/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21806577]

books that help with existential dread stemming from belief in terror management theory and the fact that this mediocre existence is all there is before the spotlights turn off and the show inevitably ends forever? reading the ending of stoner a few weeks ago was the moment i realised the magnitude of death for the first time, this realisation had been building up for a while and i used to think im a "positive nihilist" for quite a while but i never took in the full seriousness of the fact that i will be dying whether i like it or not, that experience will end whether i like it or not, that not only i will cease, but with me everything as ive known it as well.. whether i like it or not, whether ive come to terms with it or not. i love life and love looking for what this world has to offer ti me a lot.. but i never saw the upcoming void so clearly as i do now and im terrified of it, nothing i do to continue functioning in this society feels real anymore, my mentally ill mom screeching at me, my previously abusive dad trying to calm the situation while continuously (understandably) pulling me back into family matters all the time, me being pretty close to obtaining my degree, parents telling me tonhave a word with my little brother about taking school seriously, it all feels so unreal, i know the cards ive been dealt couldve been so much worse, i have a solid social circle, a family im in touch with, im young and born in a 1st world nation but i never really realised that this is really it and it drains me, my hobbies feel pointless, my previously burning interest in the humanities feels pointless, going out feels pointless

[Anonymous No.21806587]

advancements in technology feel pointless, going to the doctor feels pointless, caring about what happens anywhere feels pointless, the nihilism pill seemed all fun and games before..

[Anonymous No.21806595]

Nice text you wrote here. If I can give you advice, don't continue with school after your degree. Go around the state without money and do whatever.

[Anonymous No.21806620]

>>21806595
thx pal the anxiety has been building up for a while so i really needed to vent somewhere...

i might try to do this, ive always lived my life inside the boundaries of my parents plans and expectations of a well lived life (so breaking out of habit but be complicated) but it seems to be making me really unhappy and sad, roaming around might be harder here in europe than the states but it would be wasted time to now at least attempt to.

[Anonymous No.21806707]

What should scare you is that it might not be nothingness. It could be quantum torment, or CCC, or something we don't yet understand. Nature doesn't really care what happens.

[Anonymous No.21806728]

>>21806707
yea im aware that its probably a lot more complicated than what im imagining, itd be naive to assume that my current understanding of existence and non-existence isnt deeply flawed but dude, my worries and depressions were so much more fundamental before, dry and focused around the here and now, social life, family and career choice but this now seems to much to take in. i nowni have to since everyone does but every fucking single thing i see any adult do seems like a mega cope now, nothing feels real since im projecting my fears onto everyone and interpret every social or culture related action as motivated by fear of death exclusively which makes everything im doing and everything thats happening around me feel super unauthentic and weird. is it time for frontal lobe reconstruction

[Anonymous No.21806741]

anyways any books dealing with these kind of things? the only existential work ive read was the stranger by camus which still kinda left me with nothing after ive finished it, note that i did read it before ive stumbled into this weird statw of mind

[Anonymous No.21808326]

boomp

[Anonymous No.21808346]

To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hands,
And eternity in an hour
- The Auguries of Innocence, William Blake
Stop minimalizing your time and value life by doing with it what you wish, anon. The fact that it's fleeting makes it more beautiful and worth living. Life requires death to perfect it and vice versa.

[Anonymous No.21808365]

It's pretty simple, right?
If everything is put away to passing time, then everyone will forget at all your cringe moments. All those you hate will die.
Just accept that your life is temporal and present. You can make a difference right now, but not in the future. Even if you did, you wouldn't be around to witness it, so who cares. Historical legacy should come incidentally. Go be more concerned with mortal matters. Go find some BPD whore to fick your life at.
Ozymandias poem
QED

[Anonymous No.21808403]

>>21806577
Coward. Death is freedom.

[Anonymous No.21808457]

>>21808346
yea tha kind of seems obvious but what about literally any social norm, why should soneone ever be following set career paths, what was the kindergarten -> school -> university -> bs job grind all about when social prestige and value you pull out of your temporal accomplishment inside the boundaries of your meaningless job are nothing but quite possibly the biggest cope. why are so many people willing to follow these preset paths set by societal demand, explained through school and ibtroduced by parents. why do almost all people around me do one of the same 500 jobs that only exist during this part of human history, why is it so obvious to the majority of those people that they will do that and thus contribute to their nation/society if they couldve been living their own lifes instead. how does one life their own life if the traps of habit and bad memory lurk everywhere ready to pull you back into the hamster wheel any second

