REDUX – NPC: HATRED – SADNESS – I FEEL NOTHING – DEADNEN – ANGER

“I am human, and I think nothing of which is human is alien to me.” Terence

A mortal, who wants to be all the time everywhere but don’t want to be connected with one conciousness would want that, a person who can’t imagine infinity but desperately try to out number infinity, would want that.
Because he thinks everything is wrong gone, flawed and only he can cure this madness , this chaos , by being everywhere all the time, by controlling everything himself.

Alexithymia /ˌeɪlɛksəˈθaɪmiə/ is a personality construct characterized by the subclinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. The core characteristics of alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating.

Suicide as Agency: A Fight Against Time, A Temporal Solution

There are many ways to approach the topic of suicide. From the micro level of neurology, genetics, and psychology, to the macro level of anthropology and sociology, hard questions concerning the phenomenon of suicide receive no easy answers. The literature is vast, the analyses and prognoses varied, and the discussion saturated with statistics, emotion, and intense debate. There is an entire field of study devoted to suicide – suicidology. An entire essay could be written just explaining suicide statistics, which runs contrary to the purpose of this essay. Apart from boring the reader and writer to death (pardon the pun) with discussions of statistics ad nauseam, reducing suicide to the numerical dehumanizes the subject of suicide, a subject that is all too real for many of us. Here, the focus will be on sociocultural factors in suicide, specifically in the west, but noting that suicide is a transcultural phenomenon dating back to antiquity. For the purpose of this essay, these sociocultural factors will be discussed in general terms as capitalism and patriarchy. Far from treating suicide as socially determined, however, it will be argued that suicide is a performative act, one that requires intense internal debate and reasoning. Suicide is an expression of agency, however limited that agency may be by external factors. Suicide is not a free choice, nor is it inevitable. It is at once preventable and desirable, fascinating and repulsive.

Any discussion of suicide and society inevitably turns to or brings up Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. As contentious a study as it is (I wish not to dwell on or critique Durkheim here except to say that Durkheim’s study contributes more to methodology in sociology than it does to the subject of suicide) his definition of suicide is extremely useful and important: “Suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive [e.g. shooting oneself] or negative [e.g. refusing to eat] act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.” (Notice the gendered language here and throughout this essay.) This definition is important for two reasons: 1) it excludes deaths that arise from a person’s actions in moments of delirium, intoxication, or accident, and 2) in order to commit suicide proper, one must be cognizant and lucid enough to make the decision to end their life. Durkheim conceded that suicide could be studied and possibly understood at the psychological level (As Camus approached it: “The worm is in man’s heart” ), yet it was social factors that were the dominating force regarding the suicide rate.

Of these dominating social factors, capitalism and patriarchy are the hegemonic ideologies (read: social pathologies) that dictate most forcefully individual choices. In Karl Marx’s only discussion of suicide, “Peuchet on Suicide,” in which Peuchet is quoted extensively, it is asserted: “Although penury is the greatest source of suicide, we find it in all classes, among the idle rich, as well as among artists and politicians. The varieties of reasons motivating suicide make a mockery of the moralists’ single-minded and uncharitable blaming.” Marx/Peuchet goes on to list a number of other possible motivations for committing suicide, from jealousy to terminal disease. The notions of suicide as unnatural, selfish, or cowardly are scoffed at as, “Philisophical tirades have little value in [suicidal people’s] eyes and are a poor refuge from suffering.” Likewise, Marx/Peuchet admonish such ideas as punishment, or threats thereof, to stave off suicide. The reasoning for this should need no articulation. Suicide is seen as just “one of the thousand and one symptoms of the general social struggle ever fought on new ground.” Marx never returned, in writing at least, to the subject of suicide.

Also, important to note here is Marx’s critique of the family as reflecting the same issues as society, implying that patriarchal domination as a social force seeps into the home, creating the same problems at the micro level, some of which lead to suicide. Durkheim also highlighted the gendered nature of suicide, which sees men achieve suicide more often and more effectively, which is to be expected given “toxic masculinity” and the denial of emotions and fostered egotism that it demands. (“Only real men use guns, pills are for pussies.”)

