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Eeew existential thread.
Frosty the Snow Plow
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm not trying to sound pretentious or anything, but:
How the fuck do you deal with the knowledge/feeling that life and existence are pointless?
How the fuck do you deal with the knowledge/feeling that life and existence are pointless?
Frosty the Snow Plow on
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Even when you know (or you think you know) that life and existence is pointless, there is no point in spending countless hours in deep thinking about this. You are not a deity, you are mortal, and mortals enjoy mundane things like love, food, music, sex, or just singing a song.
I think its awesome how the avatar of this poster is the unabomber.
In all seriousness though... just get over it. There's always something about the world you haven't discovered yet that is really freaking awesome. Stay patient and find something fun.
life itself isn't pointless.
as far as individual lives, realization of that is the best.
once you realize there is no point to life you have no set end goals that you have to meet and can decide everything on your own. works a lot better that way
I concur.
Your life in the short run is not pointless. Life in the long run is pointless because there is nothing you can do or build that will survive for infinity but I don't think that will ever stop us from trying.
There is no natural, quantifiable measure of value.
You are the one that decides all that.
You are the only one that can make your life pointless. You are the only one that can make your life worth anything.
So quit moping around, unless that's your idea of cool.
Get a hobby.
Enjoy life. Go find a great person to spend your time with. Go find a hobby you really enjoy. Go sit on the side of a mountain and take a breath of awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Confession-Leo-Tolstoy/dp/0393314758/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228372050&sr=1-2
I think you'll find that if you find some hobbies, as other people have suggested, or go for long walks, admire views, engage in constructive activities, and so on, the question of whether there's a point to life will seem a lot less relevant.
Its not, you just have to define your own point(s). Which can be tricky, since other people spend a lot of time trying to get us to internalise points throughout our childhood and adolescence, often without giving us a chance to find our own. Realising this can come as a shock :P
However, the odds of creatures like ourselves existing is pretty damn slim. It's taken over 13.5 billion years for "you" to get the chance to sit down and post in the Help/Advice Forum.
Your life in and of itself is something in a miracle, so why not enjoy it? If you're seeking out the meaning of life, feel free to read philosophy and science. The meaning of life is a journey that you undertake, not a answer that you find.
One of my favorite poems is one by C.P. Cavafy.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
There's also quote from Hillel the Elder, a rabbi that lived quite a few centuries ago, that I really like. I find it to be a universally solid guideline for living one's life.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?
It's all about the journey, man.
Life and existence are pointless only if you want them to be.
but thats something you will have to resolve in order to answer "Whats the meaning of life?". Find something, and work towards it..
What is the point of MY life? To let the "lesser beings" live there lifes happily. Why own a puppy? To keep it safe, and live with it, and love it.. I apply that reasoning to my whole life. I work so that I can help my sister through college, and so that I can afford to pay for my brother's medical insurance so he can keep fighting cancer.
You need to make a decision that says "I am going to do *THIS*" and then work towards it. This, in my experience, is where most people divide. Some people never find the "this" and kind of wander through life.. other people find the "this" at a young age. Its not the defining quality for greatness.. you can have no goals and be an amazing person. Or you can have a goal, and be a complete failure..
Just find something that makes you happy in life, and live with it. You get use to the idea of the world being pointless.. I know that in 400 years no one will ever care that I wrote this post, or that I rode my bike every day to work, or that my brother lived/died from cancer. I just also know that the next 70 years are really gonna suck if I don't have something to do.
Best of luck man..
P.S. Be happy, your part of a minority that ever bothers to question "What the hell is the point.."
will you:
go out in a hail of bullets?
bake cakes for the homeless?
Adopt a child from a 3rd world country so they have a chance to live in excess like we do?
Keep your daughter chained up in the basement for 15 years?
Drink the pain away?
or my personal life goal:
have at least one illegitimate love child on every continent.
If there is absolutely anything you enjoy, persue it. Heck, persue things you'd never think to try, things you're scared to try. Go places, meet people, live.
Believe me, I know life can be depressing... usually if you're stuck in one place for too long, doing the same damned thing with no end. Monotony kills the soul. At least, it does mine.
You haven't stumbled onto some terrible secret that people try to conceal from children, you've just hit a rough patch in life.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
No, I've been having those thoughts since I was little. It helps if you don't let yourself think of those things; deliberately interrupt yourself with a book or a game, something that needs your full attention.
