/lit/ - Literature

>>17496833
There are people out there

>And long afterward, at moments of the greatest gaiety, the figure of the humble little clerk with a bald patch on his head rose before him with his heartrending words: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and in those heartrending words he heard others: “I am your brother.” And the poor young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterwards in his life he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage brutality lies hidden under refined, cultured politeness, and my God! even in a man whom the world accepts as a gentleman and a man of honor

Now that I stopped reading as much as I did before my life feels empty. It's like waking up and realizing all your friends have evaporated into thin air. My soul doesn't feel challenged or engaged anymore- all my familiar sights and sounds are gone and there is nothing to fight for or dream of. I'm suddenly having an identity crisis. I am alone, and there is no force carrying my life in any direction.
Any books for a creature like me to return the magic to my world?

>>15559396
>implying we don't all live in the same prison

>>15546749
>It's halfway through the year

>>15537036
Oh

I've written two posts about quitting /lit/. Both of which were done with this image. And I have cut down on my /lit/ posting, and I have benefited from it.

But I am not sure If I still believe I get nothing from here, which is why I am reconsidering quitting: why I am still here.

The biggest gain that /lit/ gives is feedback: I can gauge what people respond to and what they ignore: and the audience that makes up /lit/ is actually a pretty great sampling for this purpose. I don't know where else I could get that, so I am sticking around for a bit.

I am still planning on modifying my method of posting, however: I am toying with the idea of writing a first draft of my posts in my journal, and then posting it without browsing the rest of the site. That way I get the goods that I can only find on /lit/ without being afflicted with the evil of wasted time.

Also, I don't want to leave because I don't want to give up on /lit/. It can be better.

which

A Confession
>/Lit/ damages my ability to read
>it damages my ability to have sustained long-term focus on a single topic
>it satisfies my longing for community by providing me and ersatz community, but in doing so frustrates my ability to find a community in real life
> The jezebels posted on /lit/ often linger in my mind, so that I see one, then another, then a third and after the third I open up pornhub and begin to masturbrate to my favorite catagories: I type in the search-box "blonde POV" or "Redhead POV teen" or whatever else. Afterwards I feel disgusted with myself.

>My back hurts after hours of sitting browsing this site. My eyes hurt.
>On the days I browse /lit/ I feel like I have wasted a day.
>The critical judgements of posters here have seeped into my mind, so that I am so cynical in judging other works: I always want to have a witty roast. I have become less appreciative. I enjoy art less the more I browse /lit/.

>I learn on /lit/ yes: I laugh at clever posts. I am glad that this site allows the outlet of the voices who are never heard in public discussion.
>I like the people on lit. I appreciate you, anon, because I have learned from you and you have made me laugh.
>I love that people here love books, as I love books.

>But I have known for a long time that /lit/ is bad for me, that it makes me unhappy, that it twists my intellectual growth in weird stunted directions.
>I have tried to quit /lit/ before. I have said on here I will quit before.
>I failed.
>I am going to try to quit again, and thought I would say goodbye. I am sincere in saying that I loved you.

I haven't read a book in over a year and my attention span is shot due to cooming and internet addiction. How do I fix this?

>have to read 2.5 pages by tomorrow afternoon
>each page is 2 columns, so it's like reading 5 pages.

>>14157619
I actually wrote this pasta!
...and I am still here.

Kill me anon.

I am posting this just in case anyone else needs some motivation to leave this hellish place.

This is a so-called literature board, but the very title is an oxymoron.

Spending time on here has destroyed my ability to focus on poetry and philosophy and anything deep, and has stolen away all the time which I used to spend reading. Worst of all, /lit/ lures me back to using the internet and technology, so that some days I find myself sitting in a chair staring at 4chan for literal hours, until my eyes are bleary and my back hurts; and at the end of the day I have learned nothing at all.

