Half Life

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.

@Karp

Right, you need context, but people rarely think about learning contextually, they think the more info the merrier, but you can burn your brain out with too much needless info, individually for sure, and perhaps even collectively, a lot of what you learn in school is needless too, or lacks the right narratives to meaningfully string events together, or doesn’t teach people how to or encourage them to build their own narratives.

Some aspects of nature shouldn’t be meddled with at all, like GMO for example, but tell that to big science.
They’re just rushing into it like oh yea, no unforeseeable consequences will occur from all this, or we’ll be able to deal with them as they come up, but they don’t know that, it’s a faith they have, in scientific and technological progress, that the more knowledge we have and use, the better, but just look what we’ve done with the science and tech we have so far.
We’re in an ecological nightmare right now, a crisis that could overtake our civilization, our species.
We are on the precipice of another mass extinction event, and we’re merrily opening yet another can of worms, and another…

@Prismatic

From my research, I tend to agree with Darwin when he said: the difference between humans and other animal minds is one of degree, not kind.

Other animals do all these things, but perhaps all, most or many of them do them less in general.

That sounds a bit too mechanical for my taste, but it’ll probably be sufficient for this discussion.

Right, for purely reflexive animals, there’s no objective, for sentient animals, there almost always is an objective, it may be conscious or subconscious, it may be immediate or long term, but it’s there.

What I meant by there being no point to life, is there being no overall point, that sometimes we need to feel pain, suffering, occasionally we may even enjoy it, that sometimes we need to regress in some way, in many ways, for our own good, we need to do away with some, or all of our wealth and power, fame and fortune, even our knowledge and understanding, food and drink, and just about all the things people normally consider good.
Our birthrate may be too high, our death rate too low.

Life zigs and zags, and it has to, again it’s born and grows, it decays and dies, making way for the yet unborn, giving them a chance, to be born, for the young to grow up.
Like that existence as we know it happens when we balance opposites, rather than veer too far off in one direction towards 1 of the ever elusive sides of the double sided spectrum (but can a spectrum be triple sided or more?), that’s actually when oblivion happens.
So then the point, if there is one, is to take the bad with the good, that some bad is necessary for there to be good at all.
That’s your shadow on the wall…you can’t get rid of your shadow now, can you?
Batman made the Joker…or did the Joker make Batman?

I think we make it up by our thoughts and feelings about things, and our thoughts about our feelings, and our feelings about our thoughts.

But you don’t need a single purpose, you can’t have a single purpose, we have purposes and sometimes they conflict, which is where dilemmas come in.
Our purpose is plural, and they’re complex, dynamic, ephemeral things, always changing, multiplying, dividing, coalescing.

Our higher reasoning brain comes a long and tries to make sense of this jumble, so it can better manage and direct things, but it can only do this so well.
If you try to overthink it, you’ll go mad.

You might say, well our purpose is to survive…but some people kill themselves, you might say, well, my, purpose is to survive…really?
You always consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously choose to maximize your survival over all your other desires, all the time?
Like even when you put ketchup on your fries?
Well that’s unhealthy you know.

Nature, especially human nature, is a fuzzy thing, and we love what we hate we love, careful what you wish for.
We’re always changing, growing, decaying, who you were is not who you are, who you are is not who you will be…

Sometimes we do stuff for their own sake, the doing is part of, or, the, objective, like when we dance, sing and play, or gorge ourselves, or drink ourselves into a stupor/coma, or starve ourselves to attain that ‘perfect’, scrawny, hideous figure, or extreme sports and on and on.
Sometimes we do these things for their own sake primarily, not for the sake of something else.

Now evolutionists can come along and claim we always have some ulterior, subconscious or unconscious motive, that the real objective is to help us survive, or attain something that helps us survive (but sometimes these behaviors are more likely to take us to an early grave than anything else), or that the behavior is at least a by-product of something that helps us survive, or an archaic behavior that once would’ve helped us survive, but even if so, well it’s still not helping us to survive now, so some of our behavior then isn’t about surviving, some of it is all about dying.
Survival isn’t an absolute, no matter how much they try to stretch it.
Just as there are many things in the body that don’t help us survive at all, like cancers, or male nipples, or wisdom teeth.

