Bottomless_pit_supervisor
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User ID: 3109
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
3mo ago
[religion] I am constitutionally unsuited for.
In the same boat, but even if I don't have it in me to believe in any religion, I firmly believe that something outside of crude reality that we inhabit is necessary for any of this, including suffering, to make sense. It's basically what people mean by spirituality, that there is a larger context we have no direct access to now, but in which we and the rest of the world are embedded.
For those of us who can't simply have faith, what we can rely on boils down to humility&hope.
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
3mo ago
bride seemed happy
what about the groom?
Needing the conventional "self" for "meaning" is a delusion, a story your mind is telling to itself.
Can every thought, feeling, conclusion, value judgement be framed as "story"? Maybe I don't quite get what this means for you
Why attach yourself to wanting to keep having pain
Evolution wants you constantly hungry. Never permanently happy.
Neither do I.
I don't want to be "happy", I don't want to be "content". I have no use for equanimity of a sheep grazing out on a sunny day. I'd rather be eternally hungry, and eternally discontent in pursuit of infinite heights. Of what is worth perceiving, understanding, possessing, enjoying. Camping on the roadside to catch my breath is good and well, but that's not where I'd like to get stuck
How would I do that without any drives and passions, without sense of frustration over not yet having it yet?
When pain stands in my way, it becomes another obstacle to conquer, and here meditation and stoic techniques (in moderation) come in handy.
However, obsessing over min-maxing suffering and pleasure is just a waste of my time. Centering your ethics/metaphysics around this is a dead end. It's an animal thing to do.
It's unbecoming of me as a man. This is a betrayal of myself
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
4mo ago
You don't need it to live or to function. Definitely don't need it to be happy
Yet I need it for something far more important - Meaning. Pain is the proof that you're alive, as well as the price of it. I strongly hold that it's necessary to believe that joy ultimately prevails over sadness, beauty over ugliness, and so on.
I'd rather pursue the strength to bear my pains, than try to extinguish it along with myself through wire-heading praxis of ancient oriental death-cults.
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
4mo ago
How is that liberating? If you don't have yourself, what do you even have?
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
4mo ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm not sure how much of it I understand though.
Do you believe in God? Are you trying to believe, act as if you do, or some other variant, or do you have a firm "faith" of some kind, a feeling you didn't have before, but now do?
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
4mo ago
Gaining firm footing under my feet, existentially, meta-narratively speaking
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
4mo ago
When you say "this" is so very tiresome, what is the "this" you are referring to? Existence? Or the navel-gazing that you may be prone to?
Neither? Both? I want answers, a resolution, good or bad.
Bottomless_pit_supervisor
5mo ago
I narrowed down the span of possibilities to roughly two options:
1.I'm a meat clockwork with a peculiar quality of being obsessed with the fact that it is a meat clockwork.
2.I'm a soul with acute awareness of the inadequacy of a merely material universe, yet unable to even confirm any that "outside" exists, let alone make any other progress
Either way, this is so very tiresome.
More generally, as I age I find I'm just getting increasingly fed up with my eccentricities, rather overcoming, integrating or getting used to them as I'd have hoped.
I turned 25 the other day. I was never a big fan of birthdays, but this milestone feels disturbing in a new way.
I’m not sure why I’m writing this. Probably not for advice, since it feels like I started to run in circles when it comes to that a while ago. Much of what I hear and think are just permutations of the same things, thoughts traveling along the same grooves. Can’t be helped, some problems don't really have solutions and the best you can do is shrug and keep moving forward.
As you get older, you get more familiar with the workings of your mind. I always had a contemplative bent, my day to day thoughts directed to something abstract or otherwise decidedly detached from my physical and social realities. It’s hard to see this part of me as either a virtue or a flaw, if anything it’s baffling that it’s not a universal human trait.
This bafflement is blunted into nearly nothing through sheer habituation. Again – I’m getting used to who I am. That is not to say that I have any profound insight to justify all of this activity, I merely describe the way I function. And it was inevitable that I found my way to the rock bottom. In the last couple of years I’m increasingly absorbed, then obsessed with the basics: the ultimate nature and destiny of myself and reality overall. The world, what can I see of it through senses and reason, feels terribly cramped and my heart demands something more in the strongest possible terms. I’m stepping carefully here because the last thing I’m interested in now is an argument about this kind of thing (if someone does start it I’m not going to engage) but basically I often find myself equally baffled both by religious and the autistic-secularist approaches you’re all very familiar with. Apparently some people just...don't care about what to me seems like the most important problems, or talk about them in ways that makes me suspect humans have truly vast variations in their cognitive architecture that is yet to be even slightly charted.
Based on posts similar to this one I made across the years, I notice some changes. I’m less of a drama-queen, I think. I found the intensity of negative feelings decreasing and I can make some decent guesses as to why: my self esteem growing through more grounded estimation of my faults and strengths, my naturally laid-back, nearly apathetic personality snuffing out teenage drama. Come to think of it, I was only alive for roughly 10 years total - the 15 years before that as barely conscious brat I can scarcely remember let alone relate must only be included as a technicality.
Put this way, putting myself together, on my own, to this extent, in this time, is pretty good.
I find it easier to chart and execute increasingly longer plans. I see that I can control a lot about how the next 5 years between 25 and thirty year old me unfold. But then again, "five years" ... "thirty", this fills me with disquiet. Five years is just…not a lot. And neither is 20, or 50 years. My flaws might not be all that severe, and I can do a lot to mend them, but time doesn’t stop. I already missed many milestones that are for good reason considered normal. In between the times I manage to psy-op/whip myself into some kind of useful activity (I'm getting better at this, thankfully) I'm stuck with a slight sense of unreality, of something being both subtly and severely "off". If I had to choose my favorite branch of Christianity I'd have to go with the Gnostics for suggesting there's an "outside" to this world that can eventually be accessed. So far I only see hints of it from time to time, in the corner of my eye, and I don't even have confidence that it's much more than wishful thinking.
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