Yesterday was the last straw, I was browsing /lit/, /fit/ and /mu/ in a brainless stupor for about six hours—I woke up at eleven and stayed on the computer until the sun set. Then I went back, and I tried to do something I used to find fun and meaningful, namely, read some good philosophy. I tried to read "Naming and Neccessity" by Kripke, and I could barely get through five pages without my thought wandering to something or another completely unrelated.

My attention span is shot from this stupid site, and I know from experience that it won't be back to normal for a few months (and will only be fixed if I fast from 4chan).

So I am making up my mind to leave /lit/. I counsel anyone else who actually likes reading to do the same. Get out of the city before it is destroyed.

I feel very ambivalent about women.
No, I am not an incel, at least not currently. I used to be one when I was fat, but that was before the term existed.

But just because I am not a complete incel doesn't mean I don't share many of the incel traits. For example, I will sometimes catch a woman looking at me, and then I will look back and then she will look away, and my internal monologue goes something like "She's attracted to me. Disgusting." Or on other days—my personality isn't very stable—I will be very attracted to a cute girl sitting across the way from me, and I will be staring at her, and she will look up—and I won't know whether or not or how long I should keep eye contact, or whether I should keep staring after she looks down. I feel like proper eye contact is actually a matter of expertise: it can clearly be the case that one can do too much or too little, but there is no way of determining this besides practice and experience—but to gain experience you must risk making eye-contact more than is permissible, and thus you must risk being a creep. And so in order to learn how to use your eyes in a 'seductive' way or whatever, or even a normal way if you are abnormal, you'll have to be a creep some of the time. I understand this, and acknowledge that it couldn't have been otherwise for those of us who have to 'learn' this sort of thing (most people learn it naturally, it seems) but I am currently putting-off putting in the practice.

I hate that I have to learn through deliberate practice so many of the skills that other people learned as children. I had to work very hard to acquire basic social skills, and I have developed a lot of coping mechanisms to get around these problems—for example, really working on my rhetorical skill in conversation to cover up the fact that conversations are not natural and are actually painful to me. And because these skills are not natural to me, in the times when my focus is impaired—for example, when I do not get enough sleep—I revert back to how I used to be, and I am so incoherent at those times people think I must be drunk or high or something. Still, I suppose this is true for everyone for some things: I learned how to read very well at a young age, and there are people in my cohort who are only now painfully acquiring this skill, so I certainly don't think my life is a whole lot worse then theirs. But the knowledge of my social inadequacy is very painful.

When I finally sack up and decide to pursue a girl, there is a certain sort of mocking voice in my head, saying that the time and attention I am lavishing on her in my imagination and in my interactions with her ought better have been spent on my philosophic work. That old adage of Nietzsche "A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that`s my principle" comes back to me and does lacerate my mind—and I know in a certain sense he is right, because I see so many so-called married philosophers stagnating in philosophy departments.

Recommend me a book, /lit/.

Today I woke up at 3:00PM in the afternoon: I had gone to bed at 2:30am the night before. I still felt tired. I drank whey protean with milk because my muscles were still sore from my workout on Monday, and then I drove to my college campus, bought a breakfast burrito and coffee and ate them and went on to browse 4chan on the computer at the university library. That was how I got here.

This past week was a series of days like today. Every day I would wake up tired, and would drive to school barely in time to go to my afternoon class, and then eat dinner at the dining hall: If I had an evening class that day, I would go to that afterward, if not I would go to the library afterward and dawdle. I would go home, maybe go to the gym, and re-read Steppenwolf, and then spend three hours studying for standardized tests. I would try not to masturbate (as I want to test if my tiredness is a result of cooming). But on every third day or so I would end up jacking it: it is very hard for me not to masturbate on days when I did leg day at the gym. I would take either a very hot bath or a shower, then go to sleep, but when I would try to go to sleep I would find my chest tight with a nameless tension. It doesn't help that my roommate has a dog which barks at night and shits in his room stinking up the whole house. Last night I was literally fantasizing about taking a knife to his dog and opening it up or strangling it, both to get rid of it and to test my ability to kill--or I would let it out during the day so it could run out onto the freeway. Killing dogs isn't actually illegal, right?.

