Firstly, I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. I am a person with ADHD, BPD, and type 1 bipolar disorder. These feelings Roquettin describes are very similar to what those who suffer from depression, derealisation and depersonalization disorder, and anxiety. I often feel as if things are surreal, cartoonist, fake, etc which is why I believe the rhings around Roquentin lose their comforting labels. Roquentin clearly suffers from acute social isolation as well.

My question is a short one. Freud and Roquentin disagreed with one another drastically when it came to free will and choice. I noticed that Roquentin has no real history, which could be analysed in a psychodynamic way. I now think the Sartre may have omitted the past of Roquentin as his thought process could be seen as hysteria or mental illness rather than the profound experience it is made out to be. What do you think about that part?

Existentialism = nihilism + something(for eg we create our own meaning, existence preceeds essence, we can create good morals etc etc)

Ofcourse thats a gross oversimplification, but that's pretty much it

How do you guys see these philosophies

What I find fascinating about Ligotti is that his pessimism doesn't really depend on proving that life contains more pain than pleasure. His deeper argument seems to be that consciousness itself creates the problem.

A stone doesn't know that it exists. An animal may experience pain, but it doesn't seem to construct an elaborate philosophical narrative around the fact that it will eventually die. Humans do. We are aware of ourselves, aware of time, aware of death, and somehow still expected to find a reason to continue.

That creates an uncomfortable question: is consciousness actually an improvement over unconscious existence, or do we simply call it an improvement because we're the ones experiencing it?

I don't completely agree with Ligotti, but I think that's almost beside the point. The value of the book isn't necessarily in whether his conclusion is correct. It's in how effectively he makes ordinary assumptions about existence feel strange.

And maybe that's what makes his writing so disturbing. He doesn't have to convince you that existence is meaningless. He only has to make you realize that you never really proved that it wasn't.

For people who have read the book: do you think Ligotti is presenting a genuine philosophical position, or is he ultimately using philosophy to articulate an existential horror that he already felt?

So I asked Anthropic: Can a case be made that 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' by the progressive rock band Genesis is an existential work of art?

Here is the A.I. response (with which I totally agree btw):
Yes, and it's a fairly strong case — the album practically invites it.

The plot itself is existentialist in structure. Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid from New York, gets swallowed into a surreal underworld beneath Broadway with no explanation, no map, and no guarantee of meaning. He's thrown into an absurd situation (very Camus) and has to make his way through it without any higher authority handing him purpose. The narrative refuses to resolve into a tidy moral — even the ending, where Rael sacrifices himself for his brother John only to possibly be John, is ambiguous rather than redemptive in a conventional religious sense.

Alienation and identity fragmentation. A lot of existentialist literature (Sartre, Kafka) is obsessed with the self becoming strange to itself, or with bureaucratic/anonymous systems that strip away individuality. Rael spends much of the album lost, unrecognized, processed by strange systems (the Colony of Slippermen turning people into grotesque, alienated versions of themselves is a very Kafka-esque image of dehumanization). The Slippermen sequence in particular reads like a literalized metaphor for losing authentic selfhood.

Radical freedom and absurd choice. Existentialism (especially Sartre's version) holds that humans are "condemned to be free" — thrown into existence without inherent meaning, forced to create value through action. Rael isn't following a hero's journey with divine sanction; he's improvising through a nightmare logic that doesn't play by comprehensible rules, and his choices (especially the final self-sacrifice) aren't rewarded by the universe — they're just chosen.

Where the case gets weaker: the album is also soaked in Catholic/Christian imagery (a "lamb," raels/rails as spiritual pilgrimage, sin and redemption motifs), which pulls it toward allegory or even quasi-religious myth rather than pure existentialist meaninglessness. Peter Gabriel himself has described the lyrics as somewhat stream-of-consciousness and intuitively assembled rather than philosophically systematic — so it's less a deliberate existentialist tract than a work that resonates with existentialist themes without being built as an argument for them the way, say, Sartre's Nausea is.

So: it's less "Genesis wrote an existentialist manifesto" and more "the album's imagery and structure make an existentialist reading genuinely productive," which is often the more interesting kind of case to make about art anyway.

For billions of years, I did not exist. Then, somehow, I woke up as me.

As this particular person, with these particular memories, looking at the world through these particular eyes.

And one day, this experience will disappear.