>>21808365
historical legacy is not something i concern myself with, its the eventual loss of experience im afraid of. all my life i conceptualized what follows after death as a world without me, now i see itll be nothing less than the end of the world

[Anonymous No.21808479]

>>21808403
i know im just an adult baby crying about not getting what it wants no worries, death seems like freedom until the moment you strip some of the symbolic meaning of it, its easy to abstract away its seriousness with poetic and lifestyle reaffirming slogans such as that one. nothing matters but its a lot more true than the sound of that sentence implies, it really does not matter. should i now disregard anyone whos advice is only bound inside the temporal and societal now? what reason is there to "have a proper job", what reason is there to do anything in this absurd world if im already on death row. one thing would be to maximize experience, but whyvdoes everyone do that inside societal frame theyre born in to why dont people (me included) still lack the willpower to flee from the context theyre specifically born into, why am i unable to flee from expectations even if, practically speaking, it shouls not be too hard

[Anonymous No.21808520]

>>21806577
Fear of death is narcissistic as it's the fear of losing your imagined self-image others perceive. Take LSD or don't eat and drink; have an ego death, and realize if the fear of death isn't present 100% of the time it isn't reality. Realize denial of death is preaching overarching truth when we know there's no overarching truth. Life doesn't feel real because you are focusing on another, imagined, world (the void), not this one.

Nagajunas' middle way will at least dismantle the transcendental argument that western knowledge uses to make totalizing claims like terror management theory.

Nietzsche's eternal return will guide your mind from focusing on another fictional world "the void" to focusing on this one. You live you life repeatedly for eternity so it's not meaningless but the opposite. Nietzsche was writing for people like you.

Hamlet for pleasure.

[Anonymous No.21808537]

>>21808520
yea i havent dropped acid in quite a while and wanted to wait it out a bit since i had a smaller paranoia attack all out of a sudden on weed and wanted to calm down a bit before messing with psychedelics or anything mind altering again tbqh. i did have an ego death in early 2020 by accident and i remember it having given me perspective on a lot of things back then but i seem to have forgotten the lessons learned and now im too much of a wuzz to actually take a proper dose

it is narcissistic but i cant help it it feels like.

anyways thanks regarding the reccs! especially nagajunas seems interesting, regarding the point you already made about claimed totalizing truths! i did my fair share of reading into theory about ideology and one overarching lesson i had learned is that anything that claims or seems to be the truth behind the curtains just is not it and by that claim alone inherently suspect, i fail to apply that cognitive knowledge at how im currently living life though, might have to do with stress + winter i reckon

anyways thanks again!

[Anonymous No.21809534]

boomp 2

[Anonymous No.21809641]

Read Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
Ecclesiastes 7:1
>A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.
Ecclesiastes 9:10
>Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

Anon, I understand that you are not religious. I will never meet you in real life, but I encourage you nonetheless; Christianity is misunderstood as mere religion, truly it is a relationship with God. Ask yourself, “why do I live, to be born and die?” There is more to existence than our short lives on earth. I will not sugarcoat it, you either go to heaven or hell, and I will simply ask you consider, whether nihilism leads you to heaven or hell. There is no “non-existence” no limbo.

[Anonymous No.21809898]

>>21809641
thanks dude, yea i was thinking on looking into the quaran and the bible anyways at some point, ill make sure to remember those passages.

without having had a deeper dive into christian matters except of what was conveyed to me through the western canon and growing up in a majority protestant western country it seems so so random for just one part of the population to be "correct" with their take seems as convenient as anything else too.

and i do wonder why im born, why im living and why im dying but with live being so absurd i do wonder why there should be anything with any proper self-given meaning, why should there be a meaning in a world that is so mundane where the career hamster-wheel is a thing, why should there be a god in a world in which people have to give a fuck about filing taxes and actually apparently care about politics or technological advancements or anything.

you say there is no limbo but the most strereotypical argument here would be the time before me, i am the beginning of time for myself but apparently im just a relative entrypoint for existence as my parents have entered it at previous points of time. if i dont have any memory of the before why should i have any memories of the now in the next after, how is it me that wakes up if theres no memory that made me me left. not also that but there is also the basedence argument regarding how fleeting and unstalbe consciousness seems to be, how tied to this material world it is.

anyways i thank you guys for entertaining this apparent quarter-life crisis of mine. it might seem like a funny atheist haha nihilist whatever breakdown but it is quite serious to me as i seem to have avoided asking myself those questions and actually grasping their full merrit properly until now. either that or i have lost memories of those crisises somewhere in the stream of the mundane

[Anonymous No.21809977]

>>21809898
Read Gilgamesh

[Anonymous No.21810019]

>>21806577
You just get over it.