People who try to find the answer to this question always come up with the same solution -- its not finding a meaning to life that matters, its making a meaning to your life.
With that said, im going to go eat a bowl of bullshit, now. BAI!
Well, yeah, but if it gets to the point where you're dwelling or making yourself unhappy because you're going to die eventually, you need to cut it out.
Indeed, but I feel it is better to just not be unhappy about it. Life would have no focus without an end, so it's a good thing.
I (personally) don't see what there is to fear in nothing anyway.
Fear's not the issue; it just makes me sad. You don't see why someone (read: me) would be sad at having to stop experiencing things, not getting to know what happens next, or losing the ability to be with the people they love?
The fact that you'll eventually die is not something to be sad or fearful about. It's something to embrace. It's because we die that makes everything we do in our lives important and special (for ourselves). Because you are choosing to do the things you do knowing that you have limited time to spend.
Maybe you're sad cause you think every day you have less life to live. That's like being sad while eating cake cause with every bite there's less cake. That is wasted cake. It makes no sense being sad while eating cake, that should be the happiest time! And afterwards you can be content knowing you just enjoyed good cake.
If there was infinite cake and you could eat forever, would that be better? Sounds better at first, and maybe tastes great for a while, but after a while the cake will lose its flavor since it's the same cake with every bite.. same cake you've been eating forever.. why even care about the mouthful you're chewing now, there's another bite coming...
Immortality sucks.
Except that there is no afterwards. Besides, you're assuming life would stop being interesting if it kept going, and I don't think it would. I think life is so interesting that it doesn't need a time limit to make it exciting.
Anyway, I already said I prefer not to waste time thinking about it.
I mean I'm not gonna rush it or anything, but if it's inevitable then why get worked up over it.
You say here that you prefer not to think about it, and that's cool. But earlier you said that if you start thinking about it you have to go distract yourself with a book or something to take your mind off it. Sounds like avoidance and this is something you have to come to terms with if it's making you unhappy.
To the OP, it's good to question this once in a while to see where your priorities lie and how they've changed over time, but don't get worked up on it if you're not comfortable with it. We all change with time. You used to not worry about this and now you do. In time you'll have an answer for it that you accept.
Just remember that some people don't even get the chance to get old, so you're already doing better by half.
As far as life, to a certain extent it is pointless, no? After all the universe will eventually diffuse to a lot of inert gas or implode or something else, and whatever you have done, no matter how far reaching the effects of it, will be moot.
But, here you are.
So you might as well enjoy it and make the best of it.
it's better than the alternative.
I don't see why it wouldn't make me unhappy. I'm not really curious to see what happens after death, any more than I'm curious to see what would happen if I dropped an elephant off a roof. I'm not precisely, 100% sure of each, but I can judge from previous evidence what's probably going to happen. Reincarnation, pool of consciousness, simulations, these are all nice things to think about, but honesty? I think your brain just stops working and the whole "you" stops, and that's it. I mean, those things are within the realm of possibility, just like my dropped elephant might grow wings and fly off, but I know life has some more interesting possibilities.
Besides, people get worked up over inevitable things all the time. It's sad to think about people you love getting old and dying, too, but nobody gets on people's cases when they're sad about that.
I don't understand what previous evidence this is, and how you know of it so you can judge what happens when we die. You don't know anymore than I know about what happens after death.
We can observe what happens when other creatures die. We've never seen any sort of evidence of some sort of supernatural afterlife. Maybe there is one and we're incapable of seeing evidence for it, of course, but that's a question along the lines of "maybe none of you exist and I'm just constructing an elaborate fantasy," or "maybe we're all in a computer simulation!"
If you believe in a soul as something separate from your physical existence, maybe the idea of an afterlife seems more realistic. I've never seen or heard anything that makes me think that there's something separate from the body, especially with as much as we know about the how the brain works.
Also, freshman year of College, I take it?
stop taking those philosophy courses
I don't believe it is, and it's not worth giving thought to. You're here so make the best of it.
Well yes, I do believe that our soul lives on after our deaths. I also believe there's a plane of existence that these souls live in around us (or up in heaven, whichever) that we can't quite see. Really, I think saying just because we cannot see it or haven't found it YET doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I have seen evidence by my own eyes to determine my belief as well.
Honest curiosity: what evidence have you seen that determines your belief?
You aren't going to find evidence either way. It comes down to one side having faith in it, and the other citing a lack of evidence supporting the faith side.