At the time Marx published his essay in 1846, industrial capitalism was just beginning to flourish. Marx saw the way capitalism and its division of labour turned people into machine-like producers, seeing the factory as a prime example. A process that Adam Smith claimed would lead to an ignorant and stupid population. This division of labour, of monotonized, repetitive tasks (think Smith’s pin wheel example) creates a separation of a person from their labour, they also become disconnected from themselves, and they become alienated. For Durkheim, in his theory anomie, a person in the same situation, being a former peasant turned urban wage-slave, becomes aloof from society, isolated, and wracked with normlessness and uncertainty. Following Freud and his work Civilization and Its Discontents, an embracing of both perspectives is crucial in an attempt to understand suicide, as it befalls upon, or is taken up by, a vast variety of human beings.

Both Marx and Durkheim could see society taking an evermore rigid, structural, bureaucratic form. Central to this industrialization of society was the homogenization of time. Here is not the place to recount the history of the clock, however important and however it may be interpreted, but it needs to be stated that the imposition of a social schedule is a major factor regarding the alienating effects of capitalism. Or, as E.P. Thompson poetically describes it: “When the watch is worn about the neck it lies in proximity to the less regular beating of the heart.” Thompson’s work would highlight the importance of time in industrial society, arguing that without standardized time the modern state and capitalism could not have arisen. Arguably, this standardization of time has severe and deadly consequences. It also has a patriarchal aspect to it in regards to “working-hours,” being “on the clock,” and “women’s work.”

Recent developments in evolutionary psychology and biology attest to the alienating and disturbing effect of the modern state, of which the necessity of punctuality is but one part. As Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, puts it:
This is the basic lesson of evolutionary biology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals [including humans], while neglecting their subjective needs.
While Harari’s statement can be argued against, seeing as many animals’ objective needs are not met (or explicitly denied), the main point – that we are biologically evolved to live as hunter-gatherers, not domesticated serfs – holds sway. What this means, to extrapolate and infer, in the context of social factors regarding suicide, is that, simply put, humans are maladapted to our infrastructure, our mode of social organization, and the dictatorial commands of the capitalist state; hence, the presence of “diseases of civilization,” such as obesity and anxiety and, most important to our discussion, depression.

In light of all this, it becomes easy to see at least some suicides as a form of rebellion or liberation, as the outcome of a rational decision, as an expression of agency. Take, for example, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison or Thích Quảng Đức. I hope I will be forgiven here for not expounding on these examples and simply deferring to the work of David Lester, in his chapter “Self-immolation as a Protest” in the anthology he also co-edited, Suicide as a Dramatic Performance. The suicides of Morrison and Đức, as Lester says, are heavily analyzed and discussed and so anything I produce will simply be a reiteration of such analyses and a recounting of a repeatedly told story. For the sake of brevity the details and specifics of their deaths will not be reproduced here, as the main plot is well known. Their stories and subsequent analyses are well aligned with the purpose of this essay; they are vivid and clear cut examples to show suicide as performative and an expression of agency amid structural violence.

However, it is one thing to see agency in the politically motivated suicides of Morrison and Đức, but what about the depressive? Is suicide in the midst of a depressive episode an expression of agency, or the outcome of atypical neurochemistry? To be quite honest, I do not believe anyone, experts or laypeople, can answer this question. Only those who have killed themselves know, and they cannot speak. That said, we look at the various opinions offered on the subject.