[Anonymous No.21810027]

>>21809977
will do actually, probably next thing im gonna read after demian thx

>>21810019
yea i think so too tbqh as im not the first nor the last to be in exactly this position but its weird to think about a future me who will just have forgotten what im feeling rn, especially the seriousness of it

[Anonymous No.21810290]

>>21806577
>this mediocre existence is all there is before the spotlights turn off and the show inevitably ends forever
Imagine unironically believing this. There are a lot of plausible mechanisms for how an afterlife could exist, like eternal recurrence, quantum immortality, open individualism, cryonics, and living in a simulation.

https://alwaysasking.com/is-there-life-after-death/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65jdcvSOOjI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13yLq16QiM

[Anonymous No.21810310]

>>21806577
>Eternal oblivion is... LE SCARY!1
Why is nonexistence a bad thing? Ceasing to exist forever means you never have to suffer again. Eternal life sounds appealing until you realize how much suffering you could experience in your infinite lifespan. Eternal nonexistence sounds too good to be true.

[Anonymous No.21810316]

>>21806577
Read Feeling Great, by David Burns

[Anonymous No.21810444]

>fear of death
how? have you never suffered?

if death were certain, eternal oblivion 100% guaranteed, I would live every day with joy

I fear two things: hell and eternal recurrence

[Anonymous No.21810541]

>>21810290
Cope. You’ll die, I’ll die, everyone either of us has ever or will ever known will die. What happens next? Ask your ancestors. I’ll wait for your response from them

[Anonymous No.21810587]

>>21810444
id rather suffer with the knowledge that in every state of living i will experience highs and lows instead of not experience at all

[Anonymous No.21810629]

This might seem incredibly random, but how do you feel about farming?

I'm not saying give up your life and become a farmer, but considering taking a year or two and working some sort of outdoors job. It doesn't even have to be big capital F farming, you could work at an independent plant nursery or doing something in environmental works, something like that.

There is an unspeakable connection that you form with the world around you when your life is dictated by the natural forces of it. Everything revolves around the sun, the rain, the heat, the cold, all the things that exist as backdrops to our modern boxed in artificial lives become the center of it.

I also have a deep fear of non-existence and my inevitable inescapable doom, but when I talk to the birds and stand in a field of flowers humming with life as it's pollinated by thousands of wild honeybees - it helps. It reminds me of my part in this and stops me from seeing myself as outside of it. The crops, the birds, the bees, the sun - we're all intimately connected in deep and almost imperceptible ways.

To even glimpse at the level of this connectedness is a level of beauty I find difficult to describe.

I don't know if anyone here can help you but maybe nature can.

Good luck.

[Anonymous No.21810794]

>>21806587
Tldr
Meds. Now.
However I also have been feeling this way for a while. When I was a kiddo things somehow made more sense. Nothing much has changed yet I seem to care less with every day. I'm suspicious its neuro chemistry gone wrong but its like I don't even care if I get a medical assistance. Yet time and again universe butt kicks me and if there's a whip there's a will, and I keep on simulating a mentally healthy persona day in and day out.

[Anonymous No.21810826]

>>21810794
literally me, yea i actually just wrote my doc a mail to get a check up date and maybe a reccomendation for a therapist after a phone call with a friend of mine, nothing left to lose. it really does feel like i need frontal lobe reconstruction ngl, like somethings gone seriously wrong with my brain chemistry. its probably a mix of multiple factors having led to this feeling rn. you could write your doc a mail rn as well while youre at it

>>21810629
i might consider looking out for something similar after ive finished my degree next year. i just hope ill find the strength to take my life into my own hands and will do something like that instead of forgetting about what im feeling right now and continueing with the chiseled in part. thanks anon i wish you good luck too

[Anonymous No.21810842]

>>21806707
What the hell is ccc?

[Anonymous No.21811382]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

[Anonymous No.21811824]

>>21810629
I feel the same but about herpetoculture

[Anonymous No.21812170]

>>21806577
It seems often that nihilism, after prophesied for decades, is finally going to be the great struggle of our generation.

Even in the past when existential issues were more forefront in the philosophical sphere, the sense of nihilism was not as close and complete to the human soul as now.

