It all comes down to luck. For example: I was born in a first world country as a white male. I have a home with a comfortable bed and air conditioning. I have videogames, movies, books, and the internet to distract myself with. I have parents who care about me and friends to spend time with. None of this is guaranteed.

The fact the so much of the world is suffering much greater than I is of no comfort to me. I am constantly aware that all the things that bring me comfort are not inherently good things, but rather that they are preventing or protecting me from further suffering. My home protects me from the weather and from potentially dangerous non-human animals. Games and movies prevent boredom. Friends and family prevent loneliness.

And most of these things take effort to obtain and to maintain. Suffering is easy, just sit and do nothing. You will soon feel the blistering heat or the sharp cold, intense hunger, loneliness, and unbearable pain as hungry animals and insects rip apart your flesh. I am extremely lucky that my suffering in these areas is relatively small.

Though I might have a life where, for now, my most urgent needs are easy to meet, there are ways in which I suffer more intensely. The boredom and monotony of daily life, the dread of going to work, the frustration of being around and interacting with other people, the lack of meaning, the sadness of loss, the fear of death, the melancholy of looking at the world.

People often scoff at someone complaining about something like a flat tire or a store being out of stock of our favorite snacks because they are first world problems. But is it not tragic that even when our urgent needs are met, the universe still finds ways to remind us of its indifference? In the abstract a flat tire seems like nothing compared to a starving child. But when we look at the felt experience, both cause suffering. One is certainly leagues more intense than the other. But is that not the problem? That no matter how "good" we have it, we still experience pain?

And such lives are extremely fragile. It can all fall apart very easily and very quickly.

The country I live in is crumbling and I and everyone around me can already feel the effects. And it will only get worse over the coming years through climate change and growing political tensions around the world.

Beyond all that, good things in life also cause suffering in others. Eating meat brings joy to most people, yet it causes suffering, exploitation, and death of non-human animals. Having a child creates meaning, yet now someone has been ripped out of the peaceful void to suffer in order to make someone happy. Landing a job prevents someone else from getting that job. Purchasing things we like creates demand and can cause inflation. Staying home to watch a movie can disappoint our friends. Now obviously we shouldn't feel guilty about such things (aside from eating meat or having a child) but the point remains that no matter how good something is, suffering comes along with it, whether directly or indirectly.

People say to appreciate what you have because you could always have it worse. I always see this sentiment as a lack of empathy or a massive cope.

"I've read, heard, and invented a thousand solutions to my state of misery. They all failed and then I realized the misery is just fine." -Martin Butler

If you had to explain pessimism to someone without scaring them off and without using the word 'pessimism', how would you do it?

years and years as an autistic outsider and a failed artist have lead me to view the world as an inescapable trap, a convoluted fantasy, constructed by the accretion of thousands of years of bizarre, compulsive behaviour. i hate cell phones; i hate AI; i hate cars; i hate industry; i hate concrete; i hate rent; i hate war; i hate disease; i hate jobs; i hate money; i hate that everywhere i look, wherever i go, there are fucking humans, and none of us know one another.

all we do is consume. there are too many of us by about a factor of a thousand, and the future - the completely artificial, fabricated human future, that appears nowhere else in nature, is bearing down on us, always, because some cunt owns everything. in fact, no, because we AGREE he owns everything! well enough. farming was the beginning of all this exorbitant living beyond our means. agriculture was the worst fucking mistake this species ever made.

i don’t want artistic success anymore. i don’t want to prosper by the standards of this indescribably unfair system of endless torture and punishment. i don’t want to elevate myself above the 210,000 homeless people in my city alone. i watch nature documentaries and i am jealous. i see creatures living the way they were designed for: no jobs; no financial obligation…just food, sleep, sex, rest - purpose. i don’t care how hard it is. it’s not hard like this is. it’s not fucking fantastical, illusory, meaningless, make believe, made-up hard.

none of this is real. i’m sick of all of it.

