/lit/ - Literature

Life seems to be the equivalent of matter getting cancer.

Regardless of how horrible their circumstances people always breed. There seems to be an extreme biocentric bias as part of an evolutionary imperative, we were slaves to our genes until the advent of consciousness, long after in fact. As a living thing it doesn't even occur to most people that living things might not be a good thing to make. I once pointed out to a girl I work with that she would be responsible for every harm her potential offspring would suffer if she chose to have children and she had never even remotely considered that idea, she actually seems shocked when I pointed it out.

People always cite evolution and psychology when I say this, but it is my sincere hope that consciousness will lead to a collective realization that we are needlessly perpetuating our own suffering by not recognizing life as a genuinely harmful thing that we have the power to stop. On our planet at least. I like to believe it's an inevitability.

As for evolution, I don't think evolutionary drives over the last few billion years are applicable because consciousness is essentially brand new, and it seems almost like a built in correcting mechanism if we get over our animal instincts and tremendous capacity for self deceit, and learn to use it. As for psychology I think it's almost useless until we are capable of mapping our brains sufficiently to truly understand whats going on, modern psychology will be about as respected as phrenology 100 years from now.

I'm not even a very unhappy person, I just think we need to stop and seriously think about what we're doing.

>>5210551
>In order to do something with your life you need to sincerely entertain beliefs and have values that are unavailable after a certain level of inquiry. When these 'thriving mechanisms' are no longer in place, all that's left is resignation.

I wish we were friends.

Existence has a certain novelty but overall it would have been much better if life and especially consciousness had never come into being. I consider no act so immoral as bringing a child into the world. I also believe that human consciousness would eventually lead to a willful extinction of our species if given enough time, but we will probably die off before that's allowed to happen.

We have extremely powerful biological imperatives in favor of optimism and these are reinforced in almost every aspect of our culture. Our genes want to replicate and we are designed with an inherent bias in favor of life, regardless of the actual quality of that life. We have developed an astonishing capacity for self deception and many people that on some level realize "life sucks" work very hard to maintain a veneer of positivity because of the terrible stigma associated with pessimism and so-called "depressed" people. There have been literally hundreds of studies that show depressed people more accurately assess their condition and their locus of control.

I recognize it's very bad for an organism to view its world this way and it has negative impacts on everything from my immune system to memory recall. I've made a sincere effort to embrace more optimistic thinkers but they typically come off as completely facile and talking to other people about it (including a few psychologists) engenders nothing but inane platitudes and I'm left feeling more contempt for them than when I started.

For me, it is much more important to have an accurate world view than one that makes me feel good about my situation.