The closest expression I can think of is Fight Club's speech about how that generation in the 90s had no great war, and that their great war is a spiritual war. But even then, the spiritual war was waged against alienation from society, backed by a righteous indignation spawned from the stagnation in contemporary consumerist overflow.

We have had the concept of the 'information age' for decades now, but still now in our lifetimes we have reached a level of complete over-saturation of information not only of raw facts about the world, but about the lives of others via social media. There is a rise of a truly global culture mediated by individuals, and not the conduits through which information is propagated (talk-shows, news, et cetera. in the age of TV culture).

Now, everybody is part of a seething mass of information and absorption and consumption and there are so many viewpoints, opinions, alternatives, belief systems, etc. to compare and contrast. Couple that with the effect of social media turning the gaze away from the outside world and inward, to your own self, searching for "identity" and searching for what "defines you", in order to paradoxically express yourself as an individual and to feel a sense of belonging to some cultural subgroup (an idea explored well by DFW in E Unibus Pluram), and we are met finally with a sort of categorical underdetermination.

There are always alternatives in view, there is nothing to believe. There is no certainty. As a rule, our culture has no faith in institutions. The government is listening and plotting and oppressing, the corporations are grinding and producing and advertising to the end of taking your money, higher education is a scam, and all of the esteemed ideas about what happiness looks like does not involve giving yourself to something greater (other than the abstract idea of 'OtHeR PeOpLe', or highly circumstantial cases like family/friends), and involves carving out your own little niche to exist in and somehow 'be happy'. Or, as it seems to me, to rot.

This all coagulates into a general despair, bringing about a sort of life-denial. So focused on ourselves, so lonely, we are searching for salvation in individualism, individualism which while I esteem in many cases, seems to be a great engine for this existential suffering. By seeking to separate ourselves from 'the mass' through this artificial and self-conscious individuation, we also embark on a journey of consciously separating ourselves from all other humans. We embark on a journey with the ostentatious goal of 'finding ourselves', but with the true effect of sacrificing our humanity. Of relinquishing our soul.
(1/8)

[Anonymous No.21812173]

>>21812170
>>21806577
The worst part about this is that the mechanism is not entirely individual. Even if you were to eschew this modern way of life, you cannot escape it except in total isolation, which would defeat the purpose of the rebellion. The effects of these phenomena seep naturally into culture at large, and from there eke their way into the soul.

More connected information-wise than ever, but never before as lonely and cut off from the nourishing elements of life and humanity, finally subject to the previously-only-looming nihilism.

Of course, you aren't expressing pain over this self-obsessed information culture, you are pained over the more pure existential issues. The issue of death and meaning, the terror of being a subjective consciousness that will cease, the horror at being a consciousness generated by a biological entity that seems to be otherwise indistinguishable from the material world that surrounds it. I get it.

The nihilism-engendering quality of science, especially in its great victory over religion (nietzsche, the death of god, anyone?) has also never been so keen. The mystery of wonder at the material world is now easily dispelled by a google search, the reverent joy is somewhat dissipated. No effort is needed--we are ingrained then with the belief that science holds all of the answers. But if we look deep enough we find that the deepest questions seem to be unanswerable by scientific inquiry: the nature of consciousness, the mechanism of ontology, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the reason underlying natural constants, and probably some others that don't come to my mind immediately. Coupled with the modern faith that science can explain pretty much anything, there is an immediate terror: it fails us just at the most important and deep point of inquiry, it takes us to an edge promising it will explain everything, and shows us the abyss that is uncrossable.

And so, there is a twofold pain here. Not only do we perceive that humans, subject apparently to the laws of the material world, are forever damned to a state of epistemic pessimism and an almost lovecraftian island of ignorance, as a categorical rule and not merely a case of 'not having figured it out yet' (that scientific materialists so often love to espouse, stupidly), but the faith that has been cultivated in us by society is also shattered, much like the faith in religion was with the rise of modernism and industrialism, a century and some change ago.

There are other sources of this abject existential terror, too. Surely, talking about the profound and categorical underdetermination of our culture, it also lends itself to the terror of the inductive leap, which seems to be absolutely central to the whole human knowledge affair: induction is a fallacy, even if it seems to work well. There is no logical foundation to assert the fact that "things in the future will behave as they have in the past".
(2/8)

[Anonymous No.21812176]

>>21812173
>>21806577
It is similar, too, to the mechanism of the cogito: I think, therefore I am, but that is all I can ever know with certainty, for perhaps this reality is merely an illusion proffered to me and maintained by a Cartesian demon. All knowledge beyond is, on some level, blind faith.