Does anyone here feel, that we are living a life, neither we asked for, and neither we are interested in living.

The concept of freedom exists only for subjects capable of conceptualising it. It does not exist for non-human animals, microbes, and so on and so forth.

For humanity, ego is what conceives freedom, but also makes absolute freedom universally, implacably unattainable.

Before you are born, freedom doesn't exist for you, not even as a concept. But as soon as you're old enough for introduction to the ego, your ego invents freedom, determines what it looks like, and says, 'Go get it'.

But your ego does something underneath that, too: it moves freedom's goalposts when you aren't looking.

And this is why humans die wanting – wanting more time, more money, more chances, more whatever.

And death is not freedom.

In death, all things are not and nothing is deficient; there is no freedom to have or lack of it to be felt.

What freedom means to me is to live with consciousness but without ego.

I could say, 'None of my problems are mine; nothing affects me; I want nothing and experience no lack of anything; and I am neither here nor there about whether this existence is a good thing'.

Suffice it to say, my definition and wanting of freedom are exactly why I can't ever have it.

I also stop myself short of being certain that egoless consciousness exists. In fact, I'm more certain that consciousness and ego are inseparable, maybe even one and the same. That consciousness can exist without ego is more wishful thinking on my part.

Moreover, without my ego, I would not be able to experience the preferability of not having it. But that would be fine by me. But then again, who's 'me'? The ego-founded person writing this post?

You can see how self-replicating this problem is.

Because we cannot escape our egos, we are prisoners.

Every single human being is a prisoner.

Which means that our prison is not so much a courtyard and four walls as it is our entire waking worlds.

The best we can do is paint as precise a picture of what freedom looks like to each of us, but even then, those pictures would fall short of being substantive.

Our ability to describe and attempt to manifest freedom only goes as far as our restrictive, ego-founded subjectivity lets us. In other words, even the wildest, most attractive conceptions of freedom are necessarily and knowably, yet non-experientially, insufficient.

Not sure how common this kind of story is, but I'm curious. I was raised to believe in the God of Abraham. Then I studied the Bible and Quran, and especially the internal inconsistencies in those scriptures combined with the total lack of any acceptable explanation for them from friends, family, and experts caused me to doubt and finally to basically lose my faith.

However, for the longest time, I was resistant to actually taking that step in my mind. For years, even decades, I thought to myself that I'd rather believe in a lie than face a meaningless universe. Yet those religious inconsistencies weren't going away, and when I sought out secular alternatives to the meaning given by religion (or attempted to be given at least) I felt I was just having optimism constantly shoved down my throat ("you can make your own meaning, it's liberating!" etc. etc.) Completely brushing aside all the suffering in the world, it seemed to me like these people were in some sense just as mistaken as the religious believers they sometimes denigrated.

Having just recently discovered pessimism as a cohesive philosophy, finally, I understand how I was lied to both by religious and by many secular "authorities." I won't even accuse them of maliciously lying to me -- it seems more like they were and are lying to themselves, keeping up a facade. I'd never mock anyone for taking refuge in religion or whatever secular philosophy makes them feel better about the painful reality of being alive, but I can't find any refuge in them anymore if I ever really could. I also can't fear a Hell that I can no longer believe in, so at least that's a plus, but I still find the prospect of a meaningless universe extremely depressing.

I guess I'm wondering whether anyone here can relate to the path I've taken. I'm partly pissed off that I wasted so much of my life grappling with these issues when it seems like pessimism was "hidden" from me as an option, though it's obviously understandable why it's not a popular one. Reading Zapffe and Ligotti felt like finally being told "no, you're not alone in feeling this way," which is maybe the only other comfort I can take anymore.

P.S.: if it sounds strange that I recognized lies for so long but still tried to believe in them despite knowing better, it's strange to me too. Having heard the accounts of others who fell out of faith, I think it might just be that a religious upbringing does some weird things to your thought processes. No shock there, I guess.

