A common thought finally hit me today must be getting that age. The thought pop out in my end randomly today, that everything we do is really just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end.
We create all this distraction from hobbies, jobs, family, technology, entertainment, science and religion to keep our minds occupied. We invented money to buy us more time to be occupied.
It is like the whole thing is just a fidget spinner.
Curious how you approach this?
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, 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 hedonism a lot, that’s just 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, for the cool name. Honestly, for me the whole (optimistic) nihilism/existentialism/absurdism spectrum blends together, and even the chaotic-sounding absurdism and orderly-spunding stoicism have a lot in common, especially when we’re usually not talking from rigorous study but interpretations of pop-philosophy. People have been thinking of this shit for as long as there have been people, and come to a lot of similar conclusions with minor differences in emphasis. “Figure out what you want, do it the best you can, don’t let the other stuff distract you.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Realize and accept that time is going to move forward whether I like it or not, as well as not having that fruitful of a life. Then just hope I get a better life once this one is over.
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.
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.
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.
While I don’t live it, I think human time should be spent farming/hunting/building only what’s needed.
Contemplate the thought for a bit, then continue doing whatever it was i was doing. The world goes on
Got a dog.
“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.