I can go on and on and on about more of the abstract/philosophical sources of the existential terror you feel. It would serve no purpose. I mean only thus far to illustrate the connection between these abstract terrors, known for centuries, with the state of the modern world. I cannot articulate an obvious linkage, but I'm sure you can see the resemblance. These abstract sources of existential terror, known in some cases for centuries, have now taken on a greater life of their own in our modern surrender to underdetermination.

And then we come to the solutions of old. How do we construct meaning? You have probably read about the various schools of existentialism in the past. I personally loved Camus. But they all still falter, and cannot satiate the human drive for absolute meaning, what Camus' called the 'nostalgia for unity', that plagues the human mind. Even Camus' answer, the self-driven and perpetual human revolt against the meaninglessness as a way to claim some definite victory over it, has the same great weakness shared by every attempt towards meaning or a substitute towards meaning: "Who cares?"

This is the real difficulty with nihilism. It is all-consuming. It eats whatever you throw at it, with no exception. "Make your own meaning." Who cares? You can say that you yourself care about your own self-fashioned 'meaning', but who cares that you care? Nothing new is gained, no certainty is established, no new knowledge generated. Even the oldest and historically longest-lasting source of the human sense of meaning, religion, is vaporized by the maw of nihilism: so God comes down from the heavens, ultimate, possessing the triad of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and asserts some meaning to life. Who cares? Why should you care, anyway? Corner a devoutly religious person in this position and you will probably gain a little bit of amusement as you watch them squirm, and see the gears in their head begin to grind (assuming they don't have some cop-out solution: "because otherwise you'll go to hell!" -- again, who cares, why is being happy better than suffering?)

Socrates is heralded as a great figure of human knowledge, but in this light he becomes a great and terrible destroyer. The Socratic method, the incessant "why", defeats any belief at all.
(3/8)

[Anonymous No.21812178]

>>21812176
>>21806577
So then there are of course attempts to get around this: instead of meaning, there is the idea of nietzschean life-affirmation. A sort of experiential focus: the alternative to 'meaning' is the self-metric of whether or not, in the context of voidal nothingness and nihilism, if the very experience of your life was worth living, and possibly (if you're an eternal return kind of guy) worth living over and over again ad infinitum. In less formal terms, this would be the attitude of "making the most" of your life. Living with some nietzschean gravity.

This argument has some substance in it (maybe I'll get to this later), but it too suffers from a great weakness: life-affirmation, as a state of the self or soul, is tied to the deeper questions that themselves engender terror and nihilism. How are you to ever come to an understanding of whether or not you believe that your life was worth living if you cannot answer the following: "Who am I?", "What am I?", "What is the self?", "What do I want?", etc.

These questions, terrible and scary in their own right, require the substantive, certain evidence that we are trying to navigate around in the first place. Perhaps for the Nietzschean Ubermensch, this is no problem, self-generator of eternal gravity he is, but he is an ideal, not a human. In any case, certainty in any of these things would still amount to blind faith on some level, in this case the level of self-knowledge, the type of knowledge perhaps hardest to ever obtain.

And so we then come back to the crux of the issue: to restate, nihilism is all-consuming. So how do we resolve this? To further explore this issue, we must be very single-minded in our desire for truth over relief. We have to continue to think, here, with not the goal of soothing our existential terror but instead of trying to get at the truth of whatever deeper underlying mechanism afflicts our condition. The terror in your gut has to remain, for now.

The fact of the matter is, having taken you this far and assuming you've even read this shit, that I have no real answers and no certainty for you. And neither does anybody else. But, as someone else suffering from the same thing you are, I am going to at least try to offer something at least a little substantive to you.

I don't know how I feel about 'epistemic' truth. There is no certainty beyond the cogito, and so any claim to further truth by a subjective consciousness is possibly wrong. But personally, I believe that there are 'great truths', something that seems similar but perhaps only analogous to the definition of truth in that it appears to reflect reality, and that in reckoning with great truths there at least seems to be something substantive to be gained.