"Life is sacred", that has been earnestly implied by many philosophers and sages.

If life is living, living is life...

Is it the mind, that forms/grasps/scrutinizes the source of patterns,

which forms as "meanings", adding conformity to it,

and thus, when there is another pattern, that acts as an adversary to any of these manufactured patterns/meanings, that go against,

is what triggers the anguish?

Is it the meaning(s), that is antagonistic to the meaning(s), certainly the cause of suffering?

Based on this rationale, the mind is like an extension that is added to a life form, that is capable of inducing perpetuating conflict to itself and others.

Or can this vulnerable mind, that is bereft of comprehending the actuality of reality, of what is, and what is not, contemplate on what or how the life is sacred?

Link to other invasion take on the same post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1x6ewnn/a_malevolent_invasion_theory/

I'm curious to know the extent of the impact pessimism has on one's overall view on the topic. I see a lot of pessimists associating with Nihilism, Promortalism or even Eulavism in more obscure cases, but I wonder if anyone concludes positively about it.

I personally believe moralities are subjective values who cause us to hold on to the delusions of life, therefore I disapprove of (specifically) 'objective' morality; there's no such thing.

Human species has the curse of consciousness, deep down everyone knows how absurd life is, and in particular everyone knows that death is inevitable.

So how a self-conscious organism that by design wants to live, can face the fact that his condition will inevitably decline until he will no longer exist anymore?

He can use two psychological tools, one is repression. You know that you have to die but it is not an imminent event, it is located somewhere in a distant future and there's no reason to be anxious about it right now. The other is hope. In the past it was hope in a religious afterlife, now it is hope in progress or in yourself. Something that can make you say to yourself "Yeah it is bad right now but if i nail that job opportunity, meet this boy/girl, win the lottery, move to another town etc... i will be happy and i won't be worried anymore about the future".

If you remove these two things from the equation you have the worst emotion a person can feel: despair. That is why terminal illness or a death sentence are probably the worst events that can happen to a person. The punishment in a death sentence is not death per se, because a dead person can't feel anything (after death there will be no one that can experience the regret of not having lived more years), but the fact that your death is presented right in front of your face, imminent and inevitable. Terminal illness is even worse, you know you have limited time to live, your health gets worse day by day and that's nothing you can do about it.

Human species (or at least human society as we know it) is in the death row right now. Humanity can't live forever of course, all things are meant to decline and die but while in the past you could place this event in a very distant future and not worry about it and you could be reasonably hopeful that things would stay the same or improve, now the collapse of our society has become imminent and inevitable.

1 Climate change. The most underrated one and yet the most dangerous and impactful for the survival of our species. There are countless articles and scientific researches on how the temperature of the planet has raised year by year. Global warming causes extreme climate events that can and will destroy entire cities and threat the foundation of what has allowed us to survive and thrive on this planet until now: agriculture. These things are imminent because you can experience them in your own life. By the need to install an air conditioner when in the previous years there were no need, by the fact that extreme climate events now are more frequent and intense and happen everywhere even where they were not suppose to happen, by the rising cost of food (fruits and vegetables in particular). And inevitable because countries not only do not know how to solve this problem but don't want to since it would mean going against our capitalistic economy which is based on the cycle destroy-consume-pollute

2 Fascism. Extreme right wing movement already are in power or will rule in most of the world countries. This will impact society on a personal and collective level. On the personal level freedom, one of the most important needs of a human being will be restricted for everyone except the ruling class in exchange for a false sense of security from a fabricated enemy. On the collective level right authoritarianism will impact negatively on the point above because fascism denies climate change, it is anti-ecologism, often anti scientific and an allied to elites and corporations that exploit natural resources. And will impact negatively on the points below as we will see. I don't need to actually prove the rise of fascism or the inevitability of it, just follow the president of United States (which is not a random African "republic" but the most powerful country in the world) policies and see how they influence EU governments and the rest of the world. Even here on reddit you can notice the rise of fascism, they ask you your personal information to visit some subreddits under the excuse of protecting children

