/lit/ - Literature

>>19616101
Sartre has some stuff about this and his idea of radical freedom. I've only read one play by him, but I imagine he deals with it in his fiction.

>>19616101
No, we're being brainwashed and I think someone got too queasy about deaths. I personally had some pretty normal attempts get squashed. I'm just waiting for an opening.

This is SOVL, this is being alive, this is human
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakai_incident

>>19616101
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

>>19616128
Well, actually, that's being dead.

>>19616116
>I imagine he deals with it in his fiction
Which fiction?

>>19616101
The Myth of Sisyphus

>>19616174
Nope, their metaphysics suggested rebirth cycles so because of this they'll be reborn into something greater.

check out Thaddeus Metz "Meaning in Life" also this philos ref https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/

>>19616101
Isn't it just nature?
Life's meaning is just the will to live.

>>19616101
It's really not hard to understand with even a basic understanding of evolution. Pessimists or people who see the "real" state of humanity would almost all have removed themselves from the gene pool long ago.

>>19616342
>biological materialists really believe this

>>19616351
What he said is true and you're coping, dude

>>19616361
Genes are more complex. Ppl get depression still despite having been evolving for billions of years. So there's something positive about depression or pessimism that may be derivatively linked.
In any sense, hopefully the material limitations don't take this ability away.

>>19616361
>>19616374
Also it doesn't explain ppl doing anything dangerous at all and yet ppl commit suicide daily (numbers have increased since a century ago).

>>19616101
On the origin of species. The impulse to survive is not exclusive to humans op. If anything, suicide is

>>19616101
You don't need a book.

Just because you've realized life is meaningless torture doesn't mean the parts of your brain that madly preserve itself all of a sudden shut off.

This is also the answer to "why don't antinatalists kill themselves" question; Because the same drives they lament are the ones that keep them thriving. Its called a catch-22.

>>19616419
Are you an anti-natalist?

>>19616440
I don't plan on reproducing, but I'm not one to say the entire production line of humanity must stop.
That's too big for me.

>>19616451
You do you, anon

Merry Christmas

Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter

>>19616459
Why? Do you think we should stop the game cold? Seems like such a gnarly decision.

Merry Christmas 4U

>>19616502
I don't know, to be honest

I'm very weary of life at the moment (21) I hope it's something I learn to deal with in time.

I work with children and they respond well to me, the women at work often tell me that I'm going to make a good father. Browsing this place and being exposed to philosophical pessimism/anti-natalism has made me question the morality of reproduction, though.

>>19616568
Are you Zapffe guy?
That's probably my fault. I've been touting him on here for years.

It gets easier. Like I said, even through hearing the repeated condemnations towards existence, I STILL haven't made up my mind. Even Zapffe only had access to so much of reality. I do agree with his assessment though; With what little we have to go on, life is pretty brutal.

I don't see how one can browse a /rekt/ thread and come out an optimist. They must lack the imagination to see that one day that will be them. Tolstoy said something akin to "...that one day the turn of fortune that made me a Solomon will make me a Solomon's slave."

>>19616596
Yeah, I'm actually the obsessive Zapffe poster.

It's a shame that I stumbled across his work. Seeing the world in this way has made my life a lot more difficult. It's as if I immediately deconstruct everything around me to a feeble attempt at dealing with our reality. You're right, I was just thinking about the rekt thread thing today. You can't recover a hopeful view of life after that.

I'm trying to let go of holding Zapffe as some kind of all-knowing guru.

>>19616655
It might just be that you're empathetic and something about the cruelty never squared with you. Don't necessarily blame a memetic hazard. That piece of information fit with you because you already had the slot for it.

I came to it like this; I was a happy drummer, most of my needs were met, I developed an illness, had to quit the band, and one day I said "wow, so you can really just suffer for no reason, for no fault of your own!"

It was then I realized that suffering is the most important currency, the most important human question. It was later I found Zappfe through Ligotti. The hardest bit is honestly the alienation. Something the bible says over and over again is "let he who has eyes, see." That's how I feel about pessimism anymore; I'm only going to be able to talk to those who see. That crappy book is good for a nugget or two.

So I had a negativity bias at that point, and I bet you did as well. If it gets too bad, get help. I have, and it helps.

>>19616684
I appreciate the reply, anon. I'm a musician as well and art has been my light through this perpetual existential crisis.

