/lit/ - Literature

>>15623542
"Why do I want to live?"

''Was it really that many?''

I don't remember the first but one of the first was something like
>the state cannot be trusted
I was like 12 or so. I became a "communist" soon after. Silly times.

>>15623542
I was like 5 and flied to Latvia and I thought that God had to be real because we didn't crash.

>>15623542
I remember my classmates standing all around me and laughing at me this one time after my bullies wouldn't stop pushing me around and calling me names when I was 9, I looked at the windows of our classroom as the cacophony of the classroom roared (we were on the highest floor) and thought about how it wouldn't matter in the slightest in the greater scope of things if I just leapt out of that window and died.

"Why am I me and not someone else?"

How fast is a clone of me not me anymore?

>>15623542
That “why are we here?” thing came into my life pretty early, gave a few years of on and off consideration and came to an Epicurean conclusion. To be happy is best.

>>15623590
Well it can’t

>>15623595
Turns out to have been science

I remember as a child having a gut wrenching feeling that I'm heading straight towards death moment by moment

>>15623588
Based

Anytime they teach you something you should question both the "fact" and the motivation.

>>15623542
Why be moral?

>>15623542
When I was like 5 years old I remember eating an orange in the backyard, and I saw some ants. I thought if I shared a bit of my orange with them, it would be a very small lose for me, but a giant win for the ants since they are so tiny. Basically I had come up with the concept of marginal utility, realized mine would decrease less than theirs would increase, and that by sharing a small piece of orange I was increasing the wellbeing of the world, so I did.
At 5 I was a utilitarian.

>>15623542
Whether there was anything more to a "thing" than its properties.

Who is "Me"? Who am I? at like 6. The same age that I was introduced to anti-semitism by J.K.Rowling

Why do I exist, why does anything exist, why is there something rather than nothing.

Grandma told me I asked her that when I was 5. I'm pretty sure that's always baby's first philosophical pondering no?

>>15623542
age range: 5-10
>Oh, I'm going to die
>Why would God allow evil in this world (to happen to me)
age range: 12-17
>I don't know who or what I am

>>15623542
When I was young I thought about what would happen to my physical body and habits if I were to swap consciouses/spirits/minds with another person then swap back. I also remember wondering if I were the only person on earth with a Benis and if everyone around me were unconscious robots

>>15623812
Degenerate.

>>15623812
> Basically I had come up with the concept of marginal utility
you should have been executed at the spot for that

"If I keep spending my gp each time I get 100k, I'll never have more than 100k"

>>15624164
>>15624165
Why?

>>15623812
Based

>>15624178
They're imbalanced incels

>>15623812
And that's why you're okay with nogs stealing your bike, huh

>>15624178
She's literally too dumb to understand startrek....

I came up with something similar to the cosmological argument as a kid. That's probably why I view it as childish nowadays.

>>15624230
To be honest my bike was actually stolen when I was a kid, but it wasn't by black people but white trash junkies. I was able to catch the guy's gf who stole my bike and get it back though.

I was watching a television show, and then I was up a layer in the real world with my parents, but outside that and the galaxies, there was noone watching us. So it wasn't real because we weren't watched. I felt dizzy and nauseous thinking about it as a kid.

I don't think it anymore.

>>15623542

"Man, this God guy sounds like a real... jerk!"

>>15623542
When will it all end, would things really change?

I remember thinking how you can’t get away from anything the more you try. You just have to give up and give in. There’d be these nightmares I imagine so vividly of being unable to escape anything that I saw, being inextricably intertwined with what I knew.

It was about the inevitability of death

>>15623542
I can't jerk off, I see ppl and I can't sexualize them anymore. I'm just disgusted with them

>>15623542
I think mine was trying to wrap my head around the idea of God having always just existed.
It didn't make sense to me, but the idea of everything emerging from nothing for no reason made about as much sense.

When I realized my brother was a real person with his own internal monologue like I did

"Even if you take a really small step you still move"

As a child I remember being fascinated by the idea of a second passing. A moment in time, gone forever, never to be seen again. Also the classic looking in the mirror, “I’m really in this bitch” moment.

>>15623542
being happy is a choice i can make consciously

>>15623812

I'm not a utilitarian myself, but this is a based story.

>>15624230

Where did he say he's okay with people stealing things from him? He merely proposed giving something he has in abundance to someone else. Learn to read.

>>15623542
I remember when I was like 11-12 I would try to imagine what it would be like to be dead, or if I never existed to begin with. I still sometimes do it and I always feel a bit sick if I think about it for too long.

>>15623542
Why do we exist?