3 War. After the end of the cold war no one could think a western country would be bombed and invaded by another country, and yet we have the Ukraine-Russia war going on. If you were born in the 80s or in the 90s in a western country you could be sure that you would never be called to fight a war for your country. Today's kids or boys can't be, especially because fascism and nationalism go hand in hand and US already started another war and threatened a "supposed" ally (Denmark for the control of Greenland) and some neighbours.

4 Economic collapse. People are becoming poorer and will continue to do so at a rapid pace in the future. Society is becoming extremely unequal; wealth is already concentrated in the hands of elites who control national governments in order to maintain their power. The development of AI could replace a lot of jobs leaving people unemployed, and even if it did not, it would cause the collapse of banks and investors who fueled the financial bubble, leading to a crisis worse than that of 2008. The most likely scenario is a techno feudal society in which a very few control the means of production and the enslaved masses work for scraps. Right now you can feel how the cost of living has raised, how the salaries don't and we have to work more to get less and i don't see how things could not go worse.

5 Cultural decline. People are more stupid and selfish than ever. I live in an apartment, and I've noticed that people are becoming more and more selfish and disrespectful of others' rights. My apartment building has always been fairly quiet, but now I hear noise at all hours, people keep their TVs turned up loud, or let their dog bark alone for hours. Social medias have destroyed our attention span and boost our narcissistic tendencies. The level of public debate is abysmal, and most people engage in dialogue solely to impose their own views on others. When people do not compete with one another, they form tribes whose members are bound together more by their hatred of other groups than by shared values or interests

Personally and in general i feel like we are living in desperate times, i don't think it is because of my pessimist inclination but the reality of things. In the last years, especially since 2020, everything is getting worse and there is not a single sign that things can get better or even stay the same and not decline rapidly.

For a human being living in a good situation that is declining day by day is worse than living in a mediocre but stable situation with the possibility to hope for an improvement.

It's as if we're in a car speeding toward a wall and there's nothing we can do to stop it; we're just sitting there, frozen in place, waiting for the worst to happen.

Accepting certain truths about how life is fundamentally flawed is one thing. But can you ever be happy? Do you even get to be happy? Or will Emil Cioran himself descend to remind you that you shouldn’t be?

I’ve been working on a new podcast all about philosophical pessimism. Some of you might be interested. The first episode is out now.

Episode 1: https://youtu.be/AUVKpnKliLk?si=q9qYbTIGiuhj0234

This is kind of an oxymoron since Schopenhauer, the main pessimistic philosopher, didn't exactly like Hegel, but I kind of reject Schopenhauer's rejection that the Will is fundamentally blind striving without any rationality behind its actions.

I've already heard of Hartmann and I've already read the slightly related philosophy of Mainlander, but I was wondering if I could find more obscure philosophers out here. It should be within the tradition of idealism, and of course pessimism, ideally.

Tl;dr

I've wanted to get this off my chest for a long time. I consider myself a misanthrope, and I want to explain why I've grown to resent humanity so much.

I wasn't born hating people. I was born an introvert. I was quiet, kept to myself, and was afraid of people. But over the years, my experiences with human beings have turned that fear into resentment, and eventually, hatred.

My father was verbally abusive toward me and my mother. He was a misogynist who would make inappropriate comments about women's bodies right in front of us, even when I was a child. He openly flirted with other women, and instead of confronting him, my mother often took her frustration out on me. I grew up in an environment where I was constantly afraid, where I never felt secure, and where I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

At school, I was bullied practically every year. Being an introvert made me an easy target. I was already struggling with my confidence, and other children found more reasons to make me feel like an outsider.

But one of the worst things that happened to me occurred when I was 12.