Voltaire and Zapffe provide the clearest examples of opposite opinions on the matter of depression and suicide. For Voltaire, “The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself to-day, would have wished to live had he waited a week.” This assumption implies that depression is a fog or a lens that skews reality and those who commit suicide in depressive episodes are not thinking clearly. Voltaire counsels, as many do today, “a little exercise, music, hunting, the play, or an agreeable woman.” The naïvety of such a “remedy” befoggles the mind, it also negates social forces and pins depression on the individual. In contrast, Peter Wessel Zapffe, in “The Last Messiah,” asserts, “When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.” This seems grotesque from certain standpoints, and perfectly logical from others. Just as within the field of suicidology, which encapsulates in its definition suicide prevention, there are those who dissent and posit that suicide prevention does not logically follow from the study of suicide. The ubiquitous, transcultural reality of suicide means accepting that in some cases there is no remedy. No amount of fresh air and vegetables will ameliorate the existential despair of the body that wants to die. Furthermore, there is the theory of depressive realism, that those who are depressed are seeing things clearer than most. Emil Cioran, nihilist pessimist philosopher, whose musings on suicide are highly valuable (at least to me), once wrote, “A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity…” These speculations on the part of Voltaire, Zapffe, and Cioran highlight the nature of studying suicide and its etiology and possible prevention. The study of suicide is an examination of subjectivity and the tensions between self and system.

Returning to Marx, considering the arguments above and from the perspective of one who may wish to prevent suicide, Marx’s assessment, or rather Peuchet’s assessment, that “short of total reform of the organization of our current society, all other attempts [to prevent suicide] will be in vain” seems fair. The problem with this assessment, however, is that there is no way to prove it. And, even if one could prove, without a doubt, that capitalism and patriarchy are central motivations for suicide, and that abolishing both and finding alternatives to these structures is paramount to prevention, the rich and the powerful are capitalist patriarchs. (I also have not broached the subject of suicide in stateless societies in any way, which is an important counter-argument to my thesis.) The whole problem with power of any sort is nobody ever wants to let it go. That was Marx’s main mistake in his purported “scientific” plan for revolt. The notion that anyone will seize power via the state and then relinquish it is more naïve than Voltaire’s good-hearted advice of music to alleviate depression. The attraction to power is a trait of the narcissist and the psychopath. Nobody in power cares if you kill yourself, unless, as Lester said regarding Norman Morrison, your suicide is obvious, public, motivated, and political in nature. Would Marx prevent the suicide of Norman Morrison?

To describe suicide as a form of agency then, as an assertion of personal, even political, power, is to modify Durkheim’s definition of suicide. This has already been done by others and repeated by Ludek Broz and Daniel Münster in the recent anthology Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power. Quoting De Leo et al. the modified definition of suicide is thus: “an act with fatal outcome, which the deceased, knowing or expecting a potentially fatal outcome, has initiated and carried out with the purpose of bringing about wanted changes.” The ability, or at least the potential to effect change, any change, is the bread and butter of what we call agency. As Broz and Münster inform, “The World Health Organization has even replaced the terms ‘suicide’ and ‘suicide attempt’ with ‘intentional self-harm’ in its lexicon, which clearly highlights the centrality of intentional agency.”
To bring all of this home, so to speak, let us turn to what the state of Canada, in its callous hypocrisy and denial has called, in various ways, an “epidemic of suicide” afflicting several First Nations reserves, keeping in mind the above discussion. To combat this “epidemic” Canada has called for a “state of emergency” regarding the crises (see: Agamben and “State of Exception”). Again, here, for the sake of brevity the details and specifics will be omitted, as they can easily be found elsewhere. Here, I want to inquire and speculate about the motivations and intentions of those who succeeded in their achievement, their “nirvana by violence.”

If the contention concerning the etiology of suicide is correct, or partially correct, the effects of capitalism and patriarchy (both contained under the umbrella of colonialism), have wrought miserable circumstances upon First Nations people, leading to suicide rates that are astonishingly egregious. This seems obvious. What remains enigmatic is the act of suicide itself. If colonialism has created such a hostile environment, from a social deterministic point of view, all First Nations people who experience the psychosocial dislocation and anger wrought through the tragedy of the Canadian state would commit suicide. However, if we understand suicide as a form of agency, albeit limited, as a means to effect change at a macro level, the “epidemic of suicide” makes much more sense. And it is effective, just as Norman Morrison’s protest was effective – to a certain extent, anyway.