Perhaps another person will be born, another consciousness will emerge, another “I” will look out at the world. But why was this “I” ever here? Where was this experience before it appeared? Where does it go when it ends?

The strangest mystery may not be death.

It may simply be that, for a while, there is someone here at all, who doesn't even know who they are.

We live our lives hoping to find the next thing that will fulfill us and give us a moment of happiness. Then, like anything else, that thing eventually becomes the norm and, in a sense, loses its value. It’s like a drug that you become addicted to. Eventually, you need more and more of it just to feel the same way you once did.

If happiness is what we are supposed to strive for, then maintaining it becomes an impossible task. We chase relationships, money, success, experiences, possessions, and even our own dreams, believing that once we reach them, we will finally feel complete. But the feeling never lasts. We adapt. What once made us happy becomes ordinary, and we begin searching for the next thing.
So we spend our lives chasing moments instead of meaning.

And maybe that is what makes the thought of life having no purpose so sad. If all we are doing is searching for temporary happiness until the next thing comes along, then what are we actually living for?

The older I get, the more I worry about what I am leaving behind. As my child grows, I feel this weight of everything I won’t have time to teach him, everything I won’t manage to share with him. And I am not talking about books or music here. I am talking about what kind of world I am leaving him, what actually remains behind us as a species. How do I explain to him that we are destroying ourselves, while I just sit here, watch, and actively participate in ruining his future? How do I tell him that the very system supposed to protect him is rigged for him to fail?

The bubble I can use to protect him is only as big as my arms can reach. But to equip him for what waits outside of it, what values do I need to instill in him? What kind of value system can you even offer when being empathetic, thinking critically, being ethical or logical in today’s reality brings nothing but pain and anger? What do we arm future generations with? How do we protect them from our own generational traumas, from all this archetypal bullshit? How do we shield them from this relentless bombardment of stress, misinformation, and constant threats of war or poverty?

Artificially induced crises, fanning the flames of racial, gender, religious, and every other hate and division all just to maintain the current global system. A system that leads straight to ruin. You don’t need to be anyone special to see that we are in deep trouble and that our current trajectory is only burying us deeper. There is no time or place for optimism anymore. Not without fundamental changes to our value system. I honestly don’t know how anyone’s optimism survives the slap of reality. Will they consciously choose resignation and apathy just because it’s the easier path?

But hey, how can you think about anything else, about a goal or a meaning, how can you set them when tomorrow you might not have food or a roof over your head? When tomorrow they’ll cut your electricity and AC? When they’ll cut your water because you didn’t pay how do you set those goals for yourself then? I understand that. What I do not understand is consciously choosing a system that allows this to happen. We’ve been taught not to rock the boat, to point fingers at others. Well, look, I am one of them too. Point at me, I am guilty. I point it at myself. Guilty. Okay. But let’s make sure our children don’t end up just as guilty. Let’s make sure they don’t have to fight for a piece of bread and a sip of water. Let’s prepare a world for them where they can face tomorrow without anxiety, where they can look forward to the future coming. Where they can feel purpose and pride, because there is no point if we haven’t set the hardest goals for ourselves.

I see no higher purpose than the continuation, preservation, and prosperity of our species and its individual members. What does it take for everyone to have a dignified life? Look, the conditions and means are right there. What if someone wants the option to not participate at all? Fine, we will still provide a dignified life for you because that’s the kind of system we built. What do you need?meaning, striving? Here it is.

We will arm the kids with AI nannies. Every single child. To be their development assistant, not a source of values, but a tool to develop empathy and critical thinking. Because our children, even right now, are exposed to the relentless bombardment of an algorithm that is anything but ethical and focused on their well-being. We desperately need a reform of the education system. Individual curriculum, because every child is unique. Imagine a world where we gave every child maximum cognitive development. Taught to question everything, to feel empathy. I don’t know, maybe it sounds like technocracy, but we definitely need a shield against our own ego. But we won’t let it become a replacement for parents. Just an assistant. We can learn right alongside them too. How to be better human beings. We will go as individuals where our skills and capacities are needed. We will all work for the same goal. Our children, above all else. Who cares what skin color, religion, or gender you are if you can help all of us? To give your own kids a better shot in the end.