My own cousin sexually abused me for two months. When I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents and her mother, they didn't believe me. According to them, she was an innocent, well-behaved golden child and a girl at that who could never do something like that.

Apparently, being a boy meant my experience wasn't worth believing coz well women don't do that I learned something from that experience: sometimes, telling the truth doesn't mean anyone will listen. Sometimes, people would rather protect the image they have of someone than acknowledge the suffering of the person standing right in front of them.

I became even more afraid of people. I withdrew further into myself and began resenting them.

When I was 16, my father died by suicide because of the debts and loans he couldn't repay. You might think that losing a parent at that age would be enough pain for one child to deal with. But my mother continued verbally abusing me, and my depression grew worse.

I went to college hoping things might finally change. I made friends. For once, I thought perhaps I could have a normal life.

I was wrong.

Those friendships eventually turned into more bullying. I was judged for being an introvert, for not participating in sports when my parents hadn't allowed me to do so at school, and for my physical appearance. I'm short for a man, and people made me feel as though that alone made me inferior, useless, or less deserving of respect.

College became a nightmare. I failed repeatedly and couldn't graduate.

Think about what it does to someone when, everywhere they go, they seem to find another reason to believe that something is wrong with them. Home isn't safe. School isn't safe. Friendships aren't safe. Even the places where you hope to start over become another source of humiliation.

Eventually, you stop expecting good things from people.

The one thing I found that I was genuinely good at was art. I pursued it professionally, started taking commissions, and managed to make a living from it. It's something I can take pride in. But even then, the judgment, expectations, taunts, and ridicule haven't disappeared.

It feels like people always have something to say about how you look, how you live, what you've achieved, how much money you make, and whether your life meets their expectations. They laugh, judge, compare, and look down on you without considering what you might have gone through to get where you are.

I'm tired of it.

I also tried therapy. I thought that perhaps I could finally speak openly about the things I'd been carrying for years. But when I disclosed what my cousin had done to me, I felt that my therapist didn't believe me because my abuser was female. I tried opening up to few people about this but still it was just made like a joke. Men said comments like "Dude you should habe enjoyed it. You were lucky" while women who are considered the so called belivers of equality and say patriarchy hurts men too have said "But that's hard to believe. Women and girls don't do that. You are just seeking attention"

That experience was devastating. I had already been disbelieved as a child, and now, as an adult, I felt as though I was facing the same dismissal all over again in a place where I had gone seeking help.After so many experiences like these, my view of humanity has become deeply cynical.

I see hypocrisy everywhere. People talk about kindness, empathy, equality, and compassion, but those principles seem to disappear when someone doesn't fit their expectations or when believing a victim would challenge their existing beliefs.

People say they want honesty, but often punish you for being honest. They say they want authenticity, but judge you when you show them who you really are. They talk about accepting others, but attach conditions to that acceptance.

Even affection can feel transactional. People often seem to value you according to what you can offer them, how you look, how successful you are, how entertaining you are, or how well you fit into their idea of a worthwhile human being.

And when you don't meet those expectations, you're made to feel as though you don't deserve the same respect as everyone else.

I know people will say that not everyone is like this. I know there are kind people in the world. But after everything I've experienced, I find it incredibly difficult to trust that kindness or believe that it will last when things become inconvenient.

I have very little empathy left for humanity as a whole. I don't feel that automatic sense of connection with people that others seem to take for granted. I've grown distant, bitter, and resentful.

The exceptions for me are small children and animals. I feel much more protective toward them because I don't see the same obsession with status, appearance, social expectations, and superiority that I've repeatedly encountered among adults.I feel a tenderness toward those who are vulnerable and cannot always defend themselves. Spending time with them makes me feel more human

Perhaps that's because I know what it feels like to be vulnerable and have nobody stand up for you.

I'm not proud of how much resentment I carry. But I'm not going to pretend it appeared out of nowhere, either.