Mutations in genes and the rest of the body don’t have to help us survive 100% of the time, some genes are neutral or bad, parasitical, they can survive and replicate themselves because they’re attached to other genes that do help us survive, just like human beings aren’t all good or bad, if you want to have relationships you have to take some of the bad with the good, but good/bad themselves aren’t black/white either, people can have behaviors that’re purposeless, from an evolutionary perspective, but benign, they can be quirky, eccentric, and consequently refreshing, interesting, or alternatively off-putting.
Genes and corresponding behaviors can also have like advantages and disadvantages, a behavior might be beneficial in most circumstances it’s triggered in, but not in all.

Not all our genes and behaviors have to be good, from a survival standpoint, they just have to be more good than not, for us to be here, they don’t have to be and can’t be all good, and they don’t have to all have a consequentialist, sort of speak, aim, people find intrinsic value in dancing itself, or singing itself, or laughter itself, and not just for the sake of the pleasure they induce, or sometimes even in pain and suffering itself, in sadomasochism.

Yea, maybe there is a spirit realm our souls go to after death, but how dare we entertain such things on a philosophy forum.

Take the whole human population, 100% which is at present 7+ billion then ask what is the % or number that is living with a drive to die prematuredly, i.e. those who are suicidal.

Note the suicide rates around the World
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … icide_rate

The highest is from Sri Lanka at 34.6 per 100,000.
That is 0.0346%.

From the above insignificant % of suicides, one can infer the majority 99.97% strive to survive in some forms or another.
We can also infer the purpose of human life is to survive at all costs as based on evidence of how humans strive to survive.

It is also evident humans are endowed with males and females parts to reproduce.
Here again note the numbers of homosexuals and asexuals which at most is about 10%.
Thus 90% of human will have the drive to reproduce the next generation.

There are parts in the body that do not seem to contribute to survival, reproducing and sustaining oneself and the next generation, e.g. appendix but these are merely side issues and not elements of the main issues.

In addition, I have asked, which species of living thing emerged to seek extinction immediately? Answer is none.

Another point is nature is anchored on large numbers to ensure the success of its ‘objectives’ [as abstracted, not teleological]. Obviously with nature there will be variations but the majority are always driven along its main purpose, i.e. survival and reproduction of the next generation.

Thus those who are able to abstract the purpose of life and flow with it as much as possible, one will leave a very meaningful life.

For example;
‘anger’ is a necessary emotion for survival but we ought to note Aristotle’s

So we ought to understand what is a given within evolution to enable humans to facilitate survival and reproducing the next generation, and apply the above principle as advocated by Aristotle.

If and when we want to go against the grains of survival and reproductions, we need to understand its limits and work at it optimally. Example, a homosexual may not have any urge to have sex with the other sex and reproduce, so one has to navigate within those constraints to achieve the optimal results to have a meaningful life.

As I had stated humans are a servomechanism [biological] and must be fed with a meaningful objective in life otherwise one will be like a boat without a rudder going in circles with full of pains rather than gains.

@Prismatic

It’s not just people who’re driven to commit suicide, but people who drink, people who smoke, and so on.
If humans consciously thought about survival all the time, or a lot more than we do and only when it was beneficial to do so, maybe we’d live for thousands of years averagely, so even the average life expectancy might be premature, in that sense.

Yea but that’s annually, the number of people who successfully commit suicide sometime during the course of their lives, is going to be much higher, maybe 1%, 0.5% or 0.2%.

Almost everyone on earth listens to music, or watches sports, or intoxicates themselves recreationally, yet these things either don’t help us to survive, or they at least don’t obviously help us to survive, so then is listening to music the purpose of life?
No, it is one purpose among many, perhaps one of the major ones, but not the only one.
Is enjoying ourselves the purpose of life?
Perhaps, at least it’s probably just as important as survival.

