I'm not doing too well comrades. I think I'm becoming an alcoholic to cope. I can go into the details if you want. There's no meaning to life, we suffer then we die and our consciousness is extinguished forever.
Any books you'd recommend to help with this? I like to read
there's no meaning to life
yeah, and that's what fucking slaps
you get to make your own meaning instead of some dumb sky boomer telling you what to do :red-fist:
First, I'll say therapy is hella rad if you can afford it.
Second, this sounds about where I was until recently in life. This may not be helpful, but I find serenity in the void. I frequently look at things I'm stressing out about and ask myself, "Does this actually matter in the grand scheme of things?" and find comfort in my inevitable "No, it does not." Embracing the void has allowed me to focus less on the negative in my life and to convert my anxieties and stresses into motivation to pursue things that I actually care about and give me purpose in an otherwise meaningless existence. I can hear the libs heckling me already for being openly nihilist, but reading about nihilism helped me for the better.
Fuck yes love the absurdist void. Shit keeps me feeling serene in times of crisis. Also weed lol.
No one is trying to profit off of reading this and it will tell you everything about life that a therapist could.
If you can afford it, I can’t recommend therapy enough.
But besides that, it sounds like you have some degree of generalized anxiety (which I have as well) and I would strongly recommend some workbooks like this:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=AlEuBQAAQBAJ&gl=us&hl=en-US&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKT-FDR-na-us-1000189-Med-pla-bk-Evergreen-Jul1520-PLA-eBooks_Self_Help&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqfz6BRD8ARIsAIXQCf3vhDvFmCZOBRkZKjrXow5Xe4CTb_qFck48K45r0jII56PQhWXV_b4aAs5nEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
If you have any questions in general I’d be happy to try and help. But I promise it gets better, friend
There's a whole bunch of different approaches.
Buddhism suggests eliminating the Self (or recognising it as a set of contingent parts and using that to de-experientialise it.)
Catholicism suggests you recognise the self as an emanation of a divine Logos and that you can reunify with it because at heart there's no separation in the first place and you need to get over yourself.
Transhumanism (or at least Socialist transhumanism) just says "Fuck it, work the damn problem." Make humans immortal, unable to suffer, go do a space eventually when you feel like it, and eventually point us in the direction of preventing the heat death of the universe by collapsing the false vacuum and creating a noosphere at the omega point. You might not get there, but other people will
You'll note that all of these map onto sections of Matt's "what to do after-FALGSC" rambles.
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
"Life is suffering"
Just learn to live each part of your day moment to moment
For general depression, The New Mood Therapy helped me a lot. You can easily arr it. For PTSD i liked The Body Keeps The Score.
But as for 2020, idfk, like just choose the least harmful coping mechanisms you can i guess.
I don't have any advice for an existensial crisis, i feel like everyone needs to find their own meaning to life. Mine i focus on making the world better for the people around me in whatever i can. Basically just always being there if anyone asks/needs help and doing some volunteering in my free time. Am i still gonna die? yeah. Am i still gonna suffer? yep. But whatever, day to day life is really all we fucking have and if i can make someone's day better i'm gonna do it and enjoy my life in the least harmful to others ways i can. That's all i got, idk.
I hope you will be okay, though. <3
Check out Nihilist Communism by M. Dupont if you want to lean into it.
The class war begins in the desecration of our ancestors: millions of people going to their graves as failures, forever denied the experience of a full human existence, their being was simply cancelled out. The violence of the bourgeoisie's appropriation of the world of work becomes the structure that dominates our existence. As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.
I saw Tibetan book of the dead, I got alot out of it. A friend who went thru similar experience had good read of Egyptian book of dead, examining kemetic philosophy. As well as Alan Moore's Jerusalem. In the latter I personally resonated with the idea of eternalism.
I really like Kabir's poetry, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Tao Te Ching, not necessarily existential crisis but thought invoking poetry that informed my understanding of personal existance.
Seconding the Myth of Sisyphus, but also Camus' other works like The Fall and and The Stranger, and The Plague.
For something a little bit lighter, I like Slaughterhouse-V or Catch-22, basically anything that explores the inherent absurdity of human existence.
My own existential crisis back in the day hinged in large part on the failure of metaphysicalism realism to enunciate a coherent, intelligible picture of the way the world actually works, so if that's the case with you you might also look at (neo)pragmatist and instrumentalist philosophies. When you let go of the notion that things should make sense, their failure to loses a lot of bite.
Do you have any recommended works of neo-pragmastist and instrumentalist philosophy? I'm unfamiliar with those areas of philosophy.
I'm deeply ambivalent about Kuhn and Feyerabend, but I enjoy a Lakatos.
Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is really good, although he'll get a ton of flack for being a liberal idealist round these parts, though mostly from people who haven't read him I imagine.
I also really like Feyerabend, but I wouldn't place him in either group directly, although there is a strong current of pragmatism that underlies Against Method and Conquest of Abundance.
Basically, if you're looking at following my direct path, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what I read first and the more radical readings of that lead very quickly to an abandonment of any sort of realist framework, from which Rorty and Feyerabend are good jumping off points.
Dewey was also a prolific writer who coined instrumentalism and had a ton of good (if liberal) takes on education and politics, but he had so much good stuff I don't even know if the top of my head were I'd start with him.