I didn't experience a few isolated disappointments and suddenly decide that the world was terrible. This outlook developed over years of abuse, bullying, betrayal, grief, and being disbelieved when I tried to speak about what happened to me.

I know my experiences don't logically prove that every human being is evil. But emotions aren't formed through logic alone. When your experiences repeatedly teach you that people can hurt you, humiliate you, abandon you, or dismiss your suffering, it's difficult not to start expecting the worst from them.

I don't want to be told to forgive everyone. I don't want another lecture about how I need to be more positive or how I should simply forget the past. And I certainly don't want someone reducing everything I've experienced to a bad attitude.

I want to be able to talk about what happened without having my experiences dismissed or turned into an argument about how I should feel instead.

Maybe I'm a misanthrope because I'm angry. Maybe I'm exhausted. Maybe I've spent so much of my life feeling unsafe around people that I've stopped wanting to let them close.

Whatever the explanation, this is where I am right now.

I didn't start out hating humanity. I spent years hoping people would give me a reason to trust them. Too many of my experiences gave me the opposite.

(I used ia to write this post because English is not my first language. I'm sorry)

"Since we choose not to die, we must occupy the mind. Either you drown the world’s trivial friction in the deep, passionate current of a chosen craft, or you inherit the alternative—the unremitting friction of daily conflict.

Do not mistake this for a gospel: this flow possesses zero cosmic value. If you cannot maintain the state, cheer up—septillions of mammals have already vanished into the dirt, and the indifferent universe does not care. To worry about immersion is a luxury denied to the slave, the prisoner in the gas chamber, or the slaughterhouse beast. Life is fundamentally empty; flow is merely a functional mechanic for those who can afford it, and an inaccessible luxury for those who cannot.

Everything is flattened at the end—the murderer, the dictator, the rapist, and the saint. If the universe is a blind machine grinding on cause and effect, human words like 'ought' or 'wrong' dissolve into empty noise, powerless against the laws of physics and circumstance. If a horror exists within reality, it will inevitably manifest, unfeeling toward our suffering. All that happens is simply what must happen. We inherit the capacity for agony, landing by sheer accident like a number rolling on a blind dice. Only the non-existent escape the machine entirely—leaving one to wish they had remained among the quiet, unspent possibilities that never drew breath."

"No: I don't want anything. 
I already said that I don't want anything. 

Don't come to me with conclusions. 
The only conclusion is to die. 

Don't bring me aesthetics! 
Don't talk to me about morality! 
Get your metaphysics out of here! 
Don't preach complete systems to me, don't thread me conquests 
Of the sciences (of the sciences, my God, of the sciences!) - 
Of the sciences, the arts, of modern civilization! 

What harm have I done to all the gods? 

If they hold the truth, let them keep it! 

I am a technician, but I have technique only inside technique. 
Outwith that I am mad, with every right to be so. 
With every right to be so, did you hear me? 

Don't pester me, for the love of God! 

You'd like me married, futile, daily and taxable? 
You'd like me the opposite of this, the opposite of something? 
If I were somebody else, I'd do you all a favor. 
Like this, the way I am, just be patient! 
Go to hell without me, 
Or let me go to hell on my own! 
Why should we go together? 

Don't grab me by the arm! 
I don't like people grabbing me by the arm. I want to be alone. 
I already said that I am just alone! 
Ah, how you bore me with your wanting me to keep you company! 

Oh blue sky — the same one from my childhood —, 
Eternal truth empty and perfect! 
Oh smooth Tagus ancestral and mute, 
Small truth in which the sky is reflected! 
Oh sorrow revisited, former Lisbon of today! 
You give me nothing, take me nothing, you are nothing that I feel. 

Leave me in peace! I won't be long, I never take very long... 
And while the Abyss and the Silence keep me waiting, I want to be alone!"

— Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), Lisbon Revisited (1923).