I absolutely had a negativity bias when I discovered Zapffe. I intuited something similar to TLM in high school. I'm mentally unwell (clinical depression/severe anxiety) and medicated for it. It's confusing, trying to determine the objectivity of my thoughts because I look around and see most people getting on just fine.

I know he was apparently refuted by Zapffe but I plan to study Nietzsche in attempt to change my angle on suffering. It doesn't make consciousness any less malignant but I do find peace in knowing that materialism isn't written in stone.

>>19616101
Man's Search for Meaning

>>19616736
I get where Nietzsche was going. I think radical acceptance can be a great motivator.

Look at it like you've found a thread to pull on in the world. Most people live their lives dancing around the problem, but you've identified at least part of it. You can live a long life, but ignorance of suffering won't be part of it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just prohibits you from a sort of shallowness, which like I said, can be alienating.

Take care of yourself.

>>19616101
For fiction that does an interesting job on examining it, read Stephen King’s short story Survival Type. It’s King at his most edgy, but it really does get to the heart of humanity’s drive to live even when it stops making sense.

>>19617534
Survivor Type, not Survival, damn it.

>>19616101
Warhammer 40K

>>19616764
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I enjoyed reading your exchange. I'm Norwegian, so I've read just about all of Zapffe's works and watched hours of interviews. I've also read an authorized biograpgy. He kept it going for a long time, but he seems to have suffered the same fate as many other people who discover pessimism at a young age. He spent several years playing chess at a cafe after he had a major depressive episode in his early 20s where he ended up dropping out of school. He discovered pessimistic philosophy. He wrote the last Messiah. These things stayed with him until he died in the early 90s. I suspect the same thing happens to every honest pessimist. You can still have a long and relatively enjoyable life, but this shit will stick with you if you really take it in at a young age.

>>19618839
You're fortunate given most of his work is untranslated.

You seem to be a knowledgeable source so do you mind answering a couple questions for me? I'm curious to know if Zapffe was interested in the materialism/idealism debate and what his position was. I'm assuming he was some kind of materialist.

Also, after having read so much of his work, are you in full agreement with his diagnosis of our condition? Do you believe that there's hope for us or that we should allow humanity to go extinct.

Have you discovering anything in opposition to Zapffe or a criticism of his work?

It's odd how my story (and probably the story of many anons) is so similar to his. I was a moody teenager but had my first real depressive episode at 19, discovered pessimism soon after and have never fully recovered from it.

>>19616101
Suicide is for fags.

For much of history, suicide was treated as a crime against one's tribe. The book The Ethics of Suicide provides a chronological history of suicide across various cultures and civilisations.

>>19616101
>Deliberately choose a life of perpetual misery over just offing themselves silently.
It's only like 80 years. Might as well see it through. You could at least become an adrenaline junkie and, besides maybe enjoying yourself, end up in an accident that gets the job done for you. Maybe even get a life insurance payout for those left behind. Like do something with your death instead of just give in to your broken brain.

Kierkegaard - the sickness unto death or fear and trembling :-)

>>19616101
>Is there a book about humans' absurd drive to stay alive? No matter how shitty someone's life is, they'd rather clench their teeth and endure it than end their existence. Deliberately choose a life of perpetual misery over just offing themselves silently.
wew that's some projection there...

>>19619224
>Materialism versus idealism
I'd classify him as a materialist
>Am I in full agreement with his diagnosis of our condition?
Yes. We will never solve the issues discussed by Zapffe, and humanity will never opt for voluntary extinction. Not that we need to, since we'll go extinct someday whether we like it or not. It's actually interesting how so many anti-natalist activists who quote Zapffe think they'll ever succeed in their mission. He knew no one would listen to him, and the part in The Last Messiah about being infertile and letting Earth remain silent after us was never meant as a serious suggestion. He said so himself.
>Have you discovered anything in opposition to Zapffe
Not really. The usual optimist copes and counter arguments from optimists. Most Norwegians aren't familiar with him, and the ones who are usually view him as le funny cranky pessimist man. He's not taken seriously in this nation of optimists.
I hope this didn't leave you with more questions than you started out with. His story resonates with me as well. Depressed and pessimistic from a young age, unable to shake it off. I kind of like it, though. While it has robbed me of my last copes, it has also made my inner life richer and more exciting.

>>19619445
Zapffe is a spook.
-Stirner

>>19619530
They knew about eachother?

>>19619445
I don't know why but I imagine Norway as being much more receptive to pessimism.

Are you a materialist yourself, by the way? Do you feel like the anti-natalist project is futile?