The Canadian state cannot be decolonized. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, it is not possible to enter the court of the conqueror, argue a case against their conquest, and then see the conquest relinquished. It is, however, possible to kill yourself. In doing so, one brings attention to the social problems endemic to First Nations reserves in Canada (or whatever the context happens to be) and at the same time ends the misery of subjugation and despair brought about by those conditions. Was this multi-faceted understanding of the complexity of the problem at the forefront of the minds of those who killed themselves? Do the suicides of adolescents on reserves in Canada count among the ranks of Morrison or Đức? We can only speculate, and I choose to refrain from speaking for the dead with any kind of certainty.

There are a few popular clichés – pithy retorts – about suicide that become obviously false in the conscious investigation of suicide. We have all heard them before. “Suicide is selfish”; “Only cowards kill themselves”; “A permanent solution to a temporary problem.” These vacuous platitudes are insulting to me, as a person who has struggled, and continues to struggle, with addiction, depression, and suicidal ideation. I am inclined to agree with Cioran, that:

You kill yourself, we are forever being told, out of weakness, in order not to have to face suffering or shame. Only no one sees that it is precisely the weak who, far from trying to escape suffering or shame, accommodate themselves to such feelings – and that it requires vigour in order to win free of them decisively. In truth, it is easier to kill yourself than to vanquish a prejudice as old as man, or at least as his religions, so sadly impermeable to the supreme gesture [suicide].

It is not until you are holding a knife to your wrists that you understand the courage it takes to refuse biology and society, to negate the contingency of mortality, to triumph over death and free yourself from the bondage of flesh. Academic inquiry and debate have their place in regards to suicide, but the subjective knowledge that informs the truly suicidal is beyond metric or measure. Understanding the social forces that combine and collude to create circumstances that encourage, promote, or pressure human beings to kill themselves, is paramount to suicide prevention, insofar as suicide is to be prevented. I am of the opinion that some suicides should, on the contrary, be supported and facilitated, an outcome of cooperation, just as Đức’s fellow monks helped him prepare for his final assertion of will and power.

So folks kill themselves for various reasons. Who knew.
“Encouragement is insult when hope has long since died’.

“Hope is found in anger…”

Emotions are useless to be quite honest, yes, they make you feel human but what’s the point of it all? What’s the point of shouldering all of that “feelings” in your everyday life?

Emotions are not irrational but irrations are emotional.

conscious thought is like an island surrounded by a vast ocean of unconscious, reason is one tool, but not the only one by which we draw meaning from life. 
To answer your question, yes they are irrational, but emotions themselves are one part of the equation of humankind, people that have little to no emotions usually tend to become killers and psychopaths with no empathy for their fellow man

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

does life ve the worth of living……..if you think yes than celebrate it if not than too celebrate this after all you ve not to live the past years in this absurd world where finally everything is running towards absurdity

Life can’t even be measured bt years

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a great beyond. There’s nothing.” ~ John Fowels, The Collector

~ by Eugène Séguy ~

 Dear, what makes humanity absurd, first and foremost, is how we individuate ourselves. I keep quoting Heidegger, but I can’t help it, he’s talked about everything. But he mentions how on the one hand we define ourselves with implicit reference to the existence of others, yet at the same time separate our being from the ‘they’. This relates to the post about animals somewhere around this page. How they’re comfortable in inactivity whilst we are not. Animals are comfortable doing nothing because they are, ontologically, always in the ‘they’, always their species. Our individuation causes our dread and anxiety. The kind of anxiety that’s there just from being thrown in the world, alone. But as I see it, the more you think of others, the more you help, the more you see yourself connected with those around you, the more you dispel your own inner instabilities. Why give in to philosophy’s conclusions? Just because someone with intellect can deductively prove to you that everything is pointless, it doesn’t mean that you should stop acting in a way that, if everyone acted that way, life on this spinning rock would be less annoying. The ripples you make in this world matter to the people touched by them. One day we will all die, yes. But on all the other days we will not. To summarize, you should stop worrying about making yourself not care, and continue caring to your hearts content. Anything beautiful on this rock is manifest of concert, of the willingness of things together. Music, art, even this page. Do you think all nihilists and pessimists here flocked together like a herd of sheep because they don’t care? I’m not saying that this page is exceptionally beautiful, as regards aesthetics at least, but it’s a nice thing, isn’t it? The story about your dad really saddened me, but here’s a comforting thought, related to what I’ve just talked about: be glad for him, because he was lucky enough to go first, instead of being forced to bury his child. That’s not something a parent should go through. Okay, that was a lot of positivity in one comment. But any arguments against my points are welcome, bitches, bring it on.