I will agree with you that up until now, our behavior has helped us survive more often than not, or we wouldn’t be here…but maybe even that is stretching it, maybe we haven’t survived so much because of our behavior, but in spite of it, maybe luck was the primary factor, laughs, survival of the luckiest, or maybe our bodily adaptations were the primary factor and not our behavioral ones, and most of our behavior is either neutral, in regards to survival, or even harmful, just not harmful enough to counteract our luck and bodily adaptations.

I mean you have to have some luck, too, right?
A species may be very strong, and smart, but if a giant meteor or volcano erupts in its habitat, if a series of unfortunate calamities befalls it, than it’s game over.
We’re here because of environment too, how do we measure whether our survival had much more to do with our environment or our bodies than our behavior?

And just because up until now most of our behavior has been good enough to get us here, doesn’t mean it will be in the future, because environments change, culture changes, and the species itself changes, not always for the better, kind of like how we might be consuming ourselves into oblivion thanx to capitalism, consumerism, scientism, statism, and their underlying pathologies, some of them instinctive, many of them socially contrived, that make these systems possible.
Maybe that’s what humanity is really attempting to do after all: find an interesting way to commit collective suicide.

Don’t forget contraception, celibacy, sterility and so on…but yea, we reproduce enough, that we’re here, for now, granted.

But it sheds light on the main issue, because it’s unlikely we’d have all these physical maladaptations and not any neuropsychological ones.

Species don’t emerge immediately either.

But we’re not abstract beings, fundamentally we’re concrete, and our concrete, real selves can’t, won’t and probably even shouldn’t attempt to live out an abstraction we’ve derived, or conjured, at least not 100 percent of the time or remotely close.
I mean we do abstract some things, like generally I feel like I like X, so I will pursue X, even when I occasionally don’t feel like I like it, so long as no other likes or dislikes get in the way, or simply because I like being abstract, and perfect.
I concretely, and imperfectly tend to like the aesthetics of abstractions, and perfection, or they make my behavior simpler and easier to understand for me and others or whatever, we can do that to some extent, and do, but not nearly to the extent I think you’re suggesting.

You could say only that which survives has objective meaning, or be an objective, objective, because that which ultimately dies, ceases to exist, and while I see some merit in that, we’re not entirely logical creatures, number one, and number two, probably nothing lasts forever, we will all certainly die as individuals, our species will almost certainly die too, or evolve into another species, one we won’t recognize, or care for.
Altho we can’t be certain, life and the cosmos themselves may very well end, or mutate into something totally unrecognizable.
We can try to slow down change, except when it offers a significant advantage for survival, as much as possible, we can and do sometimes make that one of our objectives, hoping for the best against all odds, but it can’t be the only objective, there are many, often conflicting objectives, and they can all be abstracted, we are not and cannot ever be very much like an abstraction or a series of abstractions, but you can try.

I mean if the only way humans can survive is to gradually evolve back into a worm, would it still all be worth it, the struggle, or would that be surviving at all, since a worm is so different from what we are now?
Conversely, if our amphibian ancestors time warped from the past to the present, what would they think of us?
Would they like us?
They would probably be afraid, or they might try to bite you.

Well, the vast majority of species that’ve ever lived according to big science, died, and then of those that didn’t die, a tiny fraction haven’t, significantly (whatever that word means you or us, significantly) changed, in the hundreds of millions of years sentient life like sharks and turtles have been around.
So what’re the odds of us or something very much like us still being around a billion years from now, hell, a trillions of years from now, a septillion years?
By then life itself will almost certainly have ceased to exist, or mutated into something totally unimaginable.

