A common thought finally hit me today. The thought pop out in my end randomly, 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?
Every day I try to do one thing to make the next day a little better
Feeling good feels good, so I decided to make it the foundation of My ethics. I’m trying to make a world where we can all feel really good and don’t have to feel bad.
Beer works pretty well. It takes back in interest, sadly. Ain’t no existential crisis like a hungover one.
“everything we do is really just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end.”
if you believe this to be a hard fact instead of a viewpoint among many others it’ll be harder to change things up. especially if you consider that to be a negative thing.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, for me 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 distractions a lot, that’s just being human in 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, honestly because I think it sounds more fun than “optimistic nihilism” or “existentialism”. IMHO there’s a whole host of philosophies that basically suggest the same guide to living well, with different emphasis (for example):
- Figure out what you want (<- 20th century existentialism)
- Do it the best you can (<- stoicism, confucianism)
- Don’t let the other stuff distract you (<- stoicism, buddhism)
Mostly weed. But also food.
I used to suffer from a lot of existential dread. Like, not sleeping because time spent sleeping was bringing me closer to the time I’d no longer exist.
Whether you worry about it or you don’t, some day you will stop existing. Worrying about it frankly doesn’t help. In fact, it detracts from the dubious pleasure of existing. In my experience, not having fun existing makes me no longer want to exist.
A lot of people advocate for distraction, although personally I think that’s just a temporary escapism. I think we need to confront our eventual non-existence, accept it as a fact of life, and then move on by trying to find meaning in what we have left. Way easier said than done.
CBT is a school of therapy about restructuring our thoughts, and it has a lot to say about confronting the fear of the unknown. Cultivating spiritualism and religion is a traditional way of approaching the problem, although I’d encourage people to seek out and learn what other cultures are saying instead of blindly accepting what their parents’ church says.
Personally, I had a religious experience while accidentally tripping balls on psychedelics. I’m not sure I’d specifically recommend that, it could just as easily backfire, but it helped me and you can find lots of testimonials with a similar story. Maybe it’s better to start with therapy and religion
Well, kind of. Just sitting there, waiting and thinking about how you’ll eventually die seems quite boring. Might as well kill some time with fun things in the meanwhile.
The same way I deal with my OCD, try to distract myself with horror games and movies.
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.
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.
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.
