Half Life

There is no point to life.
Fundamentally your life isn’t progressing.
Life is a mix of opposing qualities: birth and death, growth and decay, joy and sorrow, desire and satisfaction.
If there was a point to life, which I don’t think there is, it’d be to embrace all these states of being, or to embrace nothing at all.
There’s no such thing as a one sided coin, but that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying to find one.

Does pleasure not imply pain, does drunkenness not imply sobriety?
Every direction you can travel in: north, west, up, there is an opposing direction: south, east, down.
Likewise, birth, growth, joy and so on, are directions, there a towards something we, think we want, or an away from something we don’t want, we hope.
The only way to do away with negativity, at least for yourself and those within capacity to affect, is to wholeheartedly embrace it, embrace annihilation.
Could it have possibly been any other way?
It doesn’t matter, this is the way things are.

But is it really a case of 999 steps back, and 1000 steps forward, or vice versa?
How can you tell, who knows?
Are things really traveling more northernly than southernly?

The famine makes the feast all the more necessary, vibrant and stimulating.
We appreciate the good times after the hard times, all the more, but likewise, we lament at the loss of the good times, if they were really very good, all the more, and round and round it goes.

There’s nothing original about what I’m saying, it’s been said a million times before, in nearly the same way.
There’s nothing even especially nuanced about it.
Even pointing out how little nuance it has, isn’t that nuanced.

How can one be nuanced in our modern world, where everyone is now a writer?
The more people there are, the more people writing there are, the less you matter, the less you matter as a writer.
The more everyone can say something, the more need there is to bite ones tongue.
But then when did human of all animal beings do anything because we needed to, in even the loosest sense of the word need?

People think you must be whole hearted about life…but you can be half hearted, you can give half your heart to things and to people, and keep the other half for yourself, or for no one and nothing, because it rarely turns out like you planned, for the good, or the better.
I think it’s good to have lots of reservations about anything you get into, to hold back, or at least it suits me.
Maybe fewer things in life are actually worth doing, or doing them to the max, than people think.

But there’s no one way to do life, aside from the bare essentials, which we must all partake in, there’s a million ways to do it, and this makes for a lot of ambiguity, ambivalence and arguing.
It also makes things more interesting.

What do you think, should life be lived head on?
Give it your all, or nothing at all, or can it be half lived, should it be, with one foot in this world, and the other in nothing or the ‘next’, if there is such a thing?
These days everyone seems to think there’s many ways to live life, but no one seems to think suicide, or a sort of suicide of the heart, is one of them, why not?

But if one only gives half their heart, or energy to things, what does on do with the remainder?

Learning isn’t progressing?

Learning is often regressing.
Learning takes time and energy.
It’s better to conserve resources and energy than to squander them.
A lot of things don’t need to be known.
You don’t need to know what your friend’s friend’s friend is eating for breakfast in Alaska.
You don’t need to know how many moons orbit Jupiter, or what their names are.
You may enjoy learning about these things, but often the more we learn about the world, the more depressed we are, as individuals and as a species, because the world can be a horrible place.
Newtonian and Darwinian cosmology and genealogy were more depressing than the cosmologies and genealogies that came before them, and what have we really gained from adopting this worldview, even if it’s closer to the truth?
Did Odin not have to give up his eye for wisdom?
Did Pandora not unleash many evils upon the world?
Humans may damage or destroy themselvs and nature in a scientific experiment.
Modernity itself is a kind of scientific and sociological experiment gone awry.

How much can we really learn?
Does the human brain only have so much ram?
If we’re busy learning this, this and this, we may forget that in the process, because we’re not thinking about the knowledge of that, or doing anything with the knowledge of that, and data requires constant, or at least occasional reveiw in order to retain.
Are we really more knowledgeable about nature than our ancestors?
Or is our knowledge merely more abstract?
We spend more time learning than our ancestors did, and less time doing, but isn’t doing the ultimate sort of learning?
The less first hand knowledge we have, that comes from experience, the less authentic it is.
We’re learning about someone else and their experience of their environment, who says we and our experience of our environment will be the same?
People lie, and so the less we can confirm via experience, the more we may be duped.
Can a scientist really know more about a certain locale than the indigenous people living there, unless that scientist were to live there himself, immersed, as opposed to frequent it on mere occasion?
Native Americans had a built a civilization that sustained them for thousands of years.
Our civilization may very well not survive this century.
Maybe we should be learning more from them.