Besides the obvious (seek professional help, yada yada yada, think of your loved ones & how it’ll impact them, blah blah blah,) … just the thought of the possibility of an eternity of nothingness makes me queasy. MAYBE we’re born again, MAYBE we live our lives in a loop (explaining intense deja vu,) but it’s also very possible there’s nothing. Just like there was nothing (for us) all the years before we were born. So, all that considered, I’d rather play the percentages and try to enjoy this ride as much as I can … no matter how miserable I am or how much pain I’ve been through and am currently experiencing

The thing is that deep inside nobody wants to die, we all pretty much want to live but we cant, at least not like how we should or believe we should, is it something that haunts us, or something thats still in motion, depression, poverty, 
illnesses, existential crisis, or some minor problems that have equally deep impact on us… whatever it is we just cant handle it anymore, ending life meaning ending all problems, and it is relieving as it is terrifying, its written deep in our core to be arfaid, and to have will and fight to survive, and we prolong such thing as much as we can, we hope, we dream, we find meaning, or we are just afraid of afterlife same or more than we are afraid of nothingness, thats why most of the people never actually kill themselves. 
You are relatively young, you’ll probably find something why not to kill yourself.

“I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with characters in books, with images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity know as ‘flesh and blood.’ In fact ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures breathing as though still alive.” ~ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“How nice– to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

“It’s all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary.”― Francis Bacon
It it is meaningless, why should we continue at all. No one knows. But probably, if there is something we can choose it is whether we should care if there is a point or not. Personally, it is far more terrifying if there is a point to everything. If there is a reason for everything, I am still choosing not to believe it. Well, at least I want to lie to myself that I don’t believe in it.

Oh yes absolutely. Having a meaning is scary for me. I’ll feel a limitation, if there is a purpose for the existence of humanity or life in general.

I chose not to be afraid of meaninglessness of life. I am not saying it isn’t scary sometimes. Damn sometimes it is ruthless. Some days you wake up, and this realization ruins your day. But it is what it is. For me it is still better than some kind of obligation to fulfill a purpose. It makes me anxious, to think okay if there is a meaning to this that means- first, I need to find and comprehend what it is. Second, I need to follow this meaning. All this, I think limits my other meaningless desires. I want my distractions, I want my fascinations. Maybe there is a meaning to life, but that’s not my worry. 

Nothing drives me. And that is beautiful to me. Well it is ugly sometimes, but you can’t have everything. You know, personally realizing that life is meaningless, wasn’t a big discovery for me. But more of an end to the struggle to find meaning. Well, you can say I didn’t find that life is meaningless, I just stopped caring.

I have come to think that conciousness is a mistake.

The human condition is to think of itself as the only real thing, we say, if there was no sentience to experience the universe, would it actually exist?

You see the question and it sparks some sort of troubleshooting inside your brain. We think of ourselves as necessary, therefore we are not able to imagine a universe devoid of conciousness. Who would see it? How can that be? Impossible!

Yet we know 10 million years ago such a thing was not in this planet, but it doesn’t make us ask anything as we take the past for granted only because we are now here to deduce it.

We are an illusion of ourselves and yet we believe ourselves to be the only truth. But there is no you, there is no us. We are only a mistake, not a bad thing in a moral sense, but a mistake of nature, of the universe, of ourselves.

We hate our attachment to reality, we want to be more than that, when we actually are less than reality.

We can’t even bear one another, we can’t even bear ourselves, we want to be everything and nothing so bad, we shouldn’t be, but we are.

How unfortunate, for who? Nobody.