"For whom is the difference of the system itself can only exist as the being of the difference that make the difference of the thing that corresponded the system from within"

Not exactly philosophical but I used to do the following when I was very young

When I was very young I used to ask all the adults why we couldn't invent new colours

I also used to do some form of proto-meditation whereby I would close my eyes and focus until I saw small movements of 'stars' that would form into a very bright and colourful fast moving tunnel. I would sit like that for up to an hour

>>15624735
why do they exist?

>>15623542
The sun comes up and down in and from the ocean.

>>15624587
Get an alien fleshlight

>>15623812
Based

I was in 4th grade when I wondered "is the red I'm seeing the some color as the red others are seeing" I thought about it and about if there was any way for it to be tested out. I ended up confused resting assured that it must be like that because everyone feels the same way about it. I tried to ask my teacher but she just kinda said, 'what do you mean?'
Anyways I randomly thought about it sometimes then in my early teens I came to the realist take on the problem of universals.
Then everyone clapped and my parents started calling me "quite the little intellectual"

I really like astronomy and cosmology and remember asking my mom around age 6 or 7 "if the universe started as a big bang, who made the big bang -- was it God?"

The universe must be infinite, unless something outside of the universe exists. A non-infinite universe is a self-contradiction. If the universe were not infinite, then it would be bounded about by nothing. But if something is bounded about by nothing, it has no boundaries, and is consequently infinite. Either the universe is infinite or something exists outside of the universe as a boundary to it.

>>15623542
I was 17 and I went for a walk out to some cliffs late at night. A family member had passed away recently and I was wrestling with my belief in God at the time (I was and still am the only Christian among my immediate family). I took a break by the entrance to a field and looked directly above to see a perfectly round hole in the clouds through which I could see the stars. I remember wondering if that window had been put there for me, and eventually found myself asking why I wouldn't immediately attribute such an occurrence to random chance.

>>15623609
You got unlucky

i dont remember exactly what it was but i was like 7 and i dropped and spilt my packet of color crayons or whatever and i started crying and after awhile i was like "why do i even care" while staring off into the distance. It was a great view. I looked into the toos of these tall pine trees and the sky above, just the sheer concept of the sky was mind boggling to me, i understood just how tiny i am and how miniscule my life and the bullshit problems that i worried about, never was quite the same aftet that.

STEMlord here. It has been like two and a half thousand years. Have you philosophyniggers already figured out whether or not there will be a sea battle tomorrow?
Accepting yes or no answers or some probability distributions.

>>15625935
Ask a better question, like: will you be a lifeless virgin bugman the rest of your life? The answer is yes.

>>15624906
You're all just creepy

>>15623542
Why should I go to hell for not believing in a God that won’t respond to peoples cries.

>>15623542
When I was quite young I'd play a game with my brother where we would ask each other "Why" to a statement until we weren't able to answer it. I don't think I came to any epiphanies, but it did make me comfortable with not having a ground for knowledge.

What is a man?

i had a huge crush on some girl. the way i viewed her as an object of beauty before/during/after the crush made me question the objective existence of everything

lol

>>15623542
I spent a lot of time as a little kid ‘philosophizing,’ sort of, while holding certain bad assumptions to be unquestionably true, which would result in me tying my brain into knots for hours trying to resolve the contradictory conclusions I inevitably drew. A pretty early example I remember (I must have been around 8) is puzzling over the fact that laws and constitution of the USA were ‘real,’ or official or valid or whatever, whereas if I were to write out my own set of ‘laws’ on a piece of paper, those laws clearly wouldn’t be as real as the US ones. Since both were just writing on paper, it seemed obvious to me that ‘real’ laws must be written in a certain special way which made them real. I spent a long time racking my brain, trying to figure out what exactly had to be written, and how exactly it worked to make the laws written in it official. I actually came to a kind of interesting conclusion, which was that, because whatever technique I might think up, which would be supposed to make certain laws real, could then just be copied by someone else to realize a set of contradictory laws, no set of laws could truly be considered real. Any ‘real’ set of laws was essentially a guidebook to its own nullification. But instead of becoming an anarchist, I was just confused, because the laws in the US were clearly still the only real ones, even though there was no way in which they could have been written to make them real. I thought about a lot of things like that from a really early age, and they’re fun to remember because a lot of the reasoning actually seems pretty good to me, but I tended to fail at the outset by accepting ridiculous premises.

Once I almost ran onto the road which would've lead to me being hit by a car.
My mother stopped me and scolded me saying along the lines of "if you die you'll be in complete nothingness forever".
Really fucked me up and I ended up thinking about what that would be like for a long time as a really small kid.
At first I imagined that it would be like floating in empty space but then I realised I wouldn't have a body if I'm dead so I thought it would be like floating without any of my senses, and then I realised I wouldn't even be able to think because my brain wouldn't work if I'm dead. Eventually, many years after I first started thinking about it, I was like "what happens to computers when they break?" and I was like "yeah I guess my body will be here but my brain won't work", and that was that.