Life is all about forgetting too.
After our intelligence peaks around 30, our brains slowly begin deteriorating.
At this point they’ll still probably be healthy enough that we can learn more things than forget, but after about say 60, depending on your mental and physical health, you start forgetting more things than you can learn, until you’ll be lucky if you remember your own name, or how to tie your shoe laces.
At this point, the stuff that’s really important to you will be the stuff you remember, more and more superfluous info must be cast into the recycle bin, as your ram decreases.

True, random facts are unimportant when not applicable or necessary for one’s daily life, but that is not the learning I was speaking of. I was addressing more of one’s gained self knowledge and our affects on our environment and others, I was addressing the emotional intelligence that spills forth from common sense and making valuable decisions about our actions and reactions. I believe we are here to feel. We exist to feel emotions. Our advanced emotions are our greatest asset, but dumb us we cannot seem to work through our emotions without damaging our overall well-being somehow as with numbing activities or life threatening activities. We fail to react accordingly 9 times out of 10. We keep failing to learn what’s important, what makes life worth living, which is felt as an emotion.

I’ve always been repulsed by nihilistic, self-hating professors and especially their infiltration into the philosophical arena. Just because your life is worthless, has no meaning, and lacks purpose, doesn’t mean that your status applies to anybody else. However you may find this or that other nihilist, who shares your hopelessness, and then feed off each other for awhile. Others may sympathize with you, and feed the fire of your discontent. That also doesn’t help.

The world already has too many Nihilists as nihilistic views have become commonplace. Nihilism, to me, is a sign of low-birth and the slave caste, born without purpose, without meaning, without value. Rather your purpose in life is to serve your superiors. Many in the western world believe that they are “free” when they are not. Slaves rebel against their masters, and then find themselves without value in life, because the lineage of their slavitude has lasted for generations or millenniums. A freed-slave has never tasted freedom before. So of course you will experience such a nihilistic reaction, that of despair and weakness.

Most Westerners have already, long ago, turned to (Abrahamic) god, christianity, judaism, or other forms of institutionalization. Many give themselves with blind loyalty to the “secular state”, civilization. These “progressives” believe their life has meaning politically, which is another form of slavery and delusion. Another dead-end. Yes it can be the case in life that many organisms, even outside humans, live dull, boring, valueless lives of repetition. After all, to adapt to an environment, is to form a (repeating) habit within it. All organisms do this. But despite that, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the particular value of this or that specie.

Humans are no different. Within humanity, there is a portion of humans that are valueless, have no meaning in life. 80% perhaps? We could go through the numbers but it won’t necessarily help. All it will show you is that there are many other nihilists, like yourself, who have no meaning and purpose in life.

I’ve also learned, for me, that it’s pointless to “help” nihilists. So don’t think that’s what I’m doing here. I’m merely prescribing to you your symptoms, as a doctor would diagnose a physical illness. Nihilism is not only a physical illness, but a mental and spiritual one as well. It’s a genetic illness. A slave is waking up from his/her mental slavery, and yearning for a salve, a sedative, to return to sleep. Thus you may find false meaning, false purpose, and false worth in life. I’m not here to point you to a meaningful life and existence. Because I don’t have faith in nihilists. Why give hope to the hopeless? You toss a life preserve to 1000 drowning in water, they will crowd and overturn your boat. I’ve seen it happen.

So yes, your life is shit, and there is no hope for you. This is what you wanted to hear, correct? For somebody to confirm your fears?

I’m just here to tell you, you’re wrong. Your meaningless does not reflect upon other, rarer humans, who are full of meaning, full of worth, full of purpose in life. Some humans have value. Perhaps this will shock you, and you will wish you were one of them.

And with those words, Gloominary walks into some woods… never to be seen again…

Maybe he’s sitting in the forest somewhere, rubbing two sticks together. Or maybe he’s been eaten by hungry predators.

Does it even matter?

It is obvious from empirical evidence human beings are different from all other living things.
The significant differences are human beings are evolved with higher intelligence, the capacity for wisdom, morality, abstraction, progress, planning, deliberate conscious decision making and others.

From observations and inferences of the evolution of mankind to the present, it is noted the human being is a type of biological servomechanism like the following;

For a servomechanism to work effective, there must be an objective [desired effect] as a target for the machinery to work on.

In the case of the servomechanism of humans, the objective is a meaningful purpose of life.
Since there cannot be a teleological [God directed] purpose of life, to fulfill the imperative of the servomechanism, humanity must develop a meaningful purpose of life.

To establish a workable meaningful purpose of life, with intelligence on hand, humanity can abstract from the experiences, observation and knowledge of human evolution and general evolution of all living things.

An observation of the above general evolution is there are no species that has emerged with a drive to be extinct immediate or as soon as possible.

