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September 12, 2023 - March 27, 2024
We seek to learn about what we, as a collective species, know about ourselves and this reality in order to improve our experience of it.
In truth, no matter what we think we know, we are probably wrong, and no matter what anyone else thinks they know, they are probably wrong. No one knows what’s going on in any fundamental sense. Nothing about this life is simple or clear, and from the perspective of the stars, nothing down here on earth—including us—matters all that much to anything beyond itself.
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough,”
At the base of almost everything, the resulting truth is this: we don’t know. When we disregard this unknowingness, we can easily become disinterested, uninspired, and worn out of this life. We can put great stress on things that perhaps don’t matter all that much and neglect experiences and things that do. We can feel the pressure and anxiety of chasing perfection and certainty, which do not exist.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,”
From small to big, annoying to tragic, there will continue to be moments where our self, the world, and humanity appear to all be in complete conflict and disarray.
The philosophy of Stoicism suggests that the universe is indifferent to what we want from it. Buddhism says that life is suffering. Existentialism and Absurdism say that we are stricken by our need for meaning in a life that is inherently meaningless. Christianity proclaims that the condition of humankind is inflicted with temptation and imperfection.
Pessimism counterbalances the ridiculously overly optimistic expectations of the culture we live in and helps us adapt out of the deeply detached, unrealistic perspective that we likely formed as children.
We are all struggling and improvising our way through this strange existence, constantly confused and unsure. No one is perfect or normal in any traditional sense. No one knows who or why they are.
To give up on life entirely would be like refusing to play a game because we lose sometimes, as if the game would even be worth playing if we knew we were going to win every time we played. There is courage in facing the realities of pessimism and there is strength to be formed in its name. We must be pessimistic about life’s conditions in order to face their realities, but we must also be optimistic about our ability to face their realities and form strength, meaning, and experience through them.
We are but collections of constantly changing interactions between the world and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion. This is essential to understand because it suggests that the self that we are trying to satisfy, escape, or eternalize never even really exists in the first place. Rather, the capital I that we describe is merely a state of emptiness constantly being filled and emptied by the succession of each moment.
According to the Buddha, we suffer not as a result of not having enough things like money, status, success, or ideal external circumstances, but because the desire for such things is attached to the impossible delusion of a permanent self capable of being satisfied by desire.
Moreover, to what extent do we really have any control over our desires, the information we encounter, and how it all works together to affect us?
One of mankind’s greatest longings is complete freedom. One of mankind’s greatest limitations is the inability to ever truly be free.
We are given one lens through which to see the world, with one type of software running on one type of hardware to process all that we intake and experience.
“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis,” wrote the philosopher Emil Cioran.
You are your thoughts and the lineage of every bit of history that they touched to get to you. You are the words you are reading and the mind that is automatically processing them. You are the mind that will forget them in some amount of time. You are everything you’ve heard and perceived.
Of course, all we can do is try our best, and try our best to not worry about whether or not our best resolves the impossible. Because, in truth, there is likely no heroic, ultimate defeat of worry, but only small, mini victories, moment to moment, along the way.
He suggested that we often give up a great deal of our time to things and people that we wouldn’t consider to be worthy of giving anything to if we slowed down and thought about what we were doing and why.
The mass of despairing individuals are not disillusioned because life is inherently meaningless, but because they willingly let themselves be pulled from their own individual meaning, distracted and tempted by the idea that somehow, through enough surplus money and possessions and achievements of this and that according to other people’s ideas and constructions, life could be made completely happy and perfect and certain.
One of Nietzsche’s key ideas at the foundation of his attempt to resolve this issue is the recognition that there is in fact no universal, objective truth to be known. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” he wrote.
To regret or desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things we wish to change, presumably things we perceive and interpret as negative, are purely negative in the bigger picture—or that equally negative things would not have occurred if everything went differently.
It is not necessarily that life could have been different that is the problem, but that we resist finding the beauty in how it inevitably has gone.
Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say yes, I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?
What his work also seemed to parallel alongside this dread and nihilism, though, is the notion of accepting and playing into the absurdity of it all. It encourages us to love the absurd uselessness for what it is, how it is, and to use it against itself and live anyway.
When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.
How many Kafkas have lived and died without ever sharing their voice with the world; voices that would have changed it forever? How many people never know who they’ll be after they’re gone?
If we are not made with a specific purpose prior to existence, we create our purpose through our existence.
If we look, we will always find a reason to regret any decision we make. Move or stay; agree or disagree; take the job or quit; marry or divorce; walk one path or another; in all cases, whatever the choice may be, we will only ever know the outcome of the one we take. And no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.
Everyone is experiencing the same dissonance of being, living their own story through the nauseating rollercoaster of ups and downs to nowhere.
To not see the so obviously unobvious thing behind everything, to hate, to seek vengeance, to frequently act on anger, to declare certainty in almost anything, all contradict the very struggle and confusion of life that bring us so much pain in the first place.
Ultimately, there is a movement in this world with no one in the driver’s seat. Everyone is dealt different, complex hands of good and bad luck, all of which causes everyone to be who they are and aren’t.
We so often take personally what the world does without us in mind.
Those who are often angered reveal themselves to be a strange sort of optimist, still in denial of the tragedies of this life and the death of their youthful innocence—the belief that life can be what it can’t.
A theory in psychology known as appraisal theory, initially developed by psychologist Magda Arnold, suggests that our emotional responses are in large part created by our conscious evaluations of events—how we view, interpret, and label stimuli rather than the stimuli themselves.
In the words of American author David Foster Wallace: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice . . . you will be totally hosed.
He would later commit suicide, so that philosophy worked out great fir him.
When we believe the world is congenial and manageable in some just way, when we think we are at the center of all things and all events in the world that happen to us happen at us, when we neglect to consider that suffering and ignorance are fundamental to all people, anger can and likely will eat us alive.
How often do we find ourselves worrying about what others will think of us before entering into a benign, low-stakes social interaction? How often are we worrying while we are in one? How often do we worry that others are thinking about some foolish but otherwise irrelevant thing we said or did in the past? How often are we doing or not doing things, buying or not buying things, trying or not trying things because of our concern over how others we barely know and are barely affected by will see us?
“You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!”
Sartre suggested, however, that in the process of trying to fashion ourselves according to how we fit into the look, or minds of other people, we deviate from our free, personal, and subjective self. In doing so, we enter into a state of a sort of existential hell.
Everyone is to some extent unlikable.
The continuous striving toward integrating the psyche through a process of self-realization and becoming a maximized, authentic individual, for Jung, was the fundamental goal of life and psychological understanding. “. . . man’s task,” he wrote, “is . . .to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious . . . As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
The ego is expressed in the conscious realm by what Jung called the persona, which is the outward efforts of appearance that the individual actively displays to the world. This persona, however, is often disjointed from the individual’s true self as it displays the character that one thinks or wants to be according to what the ego deems is appropriate to a particular society and role, not what is true to who the individual actually is.
In order to actively move deeper into the psyche, each time one examines a personal feeling, thought, or action, one must attempt to do so by accepting the complete and potentially undesirable truth of what it indicates about them—that they are not always who they think or hope they are.
One’s shadow does not disappear by looking away from it.
Awareness of one’s dark side allows one to more appropriately manage and recognize it when it sneaks up the stairs uninvited. One must know of a problem to be able to fix it, and it is an act of healing to admit that one is sick.
As humans, one of the fundamental things that sets us apart from other earthly creatures is our unique ability to think conceptually.
. . . man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.
the juxtaposition of its awareness of itself and its condition, a living thing born to die like all other living things, and its lack of any reason to justify this awareness.
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax.