Also, say the only way for the human race to survive was to place us on life support machines ran by robots, while we’re in a vegetative, comatose state, or the only way to survive was to condemn yourself and descendants to complete slavery and humiliation, torture and torment, a kind of hell on earth, forever and ever, would you?
Wouldn’t such a state not only be painful for them, but a kind of death to everything you value about being alive?
Or a vegetative state?
Wouldn’t that be a kind of death anyway?
So you see, yet another reason why it can’t only be about survival.
I agree survival is one of, if not the prerogative, but it exists alongside many other prerogatives, it isn’t, can’t and shouldn’t be an absolute, a very important consideration, yes, but not absolute.

I mean we’re always doing something to survive, but we’re also always expelling fluids, so should we turn that into an absolute objective or imperative?
Should human beings try to expel as many fluids as we can?
Should we build giant contraptions, fill them with fluids, only to drain them over and over again?
You see how this level of abstracting things hinges on absurdity?

In the main, I say if it feels good do it, I think we should just do what we feel like doing, and then whenever we also feel like considering the consequences and implications of what we do, weigh them out to the best of our willingness and ability to determine the best or at least a suitable course of action, and get back to just doing and being again.
I think that’s really what we do, all we can and should do.

If science is entirely right about evolution, the vast majority of animals throughout earths history managed to survive reflexively, instinctively and intuitively.
There’s such a thing as an organic, bottom up organization to things, spontaneous order.
Our reflexes, instincts and intuitions, many or most of them probably did evolve for a survival purpose, and now evolutionary psychology is going back and finding survival purposes for many, not all, but many, which is what you’ve been pointing out, and I’ve been finding exceptions for, to prove that it is far, far from absolute.

So then, why be so opposed to your intuitions, or our habits, that’ve formed over the course of decades, instincts over the course of millions of years and so on?
Constantly undermining and interfering with your instincts trying to be hyperconscious about surviving is not only painful (and pain can damage the body/brain), but also it’s unnecessarily intervening in processes that’re by/large probably there to help you.
We don’t need to micromanage, so give into what you love, be guided by your feelings, work together with your emotions instead of against them, without knowing exactly why or how they arise, or what their aim is, and you’ll probably end up improving your odds of survival anyway, 9 times out of 10.
Reason needs to do its job and let the emotions and instincts and so on do theirs, instead of trying to do everyone’s work for them.

Your conscious, linear, linguistic, rational self is only a small part of your total organism and its consciousness, don’t identify with it too much.
There is also consciousness itself, behind it, pure awareness, without analysis, like when you’re just watching your thoughts, feelings or the objects of sensation, and also, many processes for analysis going on that can’t be easily translated into words or numbers, or perhaps at all.

You could write an essay on how to shoot basket balls into hoops, and then present it to an amateur to read, but that wouldn’t be a fraction as good as him throwing the ball at the hoop just once, at teaching him how to shoot hoops.
At best the language and linear, sequential thinking can give us a rough outline of things, and their value to us, a skeleton if you will, and then our various subconscious psychophysical processes fill in the fat, muscles and sinews.
So much of our thinking is beyond the faculty responsible for this discussion you and I are having right now.

Also, why try to fix what arguably isn’t broken, the environment and the body have got us this far, why does the mind think it has to suddenly do all the work now, that it can easily and totally transform its nature into something totally superior, for our pleasure or survival, something that took billions of years to evolve, this delicate, fine, symbiotic harmony that exists between things?
That seems pretty presumptuous on the minds behalf.

The constraints aren’t absolute, the homosexual is often able to have sex with the opposite sex, where as sometimes the heroin addict is not able to give up the heroin, and so they die.
It really depends on the individual and how hung up on survival and reproduction they are, and how much discipline and foresight they have, the social and psychological and environmental tools they at their disposal to force themselves to do this, or pull away from that.

Ultimately I think I’m arguing for a balance of all things, as being the point, even pointlessness can be and is sometimes part of the point, if there is one, and even imbalance.
It all is and isn’t.
The way that can be named is not the way.
You can perhaps name part of the way, or parts of it, but you can’t name it in its totality, or it wouldn’t be the way.

