6 ms·

The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make

by kashif 16y ago

The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die. Do not try to "find yourself", you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and then live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other than that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, "This is who I make myself". Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which you imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, "Fuck You!". Remember, that to fight meaninglessness is futile but fight anyway, despite its futility. The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free. - Anon (Edited)

Confusion 16y ago
I would have written something similar, but recently came across: http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/27/back_from_the_dead/index.html http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/27/back_fr..., which, including the comments, put the same message in so many different ways that I don't feel I have anything to add to it.
randallsquared 16y ago
All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. ...and by what standard should we judge "well"?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The standards that you yourself make.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    So it's circular, you're saying? I don't disagree, but this is not ultimately very satisfying to someone who'd like meaning in their life. It amounts to saying "Don't want that, then", does it not? :)
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Why should meaning to your life be supplied externally ? That's a hidden way of arguing there can be no meaning to life without a creator, a feeling that religions the world over have handily exploited. Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts within your own reference frame of morality that you have derived from your experience with the world. There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.
      - randallsquared 16y ago
        I'm not sure how a creator would help provide meaning. If World of Warcraft characters were actually self-aware people, would providing fun for players really be the highest meaning they could aspire to? If not, why would a hypothetical creator's plan for us have any particular bearing on what we ought to do? Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad. If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)
        _pi 16y ago
        You forget existentialism has a clear definition of angst, despair and inauthentic living. That tie into what is "good" in existentialism. Essentially existentialism says yes happiness is good, but happiness supplied by drugs is an external source of happiness and is thus inauthentic. Poking yourself with needles, ie the act of consuming doesn't make you feel good, the drug does. Existentialism is in this respect where Eastern philosophies meet with the West. Read some Camus, or Sartre, but if you feel the need to see what existentialism is like with a higher power read Kierkegaard.
- shizcakes 16y ago
  Start the standard with happiness, add sophistication as necessary.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    Just don't confuse happiness with pleasure. Sometimes what will give you the most happiness you won't find pleasurable at all to do.
jacquesm 16y ago
What an amazing find. Thanks!
kashif 16y ago
I don't know if this is the source, but this is all I could find. http://www.writesomething.net/post/1260672/ http://www.writesomething.net/post/1260672/
- username3 16y ago
  posted by Existentialist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
vecter 16y ago
Saving. That is the most liberating thing I have ever read in my entire life.
oz 16y ago
Probably inspired by Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.
- Confusion 16y ago
  Or by existentialist philosophy in general.
signa11 16y ago
beautiful ! here is one by samuel-ullman which a lot of folks here might already have known: Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.
- vineet7kumar 16y ago
  I read a quote on a T-Shirt and loved it : "I am 18 with 20 years of experience" Note : Replace that 20 with whatever you want :)
cynicalkane 16y ago
Really? What a mishmash of meaningless platitudes. There's regularly more insightful stuff on the Dr. Phil show. This insistence on bald self-determination will fail utterly for all but the loneliest, most isolated instances of Nietzschean uebermenschen. The reality is that mankind is a social creature, that we draw on the meaning provided by others, that we look to the molds of others for inspiration, that our definitions of ourselves vary significantly from culture to culture and society or society. But wherever and whoever you are, you won't find the secret to eudaimonia in a philosophical ramble that reads like it was written by the memetic Courage Wolf. I know many who have tried to "make themselves" and failed. It seems to be a common thing for kids in their early 20s, fresh out of college, to try to do. Many with depression will not be able to summon the will to "imbue" their own meaning. For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is strictly worse than irrelevant. And so on. And even if you have some unusual strength of willpower such that you can take the OP's advice to heart, trying to re-make yourself all at once, with no idea how to go about it, will be about as productive as banging your head against a wall, and the end result will be nothing but a terrible headache and severe ego depletion. Indeed, I once tried the Courage Wolf approach to happiness that is advocated above. I found much better results once I decided that I don't know what I want, but by pursuing those things that seem to fulfill me, I can head down the positive path one step at a time. Many, particularly Greeks such as Aristotle, pondered what makes one happy, free, and virtuous, with much more insight than the OP. But you don't have to read Aristotle. Just use some common sense.
- kashif 16y ago
  Must this be the only opinion? Perhaps, there was something in my life that makes this quote resonate with me and some other folks...
  - cynicalkane 16y ago
    I'm sure. In fact, I felt obligated to respond because of the unusually powerful rhetoric of that quote. As I hinted, I spent a while hampered by similar ways of thinking--whereas they are appealing, I now consider them very dangerous. But, hey, your mileage may vary.
JesseAldridge 16y ago
Not bad, but I don't like the "no morals" part. Ethics come from the satisfaction of preferences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism
GVRV 16y ago
Well said. I found a similar passage on Reddit the other day. No. Every single fucking day I wake up like a goddam bull, ready to charge out and destroy everything in my path. Maybe I'll start a new business, maybe I'll buy a house, maybe I'll get in my car and drive to Texas, I don't fucking know, but I'm going to do something that makes me happy. Sure, I used to be sad and pathetic like you, not sure what I wanted to do with my life, until I realized, there is no "single thing". I want everything. I want thick juicy steaks still dripping blood, I want wide-open blue skies, endless summer, ice cold glacier water out of the skull of my enemy. I want to fuck until I scream, drive up the face of a cliff, ride horses in France, blow 10 grand on peanut butter or maybe just buy the biggest suite in the place and sit around ordering pay-per-view. It's your goddam life you spineless fuck, no one is going to live it for you. You better wake the fuck up now, or you're going to turn around, look at your Chrysler Minivan, your mortgage, your pot-belly and your thinning hair and wonder with crushing regret where it all went, how you got here, and what the fuck do you do now? Goddam, I want to slap you and wake you the fuck up. You want to know what to do? LEAVE THE FUCKING HOUSE and go explore. Fuck a midget. Create a stand-up routine and do open mike night. Yeah, you aren't funny. Get over it. Learn something new. Go out and live. Then again, there is something to be said for a nice nap. Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/cm06w/dae_feel_like_they_are_just_killing_time_every/c0tiy0q http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/cm06w/dae_f...
- hugh3 16y ago
  That's some attitude, and yet I looked at the profile of the user in question and for a man who could be doing anything he sure does seem to spend a lot of time commenting on reddit. Yes I know, glass houses and all, but I'm not the one making the braggadocious comment. My real point is not to point and laugh at this guy, but to point out that such things are easily said and not so easily done.
- jtheory 16y ago
  So, this is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But let's look at it seriously for a second anyway. What makes him happy? Not all of these things he's writing about, of course. Though I'll bet he's happy when he writes about it, and gets the impression that people, real people out there, are reading it, getting excited over the energetic prose and maybe getting fired up and/or laughing. That's real. But to actually try doing some of these things? Well, after half-an-hour riding horses in France, he'd have noticed they're a lot like horses elsewhere, and also be pretty chafed and ready to get off but not sure how to ask that in French. If he bought 10 grand worth of peanut butter, he'd realize two things: someone has to pay the bill, with real money that's generally hard to get, and peanut butter has an expiry date like everything else (and it's sooner than you'd think...), so he just wasted, like, $9970 that he now can't use to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and pay-per-view (if that were enjoyable itself...). Come to think of it, this is a pretty good capture of the concept of happiness that is pushed by advertising. More, more, and more shit, all at once! -- that's happiness. If a rare, thick steak is nice, then surely a rarer, thicker steak is nicer! If sex is pleasurable, then surely more sex with more people is still more pleasurable! Doing anything that people on TV do must be amazingly fun, because they look so happy (and toned and suntanned and...)! (Of course it's correct -- I mean, that's why lottery winners are all so happy with life. right?).