We are living through an epidemic of people who are technically alive but have very little life left in them. We wake up, go to work, answer emails, pay bills, manage relationships, worry about the future and repeat. By the time the day is done, we have enough energy to scroll through our phones before falling asleep. Tomorrow we will do it all over again. We are certainly functioning. But are we having any fun?

"I breathe out of prejudice. And I contemplate the spasm of ideas, while the Void smiles at itself... No more sweat in space, no more life; the least vulgarity will make it reappear: a second’s waiting will suffice.

When we perceive ourselves existing we have the sensation of a stupefied madman who surprises his own lunacy and vainly seeks to give it a name. Habituación blunts our amazement at being: we are — and move on, we go back to our place in the asylum of the existing.

A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality. An automaton’s resignation: to affect a pretense of fervor and secretly to laugh at it; to bow to conventions only to repudiate them on the sly; to be numbered in every ledger but to have no residence in time; to save face whereas it would be only duty to lose it...

The man who scorns everything must assume an air of perfect dignity, deceive the others and even himself: thereby he will the more easily accomplish his task of counterfeit living. What use displaying your failure when you can feign prosperity? Hell lacks manners: it is the exasperated image of a frank and uncouth man, it is the earth conceived without one superstition of elegance and civility.

I accept life out of politeness: perpetual rebellion is in bad taste, as is the sublimity of suicid3. At twenty we rage against the heavens and the filth they hide; then we grow tired of it. The tragic attitude suits only an extended and ridiculous puberty; but it takes a thousand ordeals to achieve the histrionics of detachment.

The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the 'pleasure' of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us fromcarrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth...

Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us..."

— Emil Cioran. "The Automaton." In A Short History of Decay, Chapter 2: "The Second-Hand Thinker."

Welcome to our weekly WAYR thread. Be sure to leave the title and author of the book that you are currently reading, along with your thoughts on the text.

Looking back in history monarchs are typically seen as cruel. Yet, how real is our stance on morality even today? Morality supposedly changes, and there seems to have been great strides from the past. The actual actions of laws have changed.

Humans though have the propensity for virtue signaling. Authority figures in the past such as monarchs may choose to spare a "enemy." If spared then the monarch is just and fair. If executed the monarch is powerful and avenging the fallen. Or whatever other reason given. Whatever action taken though props up the monarch. However, they can't both be morally correct choices. What do the people really care about and think is the moral decision? What is the truth?

The truth is they don't really care. The morality of the situation bends to whatever the authority wills it to be. The poor soul is executed. And the people, words are said amongst themselves. They perform and they perform exquisitely well. The best performance of their life time is put on. But, they don't really care... Yet they perform well enough that they believe it? At least for that moment before the next "enemy" is spared.

The authority doesn't have to be a lone physical figure. It can be the present group in whatever situation(Mob mentality). It's like shrodinger's box of moral decisions. I've witnessed this plenty of times in the modern age and humans are well still humans. Even with changed laws, cultures, etc, how much of actual morality is real? It can feel like most people are just philosophical zombies convinced that their emotions are the pinnacle of truth at the given moment. Morals that change at the drop of a hat. When I say real I mean a genuine stance, internally consistent and resistant to authorital beckoning.

This blob of morality floats above different social situations that people just tap into. Like a cloud and the more people that tap into it the heavier and darker the cloud becomes until it's raining down its judgments on anything and everyone. Striking those with lighting that dare stand high enough to try and pull them back to their mortal animal bodies. The cloud will dissipate in time as the egos fall to back to earth, as its weight was never permanent to begin with. At a certain point it's just like who are we putting this show on for? The grass isn't going to grow. I just don't understand how people just lie to eachother with a straight face.