Maybe reality will one day cease to exist as we know it or altogether, and so what is all this but a kind of playful dream/nightmare reality is having?
What good is a cat without a mouse, or vice versa?
And so the two go together, they are part of a larger cat-mouse paradigm.
If there were no more mice to catch what would the cat do…he’d be beside himself with anguish.
And so maybe the point then isn’t to catch every last mouse, but to have a good game, put on a good show.
The whole, it’s not the journey, it’s the destination thing, and all that.

So progress, and regress, victory, and defeat…they all go together, it’s all one thing, pretending it’s not, trying to convince everyone and thing watching, or itself, that it’s really this role it’s playing, when really it’s so much more.
And maybe that’s why humanity is making such a mess of things, getting in a huff, trying to catch the last mouse.

Not in any objective sense but you can still give subjective meaning to your life
But it is not compulsory for it is up to every individual to decide for themselves
So if you think that there is no point to your life then for you that must be true

Noted your points but most it deal with the fringes of the core, i.e. re,

I had stated there is no absolute meaning in the teleological sense, like one that is bestow and commanded by a God.

But within all available empirical evidence throughout evolution of all living things to the present, the core meaning of life is survival and procreation and maintenance of the next generation.

You listed many deviations from the above core purposes but they actually have no impact because nature has taken care of that and provided for assurances in terms of operating in large numbers. I stated the suicide rate is 0.034% for every 100,000 people, so the per annum is not critical in this case. Nature has taken care of the risk, even if say 50% decide to commit suicide we still have 3.5+ billion of ensure the preservation of the species. It is the same for the other deviations.

Yes, there were no species earlier, the essence is survival, self-preservation and extension to the next generation [including asexual reproduction] is inherent in living things.

Thus it is critical we understand survival and producing the next generation is the core meaning of life. In addition we need to understand what are the support systems within us that are critical to core. Then we must flow spontaneously with these critical elements.
Note FLOW;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology

The other is peak experience:

Thus there are feedback, check and control points to guide whether one is flowing along with a meaningful holistic life.

Your counter as above,
since element/process X is part of the survival, then maximixing this input and process will maximize survival and meaningful life;
is a wrong view.
There is always an optimal level of input and a holistic approach.
Note Diminishing Marginal Returns from economics;

Like it or not, all humans are like a “servomechanism” and to be most effective one has no choice but to understand and adopt what the empirical-based meaningful purpose of life [with reasonable room for deviation] to avoid pains and to achieve flow, peak experiences and self-actualization.

As for a meteor that could appear suddenly in sight, fortunately due to the survival impulse, humans has progressed exponentially in knowledge and technology to the extent we have the potential to take care of meteors that come our way in the near future.

As for other threats not anticipated and beyond our means to tackle, we have to accept that possibility but at least we have try our very best driven by the impulse to survive at all costs which is the implicit purpose toward a meaningful life.
We have to apply philosophy-proper to abstract this reality and make it explicit to all humans.

Your OP’s theme and hypothesis is not recommendable for humanity. If that is really so, then we all might as well take poison now and end it all instead of going through a meaningless life that is full of sufferings.

Okay sweetheart, good luck.

While purposes are subjective, they’re also mostly predetermined, by millions of years of biological evolution, by thousands of years of cultural evolution, and by decades of nurturing: environmental, social, and, self conditioning, making decisions and forming habits.
You can’t just dispel all that with a flick of a light switch, on a whim, or some abstract piece of philosophical reasoning, I mean you can try…

And the sum total of these purposes are a big part of what make you, you.

At most all we can do is recombine and direct these purposes in various ways.
We can’t invent lasting purpose in a vacuum, ex nihilo, it has to come out of our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and the world, and these thoughts and feelings themselves don’t come from nowhere.

So we don’t have a whole lot of choice in regards to our purposes…we have some choice.
We’re already here, pretty much fully formed, there’s no such thing as wiping the slate clean, starting from scratch.
If we want to get anywhere, we have to use the momentum in and behind ourselves and the world.

