What keeps me alive is mostly feeling of responsibility, I do not want to let down all those people who trust me, my principal, my students. Which is strange, as I also suffer from impostor syndrome, so whenever my professional achievements are praised I feel fear that people would find out that in reality I'm a cheat.
I've been in therapy, it helped some, not with everything. Last week I seriously considered going to a psychiatrist but did not get to arranging an appointment. Maybe I will, one day, or maybe I will go back to therapy. Or maybe my life circumstances will change enought to make me feel better.
Anyway, exercise is OK, endorphines make a great drug, but I would not stick to running. For me it's the most pointless activity ever, so I do aerobics, weight training and dancing instead. And it helps. Mostly. I also have people to whom I can talk, although the majority of them are on the internet. People around me, my colleagues, my students, know nothing about my real life, one of my colleagues even calls me "Sunshine". It seems I'm a master of disguise.
If I were you, I would keep going to psychiatrist. Sometimes the medication takes some time to kick in - or possibly it's time to think about trying something new? Often it's not the first drug that helps.
Men [humans], Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
I wish your inside half solace of some kind, if only momentary. I've appreciated your words as I've come to know them so far.
In my job as a pre-school teacher I have a lot a lot of kids around me - mostly 20 or more, 3-6 years old - and all my colleagues are women with families and a a very clear conception of their way of life ( and all the Illusions and self-adulation which come with it in my opinion...) The work with the kids is stressful but also sometimes entertaining and funny. But in the conversations with my female colleagues I'm being infamous because of my cynical comments and "realistic" evaluations of situations and dialogues with the staff and the parents. And it is getting worse, I think.
From time to time I think, I'm beginning to lose my human empathy because of my negative and nihilistic opinions about life and human existence. This mindset seems to be REALLY out of place in my kind of job. What brings me through the day most of the time, is one hope: That I can teach the little kids some kind of basics, which almost none of my colleagues could not or want not to do: to be able to think critically in school and life in a few years, to conceive their OWN opinion about the world and their living, despite the typical indoctrination in the political, religious and cultural beliefs of their parents or teachers.
Many of us experience these kinds of jobs, Davias. Yours is obviously at a greatest juxtaposition, it seems clearly contrary.
But those colleagues grew up in one kind of cultural immersion, those kids have a chance at another.
We're here. We all seem to concede we live in this reality, that we are here, whatever that means. We can affect different worldviews ourselves.
But mostly, Davias, strengh. You are alive, you breath, heart beating in your chest like mine own. It matters most of all how we conduct ourselves in relation to reality experienced.
I'm responding but I do want to note that please seek out every available counter-argument (including, and especially, direct criticisms of the authors who have affected this "negative enlightenment" in you)
I haven't found any convincing counter-arguments to any of them. How do you argue against philosophies that are grounded in actual cognitive psychology and empirical science? I don't especially want to be an eliminativist or a nihilist, but I can't disprove these views.
I can empathize more with the intellectual/emotional disconnect. But to the bold - you can know more than those people. They spend years of study to allow you to make your "conclusion" now.
As for Bakker in particular...I've never seen any valid counter-arguments to The Argument, and I can't think of any. The only serious one I've seen was a review of Neuropath that basically played a semantics-game and redefined the concept of "self": http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=698
We make changes to ourselves everyday in the form of our habits, what we experience. From that resulting flux, we come to see old perspectives framed within new perspectives. Work to affect some change in your cognition and see if it still looks as hopeless.
Practice an instrument, learn a language, practice ambidexterity, dance, martial art. Just like taking medications, diet and exercise both need time to build up and affect their change. You can intellectually make changes that might affect your emotional state.
Other than that, the most common criticism of Bakker's position seems to be "Bakker is a sexist poo-poo head, I hate him".
We both know this is unrealistic.
To be fair, people say Neuropath is the amateur Ligotti. My main question of such thinkers is "are the criterion by which you establish meaninglessness a result of sociocultural organization as it has stood/stands?" If so, then every nihilist has an obligation to affect change in society and cultural to prove that every sociocultural arrangement actually does result in meaninglessness.
Interesting. Could you explain it further?
(The nihilist view, which I share, is that socio-cultural arrangements exist only for evolutionary purposes, which are ultimately meaningless and purposeless.)