My wordy explanation isn't very clear, so let me try very hard to illustrate. The sincerity of this argument makes it easy to laugh at (thanks for the extra layer of self-consciousness, DFW) but I encourage you to take time to mull it over.
(4/8)

[Anonymous No.21812181]

>>21812178
>>21806577
I believe that great truths are felt, not understood. A really nice cup of coffee during a cold morning. A beautiful sunset or sunrise. Crying from a poem. Feeling a work of art that touches your soul. The sensation of love. The worst, deepest suffering that you have ever felt. Losing a loved one. Achieving a goal. Feeling alive. Feeling like nothing is real. The way that the sunlight hits a gasoline stain on the highway, where you can see the fumes, smoky and purplish, as they filter off of the asphalt. Existential terror. Pure ecstasy. The joy of learning. The feeling when something 'clicks' and you understand it. Having your curiosity sated.

The gross sincerity of that little outpour is probably making you roll your eyes or scoff, especially if you've read this far. Please, though, really think about it. The argument is NOT that these things 'make life worth living', or that experiential joy is somehow a substitute for the meaning we desire, or somehow a rectifier of all our sufferings. The argument is only that there IS something to be gained, here. This is what I mean by 'great truth' or 'great truths'. (Is such a thing a multiplicity, or a unity? I don't know.)

Some more of this 'great truth', aphorisms this time, none particularly related to one-another:

You will die knowing less than when you came. Whatever it is, you can't take it with you. Some fates are preferable to others. All love is conditional. There is an end, but it is endless. If everything is meaningful, then nothing is meaningful--but the reverse is also true. Tragedy is comedy is also always profound and reverent joy.

We are on the literature board, and art is an abundant source of this idea of 'great truth' that I am trying to clarify. It is the first place that I ever felt the sensation. Examples:

The last paragraph of The Dead, by James Joyce.

"He sat and thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. That the world's heart beat at some terrible cost, that its pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity, and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower." -- McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses. (from memory, maybe not exactly--i read this in high school for a class, and it was the first time that any kind of art had touched my soul)

"He wanted devoutly to be forgotten [...] He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the ship sailing morningward toward the sun." -- DeLillo, Mao II (the whole passage, a couple of pages, is absolutely awe-ing. spoilers in it, though, if you haven't read the book)
(5/8)

[Anonymous No.21812185]

>>21812181
>>21806577
"I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon." -- Houellebecq, Eng. translation of Whatever

The bereavement poem "Do Not Stand By My Grave and Weep", by an otherwise unknown poet who was named I believe Clare Harner. The first poem that ever made me cry.

Rick Vigorous' 1 or 2 page monologue on the Amherst College campus in DFW's Broom of the System.

Speaking of DFW: many passages in Infinite Jest (Erdedy and the bug, Gompert's psychotic depression, Madame Psychosis' broadcast and the MIT engineer's night walk on the roof, Pemulis' explanation of marijuana addiction to Hal, Gately's (many many pages) internal thoughts at the hospital in the presence of the ghost), Mr. Squishy's neurotic main character, the passage by the religious guy having a meeting with his girlfriend over the possibility of an abortion in The Pale King (the only thing i've read from TPK, after an anon here on /lit/ called it 'the finest thing that DFW ever wrote'), DFW's speech "Laughing with Kafka". Sorry for all of these, I guess I'm a fanboy.

The passage in Pynchon's Lot 49 about Oedipa comforting the homeless guy suffering delirium tremens, the absolutely awe-inspiring connection to infinitesimal calculus (dTs of dt's of spectra). In his V., the proclaimed 'frat boy for life' at the sex-laden party being seen right through by a woman at first sight.

The ending paragraph of DeLillo's White Noise.

Sorry for the meme authors--call me a poser if you will. How about film?

Most of Scorcese's stuff. Taxi Driver, the dreamlike loneliness. Raging Bull, the rich depth of the story, the profound regret.

Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront. ("I could have been a contender, Charlie!")

James Dean in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause.

Tarkovsky's Mirror. I watched this one stoned out of my gourd, so maybe not as brilliant as a remember.

Citizen Kane.

Not a big film guy, but I do watch the artsy pretentious stuff as is maybe obvious. They still scratch the 'great truth' itch.

How about music?

The Man Who Sold The World has perfect lyricism, symbolism that is dense without being indecipherable or confusing--and Nirvana's Unplugged cover endows it with Cobain's unique (if showy) suffered affect.

Speaking of Nirvana--go listen to the demo version of Something In The Way. An extra verse not on the album version that has some powerful lyrics, if only because Cobain misses a couple lines because he can't hold back tears during the recording.