Therefore one can infer all living things including human beings strive to survive at all costs until the inevitable, reproduce the next generation to preserve the continuation of the species.
The above is thus one meaningful purpose of life.
There are many other subsets of purpose of life to support the above main purpose of life.

Thus, there is no teleological purpose and meaning of life, but there has to be an imperative and humanity defined meaningful purpose of life [as above] to ensure our inherited servomechanism works effectively or else various forms of pains are generated.

Or he chooses to remain in the city where he lives, but lives a life of intentional, deliberate mediocrity, where he works a little, eats a little, drinks a little, plays a little, and doesn’t have much of an impact on anyone, or anything, except perhaps to get some people to realize that often it’s better not to have too much of an impact, let nature take its course, not intervene, so much, to be more content with simplicity.

Your thinking is all too common, it’s my thinking that’s rarer.
The world is full of self help gurus, promising people the moon, but never delivering.
Nietzsche, your master, was a pioneer in this field.
It is I, who am in the minority, it is I, who am the rebel.
I use and abuse the system when it suits me, where as you’re a slave, who wouldn’t dare break a law.
I am a thief, and a fraud, when it comes to my dealings with the rich.
I give little to the system, and take what I need.
But I don’t need a lot, your materialism, narcissism and vanity doesn’t interest me.

@wrong

I don’t hate myself.

My life has some worth to me, just not a lot.

I think it does apply, for the reasons I gave, and more, reasons which you haven’t countered.

I disagree, the world is full of messages, telling us to dare to dream big, that nothing is impossible, to grab the bull by the horns and so on.

If nihilism means seeing things for how they really are, full of joy and sorrow, sickness and health, that you can have too much of a good thing, that there are limits to progress, as individuals and as a species, than yea, I guess that makes me a nihilist, but I’d sooner call it realism, perhaps verging on pessimism.

Mhm…unless your rich, than I guess that makes you self hating.
Or are you middle class?
Everyone knows, or ought to know there’s hardly such a thing as middle class anymore.

Just because you have money, and the power it can buy, doesn’t make you my superior, in my book, and it doesn’t mean you have any authority over me.
I’ve always done what I want, in spite of what society, or the state thinks.
The rich aren’t that much better off than the poor, especially if the poor know how to live decently, their power is somewhat illusory.

On this point we’re agreed.
Freedom is always limited, you can always have more or less of it.
Freedom is also a state of mind, it’s realizing there’s no good reason to submit to this capitalist, consumerist prison planet, which has no respect for nature or working people, and its anti-values.
In some ways we’re freer now than in times passed, but in others more enslaved.

You’ve been reading too much Nietzsche, and not paying attention to what’s around you, here, now, but even in his time.
Most people worship money and what it can buy, as well as the capitalist, statist conception of property, people hardly pay attention to (the) God(s) or spiritual things, if they do at all.
Our culture is totally secular, Christian culture has been relegated to the margins, the fringes, and very few people understood Christ’s message to begin with, or cared to.
Christianity too has long since been completely secularized and materialized with the advent of certain sects of Protestantism like Calvinism, but very few people practiced it in its authenticity to begin with.

I’m an anarchist, but I’d sooner accept a more socialist and especially an environmentalist government than a capitalist one.
Blind loyalty to the state?
That’s exactly what capitalism is, a plutocratic state, where corporations rule, with a conception of property that benefits the haves, an economy and laws that’re rigged in their favor.

I should say I’m not an anarchist in any sort of utopian, or absolutist sense.
Of course we’ll never have perfect anarchy, there will always be some form of oppression, and oppression isn’t all bad even, especially if it’s measured, and you’re the one doing the oppressing *laughs.
Perhaps we can have more anarchy, if more people signed up, in certain times and places.
But there’s an excess of oppression, especially what’s being done to nature in the name of material progress, it’s gotten way out of hand, ultimately it’s going to destroy oppressor and oppressed alike.

Here you argue against the notion of repetition, and so you’re actually arguing against reality.
Existence is repetition, rich and poor alike have to get up in the morning, shower, shit and shave, go to work, come home, eat and go to bed.
Rich people get hemorrhoids, diarrhea, they might get a kidney stone from all the rich foods they’ve been eating.
If Science is telling us anything, it’s that even stars explode, perish, and arise again like the phoenix from their stellar ash.
The seasons turn, war, peace, famine, feast and so forth.
You think life has to be exciting, because you’re a total hedonist and materialist, or at least of the positive, assertive kind, not the negative, passive away from pain and suffering kind, which is more the kind I am.
It doesn’t have to be, nor should it be necessarily, to each their own.
You’re pipe dreaming about transhumanism and linear time, but actually what science is telling us now, if anything, is the human species is on the verge of its annihilation, not salvation, not just for the many, but for all.