From what I understand there's an entire organization devoted to Zapffe and anti-natalist activism.

Bump

>>19616101

If exercising is not as virtually natural to you as breathing, and if you are not prepared to leave your home at any moment, or are not prepared to lose your job at any day, something is already wrong.

>>19619685
>...I imagine Norway as being much more receptive to pessimism

I can see why. Cold and dark, black metal, quiet and introverted people... Gave birth to people like Zapffe, Bjørneboe, Hamsun and so on... You get the picture. The sad truth is that most Norwegians don't really give a damn about existential questions. We're just like any other people in that most of us use one or more of the coping mechanisms Zapffe listed in The Last Messiah.

>"The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner."

This is true for most Norwegians. We are ridiculously wealthy, which means we have plenty of distractions at our disposal. Mix that with an extremely conformist culture and you get Norway. Who cares if none of us believe in God? We have long since replaced him with other copes. While it is true that Norwegians, especially young ones, are becoming more and more depressed, it's not the existential kind of depression. Most of them are incredibly naive and don't know the first thing about philosophy. The increase in depression and anxiety is mostly due to school, work, social media, consumerism, expensive housing, loneliness, worrying about things like climate change and so on. These are all valid reasons for being depressed and anxious, but they're not rooted in pessimistic philosophy of the kind Zapffe preached. Most people think life is "worth it", and if they don't, it's usually due to issues of a more personal nature. Divorce, terminal illness, financial ruin, lack of social interaction and/or sex etc.

>Are you a materialist?

Honestly, I don't know. Is there a world "out there"? Yes. Can we access/analyze/understand it using our senses? No. Can we ever explain what "reality", if such a term even makes sense, actually is? No. Can we ever know ourselves? No. Are our sense perceptions accurate? Our moral judgements? Our beliefs about the world "out there"? Our predictions? No. This is a huge discussion, but I guess my answer would be no. I lean toward a kind of idealism, but it's complicated. I think I'll take many of these questions with me to the grave.

>Do you feel like the anti-natalist project is futile?

One hundred percent. Anti-natalism will never catch on. How could it? Humans are animals whose main goals are survival and reproduction. We will keep on trying to spread our genes to the bitter end. I am honestly kind of surprised that anti-natalist activists, most of whom call themselves pessimists and worship philosophers like Zapffe and Schopenhauer, think they're gonna get anywhere. One of Zapffe's (and basically every other pessimistic philosopher I can think of) main points is that humanity is doomed to keep this shit going until we're forced into extinction by some external event.

>>19616342
brainlet

>>19616383
>>19616374
You guys have to realize the logic of evolution only has to work "on average". A runt is a natural occurrence that is obviously detrimental to reproductive fitness(in most conditions;some environments will of course select for smaller size), but everyone accepts that it can be caused by genes. The logic of natural selection indeed requires that in the variation between organisms in a mating population you have some with qualities much less reproductively successful. Depression is like being a runt.

With humans we have another obvious problem going on: we are constantly altering our environment, so we are not adapted to it and therefore much of our instinctive behavior may not work properly in it. Hence depression(or whatever else) being much higher than it would be in an environment more similar to those our ancestors spent thousands of years in. This is obviously kind of untestable, and really evolution in general is almost impossible to test and should be taken with a grain of salt.

But purely logically, or even we might speculatively, the existence of a small minority of people who do counter productive stuff doesn't contradict the logic of evolution anymore than the existence of a small amount of runts. Even many people acting in weird ways is not necessarily a problem if the environment they're in is new and they're not adapted to it.

>>19620094
Ran out of space for my post, but to finish it off with an even more brutal blackpill...
The ironic thing is that anti-natalist activism is a mix of several Zapffean coping mechanisms. He BTFOs modern day anti-natalists in his own essay when he says that:
>...he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised.
and
>...Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life)...
This is what anti-natalist activists do. They sacrifice themselves for the anti-natalist cause. Deciding not to have children, becoming a vegan, teaching people about wild animal suffering... blah blah blah... Joining a Discord or making a Twitter profile to get in contact with other anti-natalists, meetups, posting on 4chan and making anti-natalist threads... the list goes on. Anti-natalists (especially people like Benatar and the other idiots who get into stupid discussions about the ethics of having children and so on) have fallen for one of the biggest copes of them all, which is moral philosophy. Zapffe mentions this as a "main firmament" of any culture, and the anti-natalism-as moral philosophy is one of the main firmaments of the anti-natalist subculture. So is a belief in the future (a future where they manage to either wipe out humanity or convince a certain amount of people not to have kids, thus reducing suffering) and "the people", which is their little anti-natalist community. The anti-natalist subculture that has arisen (mostly online) in the last decade or so is full of arrogant people who don't see their own copes for what they are. What they're actually doing is using anti-natalist philosophy and activism as elaborate anchoring mechanisms. I mean, what's not to love? You get to be one of the few people who have discovered "The Truth", AND you get to fight "The Good Fight" by preaching the anti-natalist gospel in order to reduce suffering or whatever it is these people imagine that they are doing. They're also engaging in sublimation by making YouTube videos, forum posts, songs, drawings and so on. I'm saying this as someone who agrees with Zapffe one hundred percent, if that wasn't obvious already.