Maybe you’re mistaken in that as well.

Yes, that’s why I avoided saying “conclusion”.

Since all life is futile, the decision to exist has to be the most irrational of all.

“A tragic misstep in human evolution.”

I tried to read all the answers here but I got lost in all the noise.
I believe that someone before me posted something similar, still I’ll say my own.
From an evolutionary stand-point consciousness might be a “mistake”.
Human species use of intelligence is probably driving us to extinction.
On a cosmic scale though, if a gamma-ray burst annihilated all life on Earth in the next few seconds who would be left to categorize it as a mistake?
Another burst has already annihilated life on a planet somewhere else in this universe, statistically it’s impossible for it not to have happened. Is it a mistake? No. It’s just the Cosmos. It just is.
(all of the above are what I think, an/my opinion. They are not a universal truth)

You got it right. Defining something as a mistake implies that it should not happen. And as I stated above, these are all subjective views. Things happen and don’t have intrinsic values, we assign values to them.

“There are times when I feel that nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow, we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, or others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.” ~ Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel

I feel hollow inside. My brain is all broken and I really struggle to care about things. I was scooped out. I feel like an echo, I’m not the same as I was and I’m disconected from my memories. I feel lost mostly, like my mind floats. It really makes me ignore all the stupid crap people throw around, care about or even try to force. I’m guessing you guys can relate to a lot of that, except maybe the brain part… so who finds themselves happier the less they bother doing crap they don’t want to do? Because the happiest days of my life are the one’s where I’m usually in the most trouble. Who feels lost in a tangle of thoughts as well? Staying focused is so hard.

just got it, i think the ‘answer’ is, ‘everything’, but it equals nothing, i think we are everything that ‘it’ is not, and the nothing is everything to us…

I used to spend my time thinking I’ll be fine
Murder isn’t crime, I witnessed you commit and smile
Rusty breeze, let me in your casualty
Mellow leaves, you’re falling from an angry tree
An angry tree

And everybody is slipping over the edge
And everybody is

Everyday that’s slipping, come closer, the quicker to death
Drink up the magic potions, now you see me in your head
Rusty breeze, let me in your casualty
Mellow leaves, you’re falling from an angry tree
An angry tree

Can you see the world I see?
Everybody slips including me

The human race: Primitive emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, upon a meaningless now nature-less wasteland.

As if the person staring at the pretty colors will never see the forces of nature uproot homes, kill hundreds of thousands with a single wave, or see dead things littered across their field of vision.

It depends on how he responds to becoming aware of his previously hidden issues. It can go either way, depending on whether he faces reality or retreats further into avoidance of the conflicts inside himself. Realizing that I am not the ideal image I had of myself can be difficult, and ought to be accompanied by the realization that I also am not the despised image of myself that I imagine when I fail to live up to the impossible demands of the ideal image. Recognizing the contradictory issues within myself is the first of 4 steps of making decisions and thus gaining that emotional release and learning to live better, (according to Karen Horney) so facing and feeling that anger, fragility and sadness can be an important first step. After that, then knowing your own values and clarifying your personal priorities – it’s crucial to know what it is that you really want most. Third, be willing and able to renounce one of the contradictory issues. If I want both to save money, lose weight and be healthy, but also have a conflicting desire to drink lots of beer and eat a big, greasy pizza every night, then it will be beneficial for me to decide what I want more and let the other desire go. On the other hand, I can suppress that conflict and live as though I were somehow able to do both of those things, with the result of continuing to drown deeper in my problems and weakness. And then one has to be responsible for own’s decision, to have the willingness and capacity to assume responsibility for it, including the risk of being wrong and to bear the consequences without blaming others. “To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain… a spurious tranquility rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. … A realization of the significance of the factors involved in choice would give us ideals to strive for [as opposed to believing that we are an idealized image of ourselves], and in that a direction for our lives.” — Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts

“we don´t want what we see, we see what we want” (Schopenhauer)

– Means, you´ll allways realise your motives, empirically afterwards. Which can lead to understanding what your will REALLY is, in Time, with all the sideways, and confussiong forms, it naturally takes.