Life is alright, for me, some people like it, some people loathe it.
But even those who like it endure trials and times where they’ve contemplated a partial or total relinquishment or surrendering.
That’s the reality of it, for anyone who’s lived long enough to suffer.
To be somewhat numb, jaded, and detached, to give up on dreaming big, and ‘happiness’, is what sane people do, to adapt to the ebb and flow of things, the cycle of birth, growth, decay, death and renewal.
To resist them makes one a kind of a nut.

‘Nihilism’, as your labeling it, is one of, if not the sanest responses to an insane world, but keep fantasizing, likewise I’m not speaking to you so much as of you or through you to mindful onlookers.

@Wendy

Okay, well in that case we’re in agreement.
I had a feeling we’d be in agreement on this but I got oppositional with your statement anyway just to make some points I’ve been wanting to make on this forum.
I also think emotional intelligence is just as important as other more studied and esteemed intelligences, and your connecting emotions with valuing.
Feelings have a lot to do with valuing, which’s not to say reason plays no part in it.
For me, reason can gradually turn how we feel and emote about things into more consistent, well thought out evaluations of things and their worth to us.

I’d say if we’re here for anything, it’s to experience everything, both feeling and unfeeling, reason and irrationality, all of it, it’s all a part of life, to care, to not care, to pursue, to give up the chase, to be content and complaisant, to strive and struggle, and some people/groups go more to one extreme or another, because of various genes, memes and the places, times they’re living in.
I’d say if there’s a problem it’s that we tend to overemphasize one side of the coin, usually the positive, assertive one, and so I’m overemphasizing the other side, to compensate.

I agree that they are a critical asset, and I think western civilization, insofar as intellectuals, mostly male, have been concerned, tended to overemphasize reason and downplay emotion and intuition, and the critical role the play in our understanding of ourselves, the world, and our valuing.
I’ve read human beings aren’t just more cognitively advanced than many animals, but we’re also more emotionally advanced as well, our emotions are more complex, dynamic and nuanced, and so are our desires.
It’s important to be able to express, articulate, direct, and not merely repress our emotions, and it’s important to link emotion with value, and not be too abstract about value.
It’s important to think about value, not just all day long about how to get more of whatever we think we want.

Maybe if education paid more attention to emotions earlier on we’d be more able to manage them.

Agreed. What would be the educational methodology to accomplish that feat? Where would it begin if the parent/s did not participate in cooperation? I like the idea of “confrontation classes” or “designing destressing classes” or “honesty initiatives classes” or “tactful talking classes.”

This seems like an argument supporting that learning CAN BE a form of regression, but not that it must be.

From the OP, it certainly sounds like you do.

Obviously

Nihilism is a form of delusion by which any individual or person attempts to ‘negate’ (destroy) the world “as it is”. Thus Nihilism is inherently anti-reality. Usually it is a manifestation of self-hatred, spawning from, as you mentioned, a loss or complete lack of meaning, value, or worth in life. Many people feel this way, because you can argue, they really do have no worth in life. No meaning. No value. Their lives are empty, spawned from empty parents, spawned from empty parents. A long tradition of nihilism passed down from one generation to the next, breeding on instinct and reflex more than anything else. And certainly more than inspiration.

There are distinct differences between nihilists and others who, by contrast, “love life”, find meaning and value within it, or best of all, create meaning, which seems to be the most existential challenge and accomplishment of all.

I’m not anti-reality by reiterating the point of repetitions. My point is that much nihilism spawns from the repetition of the slave-caste, living out meaningless lives, through the repetitive motions, by which people wish, dream, and desire that their insignificant lives “could change”, although they/you completely lack the power and will to do so. In this way, “breaking the chain” of such slavery could mean simply, breaking the chains of repetitions. But I’ve studied human nature, and nature in general, a long time now. People grow accustomed to these repetitions, habits, and habitats. Just as a corpse grows accustomed to its burial grave.

The nature of desire is to want what one cannot have, ever.

While some people are more successful at getting whatever it is they want than others, whether it be because of luck, talent or sheer tenacity, I see things far less black/white than you do.
George Carlin, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schopenhauer, Siddhartha Gautama, King Solomon and many more were arguably successful, yet had cynical outlooks, because pain, suffering, death and disease (physical and mental) touch us all, not just the poor, or the unsuccessful.
Whatever we achieve in life, we have to give it all back sooner or later, usually piecemeal, the rich, and the successful, all the more, and there’s no guarantee future generations will take good care of their estate.