In the time when I wasn't working, I would read Plato's late dialogues or just stare at the ceiling thinking. And I would keep planning how I would fix the problem of my sleep schedule the next day, and how I would accomplish this project or another, and how I would write an essay on something important; or how I would really throw my whole soul into investigating whether or not God exists, examining the classical arguments and the writings of the mystics and the bible and eastern orthodoxy; or how I would finally abandon 4chan because I feel like it's a prison preventing me from growing. I would make these plans, and then the next day I would do nothing different, living the same damn day over again.

Well, not nothing different. Wednesday was a little different. That day I had a party at a bar with the other grad students, and we drank and talked philosophy and planned to go out again again next week; it wasn't unpleasant, as I do feel at least one of the other students is an actual thinking human being, similarly caught up in these terrible questions. But after the drinking and the talking ended and I began to walk back to my car, I felt a cosmic sense of solitude and disgust at the world and what it is becoming; and disgust also at my oh-so-pretentious talk of 'higher matters'. I went home, studied, and slept uneasily.

"Why do you continue to browse /lit/? You believe that you are actually learning something in doing this, that it is educational in some way, don't you? You also believe that there are actually smart people on lit, and that it provides a community for intellectual discussion? Idiot.

/lit/ is the greatest temptation on the internet for someone with a brain, precisely because it appears in those ways. But this is only appearance. It is not educational: what you hear here is only shallow surface thoughts; there is no community of enlightened discussion: rather there is an ersatz gathering of people, alone in their real lives and thus hoping to find a little warmth of thought online.

And what do they find here? Another Guenon thread! Another meme "retroactively refuted"! Another thread on the various arguments for God, and you scroll through, and at best you see a few people bastardizing Ed Feser, himself a second rate philosopher. Another pic of Nietzsche; a thread of non-german speakers discussing his thought and accomplishments. Luckily, we have a scholar here, someone who has read The Gay Science AND Beyond Good and Evil!

>Did you hear? Harold Bloom just died!
Yes! and in honor of his lifelong quest to create a saving remnant of readers you shall... telll us how sad you are, browse another hour, leave a few witty posts, then settle in for a comfy night of watching Netflix—you shall make some progress on the "Gorgias" tommorrow. Today you have worked enough.

I am actually a very lonely human being, with no real close friends—although I always have people who try to be my friends, but those who do I look down on as contemptible bipeds. And they are, usually, somewhat contemptible: I feel like they are mostly looking for someone who will do their thinking for them. That's what they see in me. Probably because of this way of looking at other people, I haven't ever had a close friend: all my life I have only had 'disciples'.

And I AM conscious of my own superiority in some respects: I know I am smarter than most everyone I meet—and I know most everyone thinks that about themselves, but in my case it is actually true. I am conscious of this difference between me and the rest, but in my worse moments I feel like I would trade most of my intellectual gifts just to be a happy brainlet like those around me. One of my roommates is an athlete with seemingly no mental activity whatsoever,a complete troglodyte, but he seems to be quite content with his lot: he doesn't seem to suffer at all from thinking. I tried to bring up some topics in philosophy to him, and he said "oh man, I know what you mean. I don't like to think about those things because they scare me, so I just don't think about them." As he said that, I held him in contempt, but I would be lying if I said that a part of me was not jealous.

Most of all, I wish that I could be happy, /lit/: not happy in some faux-individualist sense, or in a way that somehow ignores my unique gifts (a happiness that depends on my putting on a mask) but rather happy in that I no longer feel completely cut off from everyone else on the planet—happy in that I don't feel quite so turned in on myself, so constantly critical of myself and everyone around me, judging everyone as inadequate. I don't want to be what I am anymore; I want to transform towards the good.

What is a book that will do that for me /lit/? I promise I will read it if you recommend me one.

>>13953832
Seeing a lot of anons with mothers who passed away, sorry for your loss bro.
But that's a great advice to follow btw

>Philosophical Pessimism
>Schopenhauer, Mainlander, Cioran,

>>13265253
Same :(