Everything Hurt and Nothing was Beautiful

It's natural. It's what happens when Fortune has not seen fit to remember you for some time. Suddenly things appear as merely what they are. A world full of inanimate objects. Empty space, filled with existential loneliness. The problem cannot be cured because it isn't the result of a cognitive distortion, but rather too much realism.  One looks upon their prize, won after much struggle, and the mind immediately implies an array of potentials. Future adventures. These projections lose their import over time and you find yourself holding in your hands some stupid object. What was the battle won for? Might it just as well have been lost? All of the mythology and mystery: Confusion and Chinese telephone. There is an oily, vanta-black ink that slowly swallows and consumes all. Not unlike the fungi that absorbs the nutrients and strength of a tree, the yeast that suffocates in its own alcohol, the Easter Island tribe that cut down the last tree, zombies spreading a mindless infe...

I have tended towards depression throughout my life. As a child I often remember feeling empty for basically no reason. This emptiness manifested behaviors which would go on to isolate me and create a vicious feedback loop. Feel free to write off my entire worldview as the product of my intellectualizing my own depression.  On the other hand, I think most humans have trouble viscerally understanding the problem of suffering. Suffering is, without a doubt, the seed of philosophy. Without pain, no one would seek after the hidden God. No one would ask what it all means. No one would care about right or wrong, since nothing we did could cause harm to anyone. It is frustrating that I even have to clarify this, but suffering is bad. I think it is, I think you should think it is. Anyone who is actively suffering thinks it is. Yes, suffering can have instrumental benefits. Exercise is painful but ultimately good for us, ditto for medical procedures and plenty of other things. As mentioned,...

There needs to be humility, or else there is no honesty. I am here arguing for philosophical pessimism and there is something inherently absurd about that. Declaring life to be either broadly good or bad is somewhat vague and meaningless. What exactly am I claiming? How could someone acquire the knowledge I claim to demonstrate? Is it consistent? What could disprove it? In particular, how can I make any claims about the world or ethics when I say that knowledge is fundamentally subjective? The obvious problem with subjectivity is that everything goes. Sure, the case may be that the problem doesn't come up much in the real world. Human values are nearly universal, anthropologists argue for 7 universal values that exist across cultures.  —  family values group loyalty reciprocity bravery respect fairness property rights https://newatlas.com/seven-universal-moral-rules-oxford-study/58474/ ‐—---------- Human behaviors vary as much as they can. If there is a single defining trait t...

"The IPCC has calculated that to have a 50 percent chance of restricting global warming to less than 1.5°C, the total cumulative CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere since 1850 must be kept below 2,900 billion tonnes. Between 1850 and 2019, emissions totaled 2,400 billion tonnes; 42 percent of that total occurred between 1990 and 2019."  -Paul Abela, "Is Climate Doomism More Like Climate Realism?" "The "100 seconds to midnight" setting remained unchanged in 2021 and 2022. On January 24, 2023, the Clock was moved to 90 seconds (1 minute, 30 seconds) before midnight, meaning that the Clock's current setting is the closest it has ever been to midnight since its inception in 1947." -Wikipedia entry for "Doomsday Clock" For all the awareness and discourse, our emissions continue to grow exponentially. That humanity should be the cause of its own undoing is not a surprising fate. I'm sure Greek tragedians soliloquized the concep...

Capitalism, like all national mythologies, views itself as the natural, universal laws of nature. No different than the code of Hammurabi which laid out the structure of Babylonian society. I could give some interesting detail about what it said, but i think the fact that I would even need to already says enough about the longevity of Hamurabi's code. Economists make predictions based off of convoluted financial calculations and assumptions and investors react, the whole process having no more basis than a shaman advising an ancient monarch, except when it is intentionally manipulated by a cartel of politicians and businessmen. Realizing that money and economic laws are not the expression of eternal truths, the way the rules of football are not eternal truths, one sees that the economy is truly fueled by humanity's self-fulfilling schizophrenia and that the evils of capitalism are the result of some collective delusion. People starving, dying, and killing for something worse th...

Modern society is a cult and it is unlikely that the vast majority of us would hold the beliefs and opinions we do if it were not for the constant brainwashing and social reinforcement. Granted, spirituality and optimism are inherent to our nature, there is even a region of the temporal lobe which, through magnetic stimulation, causes individuals to have mystical experiences. Matthew Alper calls this the "God" part of the brain. This is where the idea of nature contra nurture is misleading. We have a natural potential for spirituality, language, music, cooperation, etc… That's the role nature plays in who we are, nurture defines the specific of how those potentials are expressed. Nurture is where the molding hand of society and its cult leaders take aim. It starts with school, where kids are taught in a very hands-on way how to be obedient to authority figures. They're acclimated to prison style architecture and conditioned to follow a rigid schedule communicated thro...