We live now, in this global sociocultural arrangement. I mean, the argument could be made that all such arrangements do "exist only for evolutionary purposes, which are ultimately meaningless and purposeless" but I don't think we can decide and know that without experience a number of different ones first. So to prove their argument, people who proclaim so should work towards making sure every one is absolutely meaningless and purposeless.
However, why is the goal of suicide the result?
I'm not saying that nihilism = suicide. A real nihilist would be indifferent to life or death. I'm just saying that there's no actual reason why life is objectively better than death. From a purely rational standpoint, the choice of life isn't any superior to death. Looking at it from a nihilist/materialist point of view: if you want to kill yourself, there's really no reason not to.
Almost all my life, I've been a melancholic sort of person. This is far from my first depression, and I'll probably have many more if I live into old age. Why shouldn't I end it all?
Well, I've voiced my selfish reasoning. Because I can still learn from you. By your living, you might affect "good" in the world, affect change for "better," and that is the chance I want to gamble on.
How do you know that all those thinkers that contribute to this worldview aren't poor arguers
This is a non-question. How do I prove God doesn't exist?
You're basically asking me to tell myself: "I believe science is wrong because I want it to be wrong."
I realize that can be taken this way. I wanted to say, if you were to critique these thinkers, who you have come to orient yourself with, based on the quality of their argument and not the content, would you still be so convinced? If the way they reached their conclusions are flawed...
If what exists, if what we experience is inherently meaninglessness, what is to stop us, truly, from making that meaninglessness beautiful?
You first have to decide that "beautiful" is an objectively meaningful concept, lol. I don't think it is.
You can't subjectively qualify anything as beautiful? Wondrous? Elegant? Evocative? Words? Paintings? Music? Nothing?
Why does the result always have to be incapacitation? Why does the reaction have to be one of apathetic futility?
I dunno. It's probably got a lot to do with the fact that people who have these existential doubts are usually introverted people. Quiet, thoughtful people who spend a lot of time in abstract thinking. They're not extroverted, energetic go-getters (those kind of people are usually more interested in other people than in abstract ideas) who have lots of motivation to change things.
Introverted people usually get overwhelmed by these kinds of thoughts, and become mentally paralyzed.
Absolutely. That doesn't mean they are outliers, either way. Introverted people might also be socialized that way. Our sociocultures don't make space for abstract thinking. Thus, those of us who do think these things are ostracized by the dominant strain. Doesn't mean we can't interact, together and what was an introverted experience might become something different.
Isn't it possible that there is coherency beyond what our human brains can perceive? Isn't it likely that humans don't actually know enough about anything for nihilism, religions, philosophy to be "the way things are?"
No. If we can't perceive or infer it, then it can't exist for us.
It doesn't matter if there's a coherency or purpose beyond what our brains can know, it's really a non-issue.
To the bold: that is only true in the sense of perception. All kinds of things that don't exist "for us" still exist and influence us...
I want to engage life.
Good for you.
You can too. Anyone can.
Auriga, I value your unique reality-tunnel and I still wish to spend a whole lifetime learning from differences between us.
Thanks for the compliment, I suppose, although "my" reality tunnel isn't really "mine" in any real sense - it was all a pointless delusion of being a person.
You are the only "thing" I can talk to at your particular intersect of matter, space, and time, with your particular history of experiences, thoughts, readings, etc. That makes you a unique distinction to me.
Anyways, to end this debate:
"Since there's no personal God and no gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose, it means that there aren't any no values that are inherently valuable. There's no justice that is ultimately justifiable, no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, and no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, subjectivism, elitism, or ismism. If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate non-arbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery, cruelty is equal to kindness, love is equal to hate, destruction is equal to creation, life is equal to death, and death is equal to life."
Since I qualify you dying as a negative thing, I would rather that these types of thinkers erred on the side of "good." I think (and do) you can have these types of thoughts and by the same twist of meaninglessness, not become incapacitated into thinking suicide is the only motion one can make. In fact, if it was meaninglessness and not our projecting meaninglessness onto the world, then you would have a larger percentage of these nihilist thinkers, turning around and spending their lives saving already living, starving children or something.
All things being equal.
Just offering some formalized thoughts, Auriga. Hope you're having a better/different day, one day at a time.
