The existential horror of life and reality

[...]

[...]

I'm a depressive but you bitches need to lighten the fuck up.

We are unfortunately those folks who think too much….. my mom used to quote someone who said the unexamined life is not worth living …. But it would be easier.

For me, I just accept the random nature of this purposeless life… I read a lot of Sartre , Camus and other philosophers … it helps to know I’m definitely not alone in my thoughts .

L’enfers c’est les autres. Hell is other people . I wish I could drink and use to dull the pain but can’t anymore.

I've always thought that someone has to be sociopathic to bring a human into this world. I mean in this day and age contraception abounds. Why force life onto someone who never asked for it? Seems cruel and thoughtless. And before one of you bitches comments, no, I am not much fun at parties.

Is it harder to find goals at a certain age, OP?

Once there are no goals it's so very easy to slip into nihilism and fatalism.

... and then I think about life must be like in some war-torn hellhole, or contemplate how life must be for those unlucky enough to live all their lives in poverty-stricken countries riddled with disease and famine, or I think about those people struggling with disability or chronic, long-term illness, uncertain of what horrors that could be just around the corner.

Then I realize how lucky I am to at least have access to the "pointless" options you take for granted and dismiss so easily.

When I graduated high school ('81) I got a congratulations greeting card that said blah blah you've graduated good for you now enjoy your future:

Get a Job

Get married

and

Die.

Pretty funny when I was 18 and remarkably true.

And we have spent 1000s of years trying to make it all be relevant. When I was around 14 I was a huge drama queen. My dad got so frustrated with me that he dragged me down to the beach (we lived in LA) and told me to look up at the stars. He said there are more stars and planets in the universe than all the grains of sand on every beach in the world. And all my problems are so unimportant and our lives are not important. We are but a tiny species in a vast universe. My dad was a scientist. I often wonder about the futility of life, but that little lesson gave me a lot of perspective.

OP - read Woody Allen’s early anthology collections - Getting Even & Without Feathers - he has the same obsessions and hang up as you do, but can make them amusing.

For breeders, what drives the men is sex, and what drives the women is babies.

If you're LGBTQ you have to kind of invent your own life.

r11 I agree. And for us there only seems to be devotion to a career.

Jesus, I feel sort of fortunate, sad loveless fuck that I am, that a beautiful sunrise, or a walk down a country lane, a beautiful symphony, a silly movie, a wonderful meal can make me actually feel good about this plodding existence the rest of you seem to be talking about.

R9, did your father ask you to observe that the beach is beautiful and the stars are too...and maybe that's more than enough?

mon dieu, OP, get a grip 🤮🤮🤮

Yeah. I get it. My perspective and worldview has changed so much in the last six years. This world has become more brutal than i could ever have imagined. Just disgusted with the bullshit. I've woken up to the student loan "farce" scam aka the government's not a business, so it's not interest, it's a tax. The people are fed up. I've become a nihilist over the last few years. I just don't give a single fuck. It's gotten me laid more recently though. I'm enjoying the good times I can create for myself.

My views have changed after 2020. On the surface level I knew anything could happen, but maybe didn't really think about it. After seeing where we are ending where we are today and the difference between 2019 and the 20's makes me truly believe it. While I have a more pessimistic and nihilistic view of life, I also want to seize life more - my priorities have changed. I live totally for me. Things really can change overnight, rights to travel or leave the house can be taken away in the blink of an eye. I don't feel very hopeful about the future, which is why I want to enjoy life in the present as best I can.

The existential angst is ramped up to peak dizziness in multiple threads this morning. Is it the chance alignment of a billion billion stars that we can't sad? Or just one sad fuck gone sadder than usual?

Don't care.

The purpose of my life is to carve out the most time against the few things that must be done: to find more time for friends and loved ones and myself and for pursuits and pleasures of interest, for seeking pleasure more than updating an Excel chart of the month's expenditures, or fretting over missed opportunities or who will have to dispose of my things when I die, or where the sea level will be in 1000 years, or why "human beings are so awful.".

Fuck that. Go find some beauty. Do something new. Go someplace special. Or get fucked so long and hard and well that you make sounds like a village idiot. Have a fucking good wank. Jesus, you people...

Great thread.

Guess what OP ,we have it easy considering what lives people have lived in the past. If you were poor good luck getting anyone to feed you. Its about working, all life has to work and fight their way through it. Its all about your core self when you meet difficulties. Life isnt easy and yet it is. You should have been clued in about this when you were young. Oh to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

OP Fuck all that shit. I had a weird childhood, we were very rich, then kinda middle class, when I was about 12. I have some extremely wealthy family members, uncle worth over 50 million or more. My brother made millions in the fist dotcom wave. They are all fucking miserable. Brother is paying 200k a year in child support. Quit his job, and at 60, lives in a student ghetto. On and on, the stories are boring.

I hit 23, graduated college, and was accepted to law school. The summer before school, I was a semi-professional cyclist. Got a big result, got on a decent team and spent 10 years doing that. Worked at a vitamin store, never made a real living at it.