An example of this is anything doing with looks. In small friend groups or even certain larger cutoff communties people will objectify others to an extreme degree. Whether it's stating something desirable or tearing down someone's appearance. While in other situations these same people will deny this reality and spout the just world fallacy. The stuff said in small groups themselves may not even be something they care about, but they get insecure and appeal to the group. For example they could be attracted to someone that's overweight, but are afraid of admitting it. So, they tear people down for their weight. Another example is sexism, where in mixed gender communities agreeable things are said. When in their respective gendered environment the sexism comes out. Or even personal grievances aren't adressed while they give out advice to others. Ex: Complaining that life sucks, but when someone else says it then they switch up. Telling them about how blessed, beautiful, and wonderful life is and how grateful they should be.

I guess what it all probably comes down to is knowing of an ideal world, and wanting the "bad" to somehow be good. Remaining comfortable as an enforcement of the staus quo instead of being uncomfortable. Thus outsourcing thinking to authority. And really just making ourselves care about things we really don't care about It to feel greater than oneself. To give it all meaning. It really does just ends up feeling like putting on a puppet show with the strings controlled by the audience. Like who are we kidding. Personifying ourselves when we're just automatons.

Hi all,

For most of my life I've had a spiritual inclination. Even beyond religion, I would look at a flower, the curl of a distant cloud, or how the golden rays of the sun reflected off the sky just right, and feel an invitation into a reality beyond myself. Beauty, love, wisdom -- these were all things that pointed beyond. Over the years, from childhood to teenager to adulthood, these sensations slowly faded, and I voyaged through many religions to kindle a more orthodox sense of the divine.

However, after realising none of them made sense, and several life events that involved meaningless suffering without any true higher purpose, that sense of higher purpose died completely, leaving me staring in to the heart of a void I did not yet understand.

I have been worldly successful in many domains, but those achievements started to mean less and less, and my urge to grind eventually collapsed completely. It was only after reading mainlander, schopenhauer, Ligotti and more, that I realised the truth. A simple answer to a complex question that answered all others. It is the truth we live now, that our minds are suspended by wires of subjective meaning above the abyssal maw of hell.

Now I live with this realization, this intellect torment, and the fact I know what a life of objective meaning (no matter how fake) felt like, and compare it to the dire desert I find myself in now, I am utterly disarmed and utterly hopeless. I am in pain, and psychologist support does not have the tools needed to resolve my anguish. They are clearly suited for those who feeling pain due to failing in life, not achieving something, jealousy, depression, anxiety, a neurological imbalance, ect. They refuse to reason me out of this state and address me on my terms.

Does it get any better? Not in the sense that this realisation goes away, but that it grows easier to live with. That we can indulge in subjective meaning knowing that is a distraction from the void, and yet find peace in that.

Thank you.

I don't think there's a way out of this. Even determinism didn't make me desperate, even relieved, but the fact that meaning-related activities that we do might be simply to distract ourselves from the existential dread has really ruined engagement with life for me.

There's this notion among pessimists that because there's no cosmic meaning apparent to us, there's really no point in doing anything. I never found this logic satisfying, because things can still matter to you on a personal level. Just because there's no cosmic meaning behind listening to music, doesn't mean that listening to music has no value. It has at least personal value.

But now that personal value creation has been sillued by The Last Messiah easay. I tried to reconcile my actions with my philosophy and be intellectually honest, but I don't see a solution to this. Doing any kind of project is essentially just a distraction. I guess all I can do is pick the most appealing kind of distraction available to me and recognize that me doing so is just me distracting myself.

Have any of you felt kinda desperate and did you find any way to cope with staring into the void for too long? I honestly wish I didn't read it.

When I am at work I like to see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.

I reject the modern obsession with hustle, goals, and keeping busy.

Instead of scrambling to "fill" time with work, distractions, achievements, I would choose simply to sit and watch time flow by.

Trying to fill time is a frantic and dishonest way to run away from the fundamental emptiness of existence.

Human existence initiates an unavoidable, often painful, and purposeless trajectory toward death.

We endure the tedious, cyclical burden of living simply because we have been cast into the world without our consent.