I remember when I was like 5 telling my cousin how there was no objective way to describe a colour in words and we could very well perceive the same colours completely differently

>>15623542
I must have been 7 and looked in the mirror and asked "Why did God make us who we are and why am I not someone else?" and "What does the world look like through someone else's eyes?"

>>15623609

>>15623542
When i was i child i treated my mother in a very onfensive way so i went to my room. There i was checking my school books about religion because i had a homework i guess and i saw a picture of hell. I feared god with all my inocence and felt very bad about what happened with my mom

I used to draw lizards and bugs on rocks and arrange them in different shapes in order to communicate with the earth and spirits

>>15626277
based

When i was like 8 I used to think about whether my blue was the same as everyone else's blue, or whether my blue is someone else's red.

>>15623542
Why does god create tigers if they kill

is santa real

>>15623542
Good thread, OP.

Mine was picturing space with stars and planets and how vast it was, trying to fathom how it has "expanded out" and asking my Dad, "What's outside the universe?"

Another one a little later was: what's in between air particles?

>>15623542
I thought about how what you want to do is always hard. You want to eat healthy, but healthy food tastes bad. You want to get good grades, but it's harder than failing. You want to be a good person, but it's hard to do. I thought life was very ironic for this reason, too.

>>15623588
kek

>>15623542
>everything is alive

>>15623819
Same here. I remember I would sit and stare for hours on end at this toy chest I had and wonder what it was really composed of and what it really was.

>>15623542
Around 4/5 when I was first learning basic math, I realized not only people die, but that they die in their 70s/80s usually. I realized then, that I had limited time with my mom and my dad, and that was the first time I cried beyond simple child things. I came to terms with death, and since then I've done my best to spend my time with my friend and family even if the activities themselves aren't super entertaining. It isn't the "hyper-philosophical" stuff people are posting here, but this thought still acts as the foundation for my world/ethical value system, and is very valuable to me.

>>15624173
Runescape taught me more about financial markets and human psychology than public school ever did.

My elementary school playground was next to a cemetery.

I remember wondering what it was like to be dead and imagining myself buried in it.

I was 5/6.

my dad says that when i was a toddler I said to him 'a circle is infinity' so that's the earliest abstract thought of mine that I know of. the earliest strictly philosophical thought I remember having was around age 12 (though I probably had philosophical thoughts well before this that I don't remember) something to do with how seemingly small variables will invisibly affect your life immensely. I was also obsessed with atheism and defining 'life' at around this age.

>>15626345
Opoop*

>>15626345
damn, you just reminded me that I had those exact same thoughts as a kid

>>15627311
Taught me less and I'd be six levels of retarded if I kept watching anime through high school

“How do I know I’m not dreaming / just came into existence” after I flopped onto my bed first day of kindergarten, closed my eyes, and immediately woke up the next day, freaked me out

>>15627344
I was very aggressive about trading and for a year or so, I exclusively traded items on the GE because it was entertaining.

"We're only a speck in the universe, we don't mean much in the grand scheme of things"

When I was about 5 I became a solipsist, but it turns out I just had aspergers.

"I hurt greatly for my care towards my mother's illness. How can I rationalize this suffering? Where does it come from and what do I do with it?"

"My dick feels no pleasure, yet I pump"

>>15623542
That my parents would die someday and how i would feel about it. Cried like some pussy 8yo faget

>>15623609
Yes this

>>15623812
Based

What will be after death. I was hugging my teddy bear and I was 5-6 years old.
>>15623588
Kek'd

"Are" other people the way that I "am"?

I thought that destiny was something granted to the individual. I still believe in that for I never expected to be interested in literature as today.

>>15623542
Are synthetic a priori judgements possible?

>>15623542
"What came before?"

>>15623588
Kek

derealizing in bed and zooming out to see myself in my room, then my town, the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, universe and having a minor panic attack trying to imagine non existence, and god before time.
Also being in the shower and realizing that the whole of my existential experience is forever confined to a fleshy shell and two eyeballs, just a tiny periscope who thinks of itself as everything.
That was at 6 through 12, then at 15 I came up with pessimism on my long daily walks to school.

12 year old me

"Pee ought to be stored in the balls"

>>15623542
I poop, therefor I am.

"what if i exist entirely in someone's dream" at about 6-7

>>15628399
>at 15 I came up with pessimism

Honestly, who doesn't?