by kashif 16y ago

Confusion 16y ago

I would have written something similar, but recently came across: http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/27/back_from_the_dead/index.html http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/27/back_fr..., which, including the comments, put the same message in so many different ways that I don't feel I have anything to add to it.

randallsquared 16y ago

All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. ...and by what standard should we judge "well"?

jacquesm 16y ago
The standards that you yourself make.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  So it's circular, you're saying? I don't disagree, but this is not ultimately very satisfying to someone who'd like meaning in their life. It amounts to saying "Don't want that, then", does it not? :)
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Why should meaning to your life be supplied externally ? That's a hidden way of arguing there can be no meaning to life without a creator, a feeling that religions the world over have handily exploited. Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts within your own reference frame of morality that you have derived from your experience with the world. There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      I'm not sure how a creator would help provide meaning. If World of Warcraft characters were actually self-aware people, would providing fun for players really be the highest meaning they could aspire to? If not, why would a hypothetical creator's plan for us have any particular bearing on what we ought to do? Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad. If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)
      - _pi 16y ago
        You forget existentialism has a clear definition of angst, despair and inauthentic living. That tie into what is "good" in existentialism. Essentially existentialism says yes happiness is good, but happiness supplied by drugs is an external source of happiness and is thus inauthentic. Poking yourself with needles, ie the act of consuming doesn't make you feel good, the drug does. Existentialism is in this respect where Eastern philosophies meet with the West. Read some Camus, or Sartre, but if you feel the need to see what existentialism is like with a higher power read Kierkegaard.
shizcakes 16y ago
Start the standard with happiness, add sophistication as necessary.
- dhimes 16y ago
  Just don't confuse happiness with pleasure. Sometimes what will give you the most happiness you won't find pleasurable at all to do.

jacquesm 16y ago

What an amazing find. Thanks!

kashif 16y ago

I don't know if this is the source, but this is all I could find. http://www.writesomething.net/post/1260672/ http://www.writesomething.net/post/1260672/

username3 16y ago
posted by Existentialist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

vecter 16y ago

Saving. That is the most liberating thing I have ever read in my entire life.

oz 16y ago

Probably inspired by Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.