Endroll by Mass of the Fermenting Dregs is the only non-lyrical song that has ever touched me deep down. The vocalization in the second half is absolutely sublime, and even though its long its worth sitting through the instrumental first half for the build up.
(6/8)

[Anonymous No.21812190]

>>21812185
>>21806577
I'm pretty heavy on the shoegaze: for other asian stuff check out any of My Dead Girlfriend's stuff, "Like Our Life" by Kinoko Teikoku, and I found an interesting self-titled EP by kugatsuhascome with a first song that gives me a deep feeling I don't quite understand.

When The Sun Hits by Slowdive is my favorite shoegaze song. That sublime, spacey feeling that gets down into your bones.

Don't forget classic rock. Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along The Watchtower" is a fucking pinnacle.

Not to even mention Time by Pink Floyd.

So, this post chain is getting long enough. I didn't intend to write this much shit, but to be honest I'm fucking smacked on stimulant drugs right now--it makes it easier to write. I hope it also conveys to you the complexity of your fear and the topic you're trying to discuss: you can't really get truly deep discussion on an imageboard, because to untangle the shit you're dealing with it takes a several hour conversation with a lot of nuance to even make a dent.

But I hope what I'm trying to get through here is at least somewhat intelligible. Nobody has definite answers for you, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to take away your fear of death and your existential terror. It's part of being alive, and we live in an age of profound and near-total uncertainty that calls into question the most foundational parts of our existence. And if somebody isn't distracted by the rat race of self-obsession in our modern society, they are typically without solution or insight and are just as profoundly terrified of these questions as you are. You don't have many worthwhile friends in this battle.

And you will die. More than anything, as biological entities, we fear death and the cessation of our consciousness. Our greatest fear will come true, and as I said earlier, you will die knowing far less than when you arrived, and that whatever you gain, you cannot take it with you.

But despite (or because of?) all this, and in some way that I perceive as deeper than just blind faith, I guess I am a profoundly religious man. I have no faith in an afterlife (though I believe there are some plausible arguments), I believe that meaning is ultimately a futile concept, and I believe that nihilism is undefeatable.
(7/8)

[Anonymous No.21812193]

>>21812190
>>21806577
I do think that there is a soul, but it makes no sense to conceive of the soul as some spiritual or paranormal or divine 'essence' that persists past death. Man has a self, and the soul is perhaps the metaphysical amalgamation of all of him: his body, his subjective consciousness, his deeds and the entirety of his life, and his death. I don't know. I can only say that whether the soul is an abstract philosophical concept or it is somehow an immaterial divine essence, that you can feel when it is touched, and that this feeling is what I call great truth. I can also say that if you haven't experienced it, that if nothing I've said so far makes sense, then you cannot judge for yourself until you feel it. It gives you goosebumps, it makes your heart shake, it gives something approaching gratitude for existence, and ultimately it makes me believe that there is something to be gained.

This is, of course, one long chain of stimulant posts and paradoxes to arrive at a largely emotional argument that sounds like blind faith to anybody who hasn't experienced it. It won't give you certainty, or meaning, or anything to really gain upper ground against the prospect of death and the evaporation of the self or nihilism. But it just feels like it gives you something, and that's what I'm personally running on right now.

I'll leave you (finally!) with good luck, and with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot:

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait
without hope
For hope would be hope for the
wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the
wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are
not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing."

(8/8)

[Anonymous No.21812197]

>>21806577
There's no book for that except, perhaps, Dogen's Shobogenzo. In short: just chill out.

[Anonymous No.21812212]

>>21812197
buddhism is a fucking death cult

[Anonymous No.21812266]

>>21810794
>when I was a kiddo things somehow made more... le sense
fucking kill yourself

[Anonymous No.21812288]

>>21809898

>>21808479

up until now the thought the resounds with me the most is through comparison of living for eternity while being conscious of it vs living a borrowed time

i would rather live as a mortal, knowing that my life is a chance to experience and to manifest my will to live, whatever purpose that may be. that my mortality is the one thing that i treasure so that i could understand time is against me and i will only get this once chance to experience, to see, to be happy, to be sad, to cry, to mourn, to experience new things..

think of what life will be like if you have known in this very instant that you will never die? that your consciousness will forever remain, i think that is truly the most hellish experience.

i think of mortality as a gift, an opportunity to understand and experience consciousness while i still have it.

thats just a piece of my thought, it maybe kind of underwhelming for alot of people here but i think its worth to share. i sincerely wish u all the best and hope u find something to keep u afloat

[Anonymous No.21812344]

>>21812193


im not OP but i read all of that. the way u think about life really resonated with me alot as i kind of feel the same way. hope we cross path once again, i honestly really wanted to talk to u more outside of this thread but i think that would do u no good. let me just say thank you for writing all that even if ure tripping out of ur mind right now

[Anonymous No.21812353]

>>21806577
Sounds a lot like me. I often have heart palpitations while lying awake at night imagining the end of my existence.