Philosophically: Empirically we want what we see. But transcentally we only see what we want. – and that whole dynamic, defines the persons character/will.

I think extreme scepticism is the ultimate philosophical stage, a dead-end and no-return-possible one. The kind of stage that makes philosophy useless and laughable. (… We may call it nihilarity… 🙂 )
What do you think ?

They’re yours in the sense that you have internalized them and use them to make sense of your actions and goals. I didn’t assume you had developed the ideas from scratch. Regardless, however, they are purpose -laden stories about the world. Not the reality itself.

And yes, it is a matter of taste. Subjective preference. There is no more inherent value in reflecting upon one’s existence than there is in reflecting on the possibility of hanging out with the Biebs. That you mistake your subjective preferences for facts about the world is hardly an uncommon condition. But it is an incorrect one

Temper? You mistake bluntness for anger. 

The rest of your post is more misdirection. You can’t defend your claims of objective values. So you pretend it’s about an “authenticity” I’ve already pointed out is part of your personal narrative. It’s as though you can’t see beyond your bias for your own pet concepts. 

You are about three things, it seems. Narcissistic posturing, obfuscation, and denial.

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
– Albert Camus

“Who wants peace? Everybody wants happiness – and everybody knows that happiness is followed by unhappiness, as day is followed by night, as death is followed by birth, birth is followed by death. It is a vicious circle: if you are happy, you can be certain that soon you will be unhappy; if you are unhappy, you can be certain that soon you will be happy again.
“Seeing this game of happiness and unhappiness, the watcher, the meditator becomes unidentified with both.” – Osho

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages…”

― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

People think that those who commit suicide are against life—they are not. They are too lusty for life, they have great lust for life; and because life is not fulfilling their lust, in anger, in despair, they destroy themselves.

Osho

The Litany of Hate
by Robert Crumb

I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair.

I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down!

I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me.

Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time.

Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavour.

I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness.

I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

–Giacomo Leopardi

You buy her lilies because roses are too cliche. She hates lilies because they remind her of funerals. So you buy her gardenias at your mother’s suggestion. For years, your house smells of gardenias. Then, one year, it smells of lilies.
-Reddit (r/writingsprompt)

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love.
-Graham Greene

 It has been neurologically displayed that it is the exact same part of the brain that responds to and regulates aggression and sexual impulse, so that is factually correct.

 

The trend in life is a continuous deadening of emotions and reinforcing habits that take our minds away from the fact that we’re all practically smiling, hollow men that are waiting on our graves.

Some fucking life.

 “She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.” ~ Courtney Love

 

 

 Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don’t know any other way to live than by extremes because their emotional thermostat is broken

“No one hates the way hate-haters hate ; no one is more dishonest about his intentions or in his overall self-representation than one who loudly proclaims that his goal is to rid the world of “hate.” Those who profess to hate “hate,” who cannot tolerate “intolerance,” seem capable of anything. More on point, they are capable of justifying anything. If they are harsh, shrill, and mean, if they make unfair accusations or commit outrageous slanders, if they ruin or destroy lives, they feel no shame or guilt. After all, even if they go too far sometimes or make mistakes, they can fall back on the noble crutch. Their hearts are in the right place. “We only want to stamp out hate!” they scream.Andy nowicki -considering suicide

good book “In the history of Western thought, the interpretation of death has run the whole gamut from the notion of a mere natural fact, pertaining to man as organic matter, to the idea of death as the telos of life, the distinguishing feature of human existence. From these two opposite poles, two contrasting ethics may be derived; On the one hand, the attitude toward death is stoic or skeptic acceptance of the inevitable, or even the repression of the thought of death by life; on the other hand the idealistic glorification of death is that which gives “meaning” to life, or is the precondition for the “true” life of man…”

Don’t hate the player, kittens.

 Im a rooster illusion

Correction, “you are a fememist”. I doubt you are fucking, and if you are, it ain’t becise.of your femininity.

 I identify as a vacuum cleaner!