The modern world was by and large built by successful men, yet never in recorded history has the human specie been more in peril than it is now.
It’s been said the road to hell is paved on good intentions, there’s a flipside to practically everything.
If humanity had of been more conservative, cautious and careful, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in the ecological and social mess we’re in now, but instead we had to be overly optimistic, foolhardy.

If you look at statistics, the now diminishing middle class is somewhat happier and healthier than the poor, they also live somewhat longer, averagely, but by these metrics, there’s virtually no difference between the middle class and the rich, and this, among other things, is what I meant about their power being somewhat illusory.
Furthermore, if you look at the difference between the middle class in 1st and 3rd world countries, there is no significant difference when it comes to happiness, even tho the middle class in 1st world countries are much wealthier.
What does that tell you?
It tells me a lot of our happiness is defined by envy, keeping up with the Joneses, by what other people think of us and not by something more genuine, by what, what we have can actually do for us.

It’s been said handouts, like welfare and food stamps make the poor weak, permit the weaker ones with weaker attitudes to breed, but don’t the rich get a handout from their parents?
If they’re billion or multimillionaires, they get a much larger handout than the poor get.
See there’s a flipside to just about everything.
In my opinion, if there is such a thing as successful, it means being sober, temperate, not too haughty, steering a middle course between excess and deficiency, finding the right balance of all things at the right time, place for the right person, people.
I think you can have too much of just about any good thing, even learning, as I was discussing earlier, and technology.
Presently we may not be responsible enough to handle the technology we’ve been given, we may never be.

Wealth and power aren’t everything, there’s no reason why a wise person can’t find as much health and happiness as anyone, so long as he has enough to live somewhat comfortably, conversely there’s no reason why a rich fool will be able to.
That being said, everybody plays the fool sometimes.
I think it’s more about how you spend it, than how much you have.
The rich never seem to have enough, for them, upper middle class is dirt poor.

I read an article once about how a self made multimillionaire who had 500 million dollars committed suicide because they lost half of their fortune gambling on the stock market.
I mean they still had 250 million dollars, but that wasn’t good enough for them.
What good is your high income if it’s a burden to you, if you spend so much time trying to earn more, and so little taking care of your needs and the needs of others around you, or enjoying it?
The very reason why the rich often get rich is in the first place, is often the same reason why they’re rarely able to enjoy it, or take better care of their needs.
That constant fear of never having enough, or being good enough, it can an addiction and obsession like any other.

You have this idea that rich and ‘successful’ people are really powerful like, but woe to them should they happen to stroll down the wrong neighborhood at night, which occasionally happens, or if they were to lose all or a significant portion of their wealth, which also occasionally happens, particularly if they aren’t self made, and grew up sheltered.
The more you have, the more responsible you are, the more you have, the more people try to cut you down, the less sure you can be of who your friends are.
How powerful can you be, if you’ve never had to deal with tragedy your whole life?

Look at what happened during the napoleonic revolution, and other revolutions all over the world and throughout history, whether they’re genuine working class revolutions, or new elites supplanting old ones, or how families sometimes feud over fortune, sometimes violently.
Every once in a while you hear about this or that rich banker or businessman found mysteriously dead in a river somewhere, just like Mafioso, or about wealthy people who’s children have been kidnapped and held for ransom.

They may live in a palace, but that’s not what they are, that’s what they kind of have, for now, what they are is bags of mostly water that can easily rupture just like any of us.
As generations go by, it gets harder and harder to keep wealth all in the family, unless you inbreed, which’s another problem, and it’s spread increasingly thin, because the family gets bigger and bigger, it’s why if you go back far enough, we all have some blue blood in our lineage.

Parents can’t always be expected to take care of their kids emotional and social needs, some of them are better than others, many are poor.
I like your ideas too.
Myself I think education should either be completely privatized (altho I’m not for privatizing things in general), or if kept public, government should give parents and children more options in how they’re being educated.
Should be schools more devoted to psychology, emotions, relationships and health available, or alternatively: art, music, theatre, or more hands on stuff: physical education, trades, and then parents and kids can decide together what their needs and interests are, rather than the top-down education system being imposed upon everyone uniformly we have at present.
I mean don’t get me wrong, we definitely need arithmetic and language, but after that, much of the curriculum seems arbitrary, and archaic, we don’t need, that, much science for example.
I’d also like to see a lot more open discussion, questioning and creativity happening in school earlier…but of course we can’t have that…

Sometimes life is a bridge to greater things.
The world itself is next-to-nothing.
But that doesn’t render it meaningless.
It just means it has a long distance left to travel.