@Wrong

Nihilism can also be collective and impersonal.
That’s not how I define nihilism, what you’re describing is escapism, or wishful thinking to me.
Nihilism isn’t a very important word or concept to me, but I guess I’d define it as a kind of radical ethical or epistemological skepticism or subjectivism.
I’m a nihilist on both counts then, ethical and epistemological, especially the former, but also the latter.
While people can acknowledge their ethics, morals, values, meaning, purpose and so on are subjective, because of the nature of the world, how there’s a flip or downside, often necessarily, to practically everything we value, I also define myself as a realist, some might say pessimist.

A lot of rich and ‘successful’, in their minds and the minds of many onlookers, people are chronically trying to reinvent themselves, their lives and the world.
That’s arguably a kind of ‘nihilism’ in the sense you mean or escapism, wishful thinking, because they’re perpetually discontent and dissatisfied, where as many poor people accept their lot.
The rich and ‘powerful’ have their utopian dreams and schemes too, about peace, prosperity and life extension technologies.
They think they or future generations can bring these things about, that humanity, or at least the elite, is progressing into a kind of divinity or godhood via science, social engineering and tech.
They call themselves post or transhumanists.
It’s arguably a kind of faith or delusion like any other.
These rich, power mad people are always chasing ideas and ideals, revolting against what is.
Always busy, bouncing from one place to the next.
They get cosmetic surgery, they accumulate money and stuff they don’t need or even seldom, if ever use, they live for the applaud and appraise of others and their public image or façade.
The real, or what is, is always something to overcome, a bridge, a means, rarely is it valued for its own sake.

You still did not answer her question.
Isn’t learning progressing or evolving?

As to the second part of that, wouldn’t YOU yourself be one of those who are looking for the one-sided coin ~~ in not also seeing learning as progressing?
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Mr. Gloomy.

@Arc

I did answer her question, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes knowing stuff helps us, sometimes it doesn’t.

And in some senses it is, and in some senses it isn’t.
The more I learn, the less important stuff there is for me to learn.
The more satiated we are, the less we do.
The less we do, the less ourselves we are.
Without wonder, there is no philosophy or science.
Without mystery, there’s nothing to wonder about.

I overemphasize the negative, only to compensate, because the positive is typically overemphasized, as it was in her post.

Gloominary, have you had any injections in the last 6 to 12 months, or medications? …just a thought. :-k

*Laughs, no, what’re you trying to say? :laughing: :confused:

Gloominary

I suppose that you did in your own way. You did say OFTEN.

That has also been my experience. I think the phrase “Curiosity killed the cat” works here.
Sometimes knowing stuff can be detrimental.
Think of the I or the Self as a block of wood. The nihilist within me at times needs to whittle it down, to form and shape it in a way where the person can be made more “real”.
We do not really need to have so much excess baggage become a part of us.

Do you mean that you are able to see value in what is important and what is not?
It has also been my experience that this or that is really not that important.
It is like cleaning house. The more junk which we once thought as valuable and important can be thrown away to give way to more inner space insofar as the self goes.
How freeing that can be, right?

Hmm… I am not so sure of that. Wouldn’t that necessarily depend on the individual?
Some could never be satiated and others may be for a time. Balance! I may be wrong here.
We are all different in a way.

But on the other side of that coin, doing less might make ourselves more of who we truly are, not less so ~~ unless you are speaking of plain old laziness and apathy

I firmly attest to that! Without wonder there is no mystery or thirst for knowledge, no real magic within the world (not the witch’s brew).

Well, couldn’t you still wonder about what you already know? Everything is not set in stone.
Consider everything which we have learned which has more or less turned out to be wrong.
If we hadn’t wondered or re-considered, where would knowledge?

Actually, you are not the gloominary which you call yourself albeit there is the candle which surrounds the gloom though I would not necessarily call the darkness gloom.
It can be quite beautiful…the darkness that is.