Never went back to law school. Lived in Belgium for three years, then Toulouse. Sold/imported/exported mid century furniture, from USA to Belgium, Belgium to USA, and Sau Paulo/Brasilia to USA. I Taught literature at embassy schools, met my partner in Brazil. I don't own a cell phone, or a car. I hate all that shit. I am relatively poor. My family feels sorry for me. I feel sorry for them.

Good health insurance. No addictions. Nice home. Nice clothes. Good food. Books. Cool furniture. Pets. I help my friends all I can.

Nobody is making anyone conform to these antiquated social norms. 2.3 kids. Huge McMansion. Hyper-competetiveness. Identity is your job/car/social media/vacation/sneakers and other shit people use to impress people they don't even know.

It can be a struggle, but the best thing that ever happened to me was not pursuing a career in law or real estate or academia.

I had a professor in college, it was a class on existentialist literature - Camus, Sartre. One day the professor didn't show up. He had killed himself in the parking lot. He had three daughters, and was a nice guy, and great teacher.

Those kind of experiences made me realize that being happy and content is a very hard thing to find in modern society. It became my goal in life.

I'm so grateful. I'm educated but I'm nobody special. I see people suffering. Drink and drugs. Debt.

Some people don't have a chance, and are brainwashed. American Dreamers.

OP. but you are correct. I digested a great deal of Kafka, Orwell, Jung, Sartre, and many more. We are all gonna die as victims of the wheel of Fortuna, who constantly abandons us. Camus died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket, a friend offered to drive - he should have taken the train. I've been with my partner for 16 years. Sometimes it feels like we are strangers. The boredom. The degeneracy and violence. Morbid obesity freaks me out. Guns freak me out. All this came on me hard at 13, studying the Holocaust obsessively. I rode a bike for 10 years. I made 15k a year. If like is gonna be absurd, so am I.

One friend said life was stupid because anyone can just walk up to you and shoot you in the face. We have no control. I ignore all that noise.

Aren't you original, OP.

[quote] I also want to seize life more

I think everyone should go out and eat life. Just be wary of beach friends.

Life is a banquet yada yada.

I come from a family full of glass-half-empty Italian Americans who are only “happy” when they are complaining. Complaining endlessly about shit they either have no control over or that is so incredibly petty and insignificant it’s almost funny. Except it’s not.

As a kid I decided I did NOT want to be like that. To a very large extent, life is about how you look at it and happiness is a choice. As are the things you actually decide to value and do with yourself - as R20 has explained very well.

Life is often difficult and terrible things happen to each of us eventually, but you still have the ability to frame and react to it on your own terms more often than not.

First world problems, OP.

In many countries, it is be born, starve, die. Or, be born, be tortured, enslaved, die. Or, be born, be abused, starve, die.

So, STFU

Have you tried reading Eat, Pray, Love OP?

Per R10's point, OP, watch the link. Stop reading the nihilists and the existentialists. Pick up a copy of The Bhagavad Gita and also Everyday Zen. Pull your head out of your reeking ass.

Can you imagine lamenting the richness of life that is offered in this example?

Me neither.

R13 no he was trying to teach me perspective. He already knew I was a nature lover and loved the beach and universe. But I must have been a pain in the ass because he also told me to my surprise he liked the rolling stones. He said he loved the song 19th nervous breakdown because it reminded him of me.

I see all of that as shit I have to do in the background while I figure out and pursue whatever my life's passion and purpose is- never have time but that's how I think about it

Isn't it kind of arrogant to expect so much? There is beauty and happiness in little moments. I think that feeling entitled to more than that will just leave you unhappy and disappointed. Maybe don't expect so much. Kind of what the song "Favorite things" is about- you know, brown paper packages tied up with strings . . .

Jesus, don't be such a baby.

So just face the music and dance.

Peterpanism. Some of you simply refuse to grow up. The universe owes you nothing. You're here for the ride so make the best of it. You'll take nothing with you, not even your worries.

R27 WEHT that hack Elizabeth Gilbert? Is she still pretending to be gay?

You can't possibly claim to be a deep thinker and only think about yourself and your existence.

Try art and literature. There are many worlds to explore besides your own.

Maybe op is from one of those horrible countries where everyone but the mafia-state leaders are victims and slaves.

I had a friend who believed you could choose how you feel. She had no awareness whatsoever of how much time she spent lying to herself and everybody else while she was confusing how she DID feel with how she was pretending to feel, thinking she was making a choice when what she was doing was putting up a pretense.

What I believe, after many conversation with her, is: you can only feel how you DO feel but what you can do after that is choose what you’re going to do about it. I’ve become only marginally less negative after years of trying to shift my focus toward the positive but I still think it’s worth it.

The worst of them all: why do people have to work 9 to 5 when we have electricity to do whatever we want anytime anyway? Who the fuck needs sunlight to work, except farmers and gardeners?

If it's any comfort, OP- you'll be dead for a long, long time.

The purpose of life is to be happy. To be born is to jump off a cliff and to die is to hit the ground. Life is a fire feed the fire.

Once I eliminated work, life became worthwhile again. I always tried to figure out how to be happy AND work. Never did after 30+ years. Gave up. Now patching together an existence and not worrying about having millions for retirement. Life is pointless - but absorbing yourself in beauty can make it wonderful. Food, shelter and ideally some friends are all you need.