>>15623542
people are stupid faggots.

>>15626131
Very interesting insights in political philosophy.

>>15626181
>>15623609
Same here, but I went another step and claimed to my dad "I'm lucky I am a human, I could have been born a donkey!"
He totally did not understand my point but now I realize how some cultures came up with ideas of reincarnation.

>>15628074
Yes you dummy. Kant proved it, by adding original concepts to whatever object you are judging.

I don’t know.

>>15623605
Man this hit me in the feels. Had similar experience. Got fucked with by teachers too. Completely shut down. Stopped doing homework, stopped organizing desk, stopped doing work in class, stopped talking to other kids. I distinctly remember thinking : "if I stop acting like I exist they'll have to leave me alone".
In highschool I'd get detention a bunch for any and all reasons. One time they decided they'd give me after school detention from 2:15 to 7:30 every day of the week for the whole semester. I guess they were expecting me to do work but I'd just take a chair into the corner and stare at the wall the whole time. Couple years of doing that and they gave up on giving me detention all together. Sometimes I still do it at home.

>>15623707
ahahaha

>>15628979
Kek, I was playing around anon. I doubt five year old me could have understood Kant. In all seriousness, my first contemplations were probably rudimentary questions regarding the question of selfhood and individuality. What makes me, indeed me? Why do I occupy this body and not another? Fast forward 15 years and I had the pleasure of reading Schopenhauer.

>>15628045
Still think of this one all the time.

>>15623542
That time destroys the past, and so therefore will destroy every achivement and memory we have that is made in time, it will destory everything we love, and will it destory our selfhood.

>>15625935
Maybe

>>15629030
Same energy

>>15623542
In 7th grade, started to read the bible and suddenly asked myself: If God knows the future does that mean that free will doesn't exist? If he knows tommorrow I'll eat macaroni, does that mean that because He can't know otherwise, I couldn't eat anything else? Made me feel real smart back then but now I realise the choice is still yours, even if God knows it or not.

>>15625957
That doesn't even qualify as ad hominem. I thought you guys were supposed to be good at this.

>>15629109
Please quantify.

>>15628400
Shitty sense of humor

>>15623542
It was probably something along the lines of why I hear my own voice inside my head and why have thoughts that converse with yourself at all.

Basically wondering what the hell a conscience even is.

>>15623542
Must have been „Why am I alive?“.

>>15623542
"nothing is necessary"

the impossibility of proof because of infinite regress of propositions, solipsism

>>15630479
>the impossibility of proof because of infinite regress of propositions
You mean asking your parents why why why why why why why why why until they are unable to answer?

>>15630531
Pretty much, except I was aware of the implications

>>15629274
I'm not convinced by this; if God knows you to eat the macaroni (and the quality of the eating in an omniscient way etc), then you're always already going to eat it, i.e. you are a being inscribed with the quality of something which will eat the macaroni in xyz way. Even if this fact is, initially, beholden to your agency in some way, this scenario renders in you the quality of not being able to make any choice but that, which at best is agency to actually choose a single thing, which does not sound like free will to me.

>>15630715
"beholden to your agency" in the sense of you being a being that ceteris paribus has agency

>>15623542
when i suddenly got why "I think therefore I am" is an important statement, death scared me as a kid and i was in complete denial of reality

>>15623542
When I was really little I remember trying to think about what it was like to see myself from the third person.

>>15623542
I remember wondering how I knew I wasn’t a dog sleeping and dreaming I was human

I remember hearing about reincarnation and the idea that you could be born into an entirely different set of circumstances with no knowledge of your past life. I was about nine and I panicked as I thought that if I were to die now before my family and be reincarnated all that I knew and loved would cease to exist and I might be reincarnated as some baby to another family. I might somehow one day grow up and walk past my former family. I then thought how I might have already walked past my previous family from before my reincarnation and felt sad about my previous family.
I felt a surreal sadness and existential angst in the face of such a concept.

>>15623542
I remember a few "philosophical" thoughts that I used to wrestle with as a young lad. When I look back on those very simple ponderings I realize that I'm concerned with essentially the same philosophical conundrums. Before the age of 10 I was contemplating what non-existence and non-being would be like. I would try to visualize this and would always come to see the void as an infinite white space. Another conclusion I drew at a young age had to do with the subjectivity of the temporal experience, but even to this day I don't feel like I could accurately convey what this conclusion was. All I can remember is that I was sitting on the toilet and suddenly realized that time is nonlinear and that there is no progression of time only a sudden dissultion of it from whatever point in time the subject reflects back on it.

>>15623812
> communists btfo by a 5 year old
Oh ya I’m thinking that’s based

>>15623542
"This is pointless."