>>19616342
>>19620172

Pessimism, Efilism, Antinatalism are perennial ideas, the ONLY perennial ideas.

>>19620213
>the ONLY perennial ideas

What do you mean by this

>>19620213
I'm not making a statement about pessimism. I was just talking about the internal coherence of evolutionary logic. There are other problems with evolution in any case, it's just that the existence of imperfect or counterproductive behavior is not really one of them.

I dont think it's off topic for a pessimism thread because I do see people grounding pessimist thoughts in evolution a fair amount

>>19620201
Well, I have to ask how you're managing after accepting such a brutal philosophy

There's no escape from illusion so what illusion is seeing you through, anon?

>>19620201
Is there not a conflict between total amorality and pessimism? Isnt pesismism in some sense a moral judgement. I'm sure there is some obvious answer to this that's just not popping out at me

>ctrl+f stranger
>phrase not found
I know it's not that great, but come on, OP is literally asking for a book about humans' absurd drive to stay alive. I don't think there's a better summary of that book.

>Is there a book about humans' absurd drive to stay alive? No matter how shitty someone's life is, they'd rather clench their teeth and endure it than end their existence. Deliberately choose a life of perpetual misery over just offing themselves silently.
>I find this fascinating and want to read discussions around the subject.

>>19616101
The world as will and representation.

>>19616101
Schopenhauer talks a lot about our inane will to live

>>19620515
Kek just saw this after I posted ! Schopenbro

>>19618839
>I enjoyed reading your exchange
That's good. Its a conflict for me. I think an honest discussion about quality of life is important, but I worry about exposing sensitive types to too much pessimism.

>I've read just about all of Zapffe's works and watched hours of interviews
You are such a cock. I wish I could read all of Zapffe. We really need to get a translation project going.

>>19620504
Based.

>>19620766
Absolutely

I'm sure there's a lot more to his philosophy than what is contained in TLM

>>19616101
Bump

>>19616247
Or they’re just dead forever over fake bullshit.

>>19621370
Or tomorrow never comes, all your memories are false, and today is the only day you get.

>>19616101
>>19616128
Human beings, without luxury or the solitude and time to intellectualise, are very pragmatic and mostly happy. Suicide doesn't exist in the mind of someone who hasn't put their intellectualisations and ruminating thoughts above life and all the simple and mostly fulfilling things in work, socialising, community, entertainment, etc. One exception is the kind of edgy pretence given by various media that can make people pretend they entertain darker things, but it's weak only a side fancy to their real life. It's also a bit different today given the problems inherent in technological society.

Not even memeing right now. Read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and you'll instantly just how great of a life you have even if you're poor as fuck and not struggling right now. This book can give you an appreciation for the life you have no matter where you live.

>>19622759
Does watching Mexican cartel videos make you appreciate your life, no matter what, because at least its not that?

>>19616101
read Bataille

>>19622962
I don't think watching Mexican cartel videos and reading a well thought out novel is the exact same thing

>>19616101
Schopenhauer and Freud.

>>19623009
No, the former is actually real

>>19623015
how do you know?

>>19623020
Ah yes, all videos we see online could be clever fakes. Everything could be fake. Thank you for reminding me, o'Neill consider you fake as well

>>19623023
you probably don't read much desu

depths on this subject are open for exploration
its a matter of any prose out there you want to put your back against. I think its important for us to figure some guidelines between natural instinction and hyper evolution....its very easy to conform into a time capsule given that life is short. The discussion starts with tolerance ...mental...physical...whats your stance?

i can easily say based on whats being shilled here constantly on this website 24/7 that your thoughts will go unanswered by anyone...the faggot ( you) jannies ( potentially) FBI degenerates are mocking everything this site had to offer for thought based on advertising sales.