Confusion 16y ago
Or by existentialist philosophy in general.

signa11 16y ago

beautiful ! here is one by samuel-ullman which a lot of folks here might already have known: Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

vineet7kumar 16y ago
I read a quote on a T-Shirt and loved it : "I am 18 with 20 years of experience" Note : Replace that 20 with whatever you want :)

cynicalkane 16y ago

Really? What a mishmash of meaningless platitudes. There's regularly more insightful stuff on the Dr. Phil show. This insistence on bald self-determination will fail utterly for all but the loneliest, most isolated instances of Nietzschean uebermenschen. The reality is that mankind is a social creature, that we draw on the meaning provided by others, that we look to the molds of others for inspiration, that our definitions of ourselves vary significantly from culture to culture and society or society. But wherever and whoever you are, you won't find the secret to eudaimonia in a philosophical ramble that reads like it was written by the memetic Courage Wolf. I know many who have tried to "make themselves" and failed. It seems to be a common thing for kids in their early 20s, fresh out of college, to try to do. Many with depression will not be able to summon the will to "imbue" their own meaning. For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is strictly worse than irrelevant. And so on. And even if you have some unusual strength of willpower such that you can take the OP's advice to heart, trying to re-make yourself all at once, with no idea how to go about it, will be about as productive as banging your head against a wall, and the end result will be nothing but a terrible headache and severe ego depletion. Indeed, I once tried the Courage Wolf approach to happiness that is advocated above. I found much better results once I decided that I don't know what I want, but by pursuing those things that seem to fulfill me, I can head down the positive path one step at a time. Many, particularly Greeks such as Aristotle, pondered what makes one happy, free, and virtuous, with much more insight than the OP. But you don't have to read Aristotle. Just use some common sense.

kashif 16y ago
Must this be the only opinion? Perhaps, there was something in my life that makes this quote resonate with me and some other folks...
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  I'm sure. In fact, I felt obligated to respond because of the unusually powerful rhetoric of that quote. As I hinted, I spent a while hampered by similar ways of thinking--whereas they are appealing, I now consider them very dangerous. But, hey, your mileage may vary.

JesseAldridge 16y ago

Not bad, but I don't like the "no morals" part. Ethics come from the satisfaction of preferences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism

GVRV 16y ago

Well said. I found a similar passage on Reddit the other day. No. Every single fucking day I wake up like a goddam bull, ready to charge out and destroy everything in my path. Maybe I'll start a new business, maybe I'll buy a house, maybe I'll get in my car and drive to Texas, I don't fucking know, but I'm going to do something that makes me happy. Sure, I used to be sad and pathetic like you, not sure what I wanted to do with my life, until I realized, there is no "single thing". I want everything. I want thick juicy steaks still dripping blood, I want wide-open blue skies, endless summer, ice cold glacier water out of the skull of my enemy. I want to fuck until I scream, drive up the face of a cliff, ride horses in France, blow 10 grand on peanut butter or maybe just buy the biggest suite in the place and sit around ordering pay-per-view. It's your goddam life you spineless fuck, no one is going to live it for you. You better wake the fuck up now, or you're going to turn around, look at your Chrysler Minivan, your mortgage, your pot-belly and your thinning hair and wonder with crushing regret where it all went, how you got here, and what the fuck do you do now? Goddam, I want to slap you and wake you the fuck up. You want to know what to do? LEAVE THE FUCKING HOUSE and go explore. Fuck a midget. Create a stand-up routine and do open mike night. Yeah, you aren't funny. Get over it. Learn something new. Go out and live. Then again, there is something to be said for a nice nap. Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/cm06w/dae_feel_like_they_are_just_killing_time_every/c0tiy0q http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/cm06w/dae_f...

hugh3 16y ago
That's some attitude, and yet I looked at the profile of the user in question and for a man who could be doing anything he sure does seem to spend a lot of time commenting on reddit. Yes I know, glass houses and all, but I'm not the one making the braggadocious comment. My real point is not to point and laugh at this guy, but to point out that such things are easily said and not so easily done.
jtheory 16y ago
So, this is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But let's look at it seriously for a second anyway. What makes him happy? Not all of these things he's writing about, of course. Though I'll bet he's happy when he writes about it, and gets the impression that people, real people out there, are reading it, getting excited over the energetic prose and maybe getting fired up and/or laughing. That's real. But to actually try doing some of these things? Well, after half-an-hour riding horses in France, he'd have noticed they're a lot like horses elsewhere, and also be pretty chafed and ready to get off but not sure how to ask that in French. If he bought 10 grand worth of peanut butter, he'd realize two things: someone has to pay the bill, with real money that's generally hard to get, and peanut butter has an expiry date like everything else (and it's sooner than you'd think...), so he just wasted, like, $9970 that he now can't use to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and pay-per-view (if that were enjoyable itself...). Come to think of it, this is a pretty good capture of the concept of happiness that is pushed by advertising. More, more, and more shit, all at once! -- that's happiness. If a rare, thick steak is nice, then surely a rarer, thicker steak is nicer! If sex is pleasurable, then surely more sex with more people is still more pleasurable! Doing anything that people on TV do must be amazingly fun, because they look so happy (and toned and suntanned and...)! (Of course it's correct -- I mean, that's why lottery winners are all so happy with life. right?).