerous. I remained an atheist throughout my trials, because at a young age, I performed a series of tests to disprove the existence of "God." I never believed in such a ridiculous notion and took it upon myself to think about the unknown things of my direct experience.
About the dread. I have suffered from anxiety and dread more than most I think. But as of recently, my dread has ended. Why? Mainly because instead of focusing on myself as much, I focus on others. The lines between the self and other have become blurry, and I experience the greatest joy when I view life in this manner. Nature too, is not separate. Separation is what causes anxiety. The fear of making it on one's own is a bad model for life. But dependence too, when taken to extremes is a bad model. What is necessary for massive change in society to occur is for people to experience true responsibility and also to embody the idea of not being separated. The Native Americans didn't have this separation and that is why they existed as a healthy group of humans, respecting the earth and the things it provided to them at no cost. Look at a squirrel who does work for survival and exists with contentment. We can aspire to be more like wild animals instead of pathologizing our own isolated conditions as fucked up housecats.
Thank you pouring youself here @stellabelle. I really appreciated it. At first I was hesitant sharing these thoughts. After a while though I decided that If I was to offer genuine content upon which others could reflect, then I should take the risk (even if I risked getting flagged).
I am glad you sorted out your life. I guess everyone takes these steps a bit differently. Myself I rather choose to live in isolation. I purposely cut myself from most of my social environment and I can say I feel more serenity. More importantly I can think much clearer. Like you said there is too much noise whether that is called Pokemon Go, fashion, trends or any other shenanigan taking place around me. I choose to focus on few things.
Where I live we don't have squirells but we do have lots of cats everywhere - and oh boy do I envy them.
Thank you again for taking so much time in sharing this.
It's perfectly reasonable for any rational individual to feel this overwhelming sense of nihilism. It's bad enough that life itself is meaningless, and this society humankind has built to surround itself doesn't help either. Capitalism, consumerism, hierarchies everywhere, money as the supreme value, people trying to take advantage of each other all around...
But as long as you can set all that aside for a few moments every now and then, and find the beauty in nature, find the peace in meditation, find the hope in the slight chance that people will all realize this one day and their attitude may change, it's a life worth living.
Indeed. Beauty can be founf anywhere and the way the world is doesn't make it necessarily "bad" or "ugly". I think most people will see my post as negative because of the cultural connotations given to certain ideas.
I think it's more than "just neurons firing". I mean, what are neurons? OK, they're cells, made of biomolecules, which are made of atoms. But what are atoms? What is any matter? There's a theory that matter only exists because consciousness exists to perceive it. So maybe consciousness is the fundamental thing in the universe. If you assume that to be the case, your perspective can change quite a lot.
Well I partially I agree with your analysis. I prefer to take the matter more objectively. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. So far, the evidence we have is that we are a result of various supernovas and particles scattered across the universe. Our "consiousness" is merely a mechanism for understand vaguely what goes on around us. its not something special. We perceive it as special because we like to think ourselves as special.
I agree with you. I often am sort of revolted by those who think of themselves in grandiose ways. I see that humans are the only problematic wealth hoarders of the animal kingdom. That is in itself disgusting and worth taking a closer look at. I think humans do more violence both to the earth and each other than any previous life form. Although I think it can be reversed, I am not optimistic that there will be enough time. Only the future will tell.
Technology can reverse this. There is massive reduction in violence and i am hopefull that the trend will continue.
Nice @kyriacos
Shot you an Upvote :)
thank you. you can also follow me in my channel
Keep up the great work @kyriacos
Upvoted
Hi! This post has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 10.5 and reading ease of 51%. This puts the writing level on par with Michael Crichton and Mitt Romney.