I call everyone dude. That’s how I start my degrading facebook comments

“I was born to share love, not hate” said Antigone. “Go then, and share your love for the dead” responds Creon.

~Sophocles, artist, Enzzo Barrena~

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

~Giacomo Leopardi~

An immense hatred keeps me alive. I would live for a thousand years if I were certain of seeing the whole world croak.
~ Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Illogical Artifacts of the Cosmos:

Everything seems to indicate that the lucid sacks of self-conscious future rotten flesh (to the oblivious futilitarian casuals: this is a fancier –although much more accurate– referential name for human beings) were conceived by evolution/nature/existence (pick whichever one you like the most) with the sole nonsensical purpose of being eternally harassed and severely tormented; all this without a single seemingly useful or justifiable motive.

In case that you haven’t noticed yet, let me tell you what their pitiful existences are all about: First, they entire lifespan revolves around being the dirty, sweaty and bloody punching bags of time and space.
You see, they are incessantly being pushed forward by their imposed beginning, while at the same time the ending is always creeping near, as it inevitably approaches towards them.
So, in the end, they are always helplessly stuck in the middle, observing and being forced to be participants of the abysmal nothingness of the bizarre and dysfunctional reality that it’s found in between these two, while they are relentlessly being crushed little by little with every passing moment, until literally nothing but microscopic dust particles of them remain.

If all that wasn’t enough, they are also consciously imprisoned inside a fragile and organic meat suit that requires to be incessantly satisfied with ridiculously tedious corporeal needs, and even more exhausting and harder to fulfill cognitive wants/demands, for the totality of their sensory experience; of course, there’s even more, as if all this before mentioned crap wasn’t enough either, while all this mess occurs in the background, they are being slowly devoured by bodily decay, as at the same time they are being deeply haunted by persistent long periods of mental dissatisfaction and other annoying tribulations.
Many times they too experience much of the possible monumental agony, pain and discomfort that comes with inhabiting a complex nervous system, located inside a strange congregation of cells.

So, if you really want to witness and encounter horror, all that you have to do is open your eyes and take a look at the spatial slaughterhouse of a reality in where you happen to exist. I mean, to really take a look, underneath of all the illusory stupidity that was purposely put there by humanity itself in an obvious attempt to masquerade its true face, simply to guarantee its own wretched survival and secure pointless continuation.
Fancy, right? Well, not really. It’s just a basic, quite common and overly typical self-defense reactive mechanism that gets automatically triggered to shelter and protect basic instinctive interests.
Even the most primitive creatures in existence also have it…

Therefore, all these obvious realizations basically lead to eventually end up rationally deducing that something which has no objective purpose, spends most of its time distracting its own nullity and taking care of mundane existential deprivations, such as dealing with mental misery or physically suffering, is better without possessing the curse that it’s to be alive, aware and sentient.
And, it also has no need to occupy any psychophysical terrestrial space at all.

The question here is not whether if it is better to have never existed—and with this desist from becoming a pre-programmed puppet of a mindless biological schedule—an answer which unless the subject is under the effect of a massive mental delusion currently altering its rational capabilities and cerebral perception, is already very clearly defined. The real question is why something that it’s so stereotypically built for failure and doomed to eternal nothingness even before the violent eviction from the void into the world, exists in the first place…

Just like with everything else that exists in the universe, the only decent and palatable explanation that some of the greatest minds belonging to the most advanced species of creatures that are known at this point in evolutionary history ended up intelligently accepting is: No reason.
And, to even attempt to find a reason for something that evidently has no reason, is ultimately a beyond than pointless and forlorn exercise in futility.

Whatever thing that exists is currently witnessing being a part of the most unfunny cosmic joke ever told; and that joke is themselves being put somewhere for no reason, to obtain imaginary meaning, endlessly chase pipe dreams and self-create the illusion of possessing temporal value and universal importance, only to later being kicked out towards utter voidness and oblivion again for reason…

We are all wretched victims of the colossal absurdity that inconspicuously subjugates infinity.

– Matthias Jablonka