What I've found helps is to dwell on the concept of time itself. We view it as a linear unfolding of events, but is it really? No, it is simply another dimension, and something we really have no grasp of at all. Certainly, there was a huge amount of time before you existed, and there will be a huge amount after you're gone, but why is time distinctly scary in this way, why do we feel we must exist at all times? Are you particularly bothered that you aren't occupying all of physical space? You could be existing in every city in the world, or just different parts of your own room, but usually we are just fine existing in one spot at a time. Why, then, not be content to exist in one spot /in time/. Be content that your existence has been etched into the time you had. Make it the best it could be, and be content. I've found this conceptualization to be helpful and I usually fall asleep appreciating the good aspects of my life.

[Anonymous No.21812362]

>>21812193
hey dude thanks. i really mean it. i dont think this is finally the generation where the nihilist terror is going to wreak havoc, there just have always been people having come to this set of conclusions, at least in the past 200 years were in no way a majority, which doesnt matter anyways. i do think i get the overarching truths youre describing, i think i can imagine their authenticity and of course have a lot of them in my life as well. they do seem absurd since theyre apparently truths that have been born in this time, the feeling of the described cup of coffee would not ring as much true 2000 years ago but the way to go with this might be to deliberately overlook this. i just hope i can find the strength since knowing something and deciding on something cognitively are very different things from acting out due to that knowledge having become part of me.

i will go through your list of recxs, especially the music but also the poetry, i also wanted to read dfw forever since i had this realisation on acid years back on how meaningless and blurry human conversation can become due to it being so easy to strip any underlying truthful statement from it but i kind of recovered from that quite quickly and forget about dfw quickly afterwards as well.

i too would say am religious but i mustve forgotten about the idols ive been striving after a while ago and the label beauty does not seem to cut it, maybe because im just starring at the word instead of having a proper grasp of it right now. i feel like i need to change my life but i dont know what i want, i apparently dont know myself enough as you have previously mentioned the journey to oneself is the hardest one but i do wonder if mine is possible with where i am in life right now but i quite frankly cant tell in what way i could change what i can change as to come closer to more adequate surroundings, i dont even know if that would make any difference.

[Anonymous No.21812405]

>>21806577
anon you're depressed and detached from reality
See the beautiful thing about life is that there are chemicals in your brain that conveniently let you ignore all this until the day you die at which point it won't even matter and yours just happen to not be working right
It's funny but true

[Anonymous No.21812426]

>>21806577
Literally just grow up.
You're what, 17 or 18? Quite literally just a child discovering that the world actually is complicated and kind of hard. It will pass.

[Anonymous No.21812457]

You are simply one of those people who lack the ability to repress your knowledge of death. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you can somehow put yourself under a calming spell, you can't, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner your anxiety will lessen.

This is, of course, a scary subject, I'm scared too. But so what? Running yourself ragged won't do you any good. Learn to sit with your feelings, put a movie on, it doesn't matter what, and just sit through the whole thing. I wouldn't recommend reading in your condition. I don't know how old you are, but for most neurotic types, the fear will decrease with age, nothing will make it go away entirely, but over time you will become more accustomed to this, at present, wholly unpleasant thought pattern.

Don't actively seek out media that exacerbates your fear, but don't recoil from it either.

[Anonymous No.21812515]

>>21806577
I only fear the visceral act of death; the perishing of existence is scary, but the alternative of continue life in this world is far worse. If I could kill myself I would, and the only thing holding me back is cowardice of pain. I really wish I'd never been born.

B T W, I'm so fucking sick of people who've better lives than mine complaining. I know that I complain and obviously some people have it worse than me, so its obviously a selfish + Irrational prejudice; yet still it's so tiring consoling someone about the miseries of life only to have them end the conversation by saying they're going to go cuddle with their bf. Fuck I'm lonely.

That was pointless to write. As all things. Pertinent to the thread: read James' Varieties of religious experience, especially chapter 3. Everyone has always known how shitty it is. This is basically the only true consolation for this worthless life. Of course it also raises the question: "then when perpetuate it?" You should try not to think about that one as it'll only increase your nascent misanthropy.