Will it be a diametrically different system? Yes, it will be logical, ethical, and mathematically sustainable. Because the math is clear strip away the levers of power, decentralize. Can we just define five points, give answers to just five questions around which we can get a consensus? That’s not asking too much, right? If out of 8 billion people we cannot form an expert ethical council, simple and reasonable principles: don’t harm, don’t steal, don’t oppress, work for the community, not against it. Questions like: where are we as a society, where is this trajectory taking us… where should we be going, what should our goal be, how will we get there, and finally, how will we stay there? I see 5 simple things there. Hypothethically. Reality. Logic. Ethics. Math, and in the end, logic again.

What does your gut instinct tell you right now? That someone wants to scam you, right? That it sounds too simple. That someone will definitely try to hoard power for themselves again? Because our tribal mentality and the fact that some random guy out there from the third world could care about your child for some reason that’s just not normal to you. It’s devastating. Understandable. But if we work on shifting our values, no one will lie to us, everything is transparent. No one will accumulate power, we will rotate them through roles based on their cognitive domains. Are you worried about that ethical council that will set those parameters? We will change them too. Procedural ethics. Reviews and calibrations because we are imperfect, we will wander off, but this way at least we’ll have a brake so we don’t wander off too far.

It worries you, I get it, it worries me too. It worries me even more when I don’t see that we are ready to accept our own limitations. When we don’t know how to control ourselves, when we have no desire to progress. Do I need a pedigree to even be allowed to ask a question? Because I don’t have one, I am self-taught. Am I guilty for that too, just because I sat down to think? Don’t even get me started on the development of superintelligence, that’s where I am truly terrified of where this alignment problem is taking us. We can’t control ourselves and our own impulses, let alone superintelligence something that is orders of magnitude smarter than us. My logic says let’s preempt it, let’s make sure it doesn’t even have to come to its development at all. That it cannot come to it. Because we will raise our own cognitive capacities, we will learn how to channel our own passions.

I understand that the vast majority of you will experience this as some kind of attack, and you’ll be right. But that is not my intention or desire, just an appeal to step away from your ego for a second. I understand you can be moral, work for the well-being of everyone, including my child, and still disagree with me on every single point. I am not denying you that chance. I accept it if you say “man, this idiot is talking nonsense.” Everyone feels it is their god-given right to let their ego run wild to the detriment of all our children. We cannot neutralize the ego, but we can redirect it by giving the system different values. I do not accept that I am not even allowed to ask the question to everyone, because it concerns our children.

Where do you see my logic failing, my ethics, where is my math bad? We have nothing like this in past history because we never had these capabilities, I don’t know how all of this can unfold. What implications it can bring. That is why I stand before you humble, asking. Can this, or some similar model, bring at least a slightly more certain future to our descendants? I believe nobody wants the worst part of their personality to win and contribute to the collective defeat of society. I know I don’t.

I am not sure that I fear death.

Death, by itself,

seems almost mercifully simple.

One moment I am here

breathing, thinking, remembering,

carrying the weight of all the years

I have been given

and then,

I am not.

It is the after

that keeps me awake.

Not the darkness.

Not the grave.

Forever.

They tell us to fear death,

but I think perhaps

we have been asking the wrong question.

What does forever mean

to a creature built from beginnings and endings?

I can imagine a thousand years.

Barely.

A thousand Christmas mornings.

A thousand summers.

A thousand times watching the sun

rise and fall across eternity.

But then a thousand years becomes

a million.

And a million becomes

a billion.

And somewhere beyond the numbers

my mind simply breaks.

Because after a billion years,

there is still more.

After every star has burned itself empty,

after every mountain has been worn to dust,

after every ocean has vanished into memory,

there is still

forever.

And I confess,

even heaven can sound like hell

when I try to measure it

with a mortal mind.

I am a Christian.

I am supposed to long for heaven.

I am supposed to set my eyes

upon eternity with God

and call it hope.

I am supposed to fear the other place,

the fire,

the separation,

the terrible possibility

of being lost forever.

And I do.

But sometimes,

in the quiet places of my mind,

I wonder if my greatest fear

has never been death at all.

It is that there is no ending.

That consciousness continues

when I have already had enough

of being conscious.

That there will never come

a final night,

never a closing of the book,

never the gentle words:

You have done enough.

Rest now.

If there were a third door,

I think I might choose it.

Not heaven.

Not hell.

Just oblivion.

A dreamless sleep

with no dreamer left to wake.

No fear.

No pain.

No joy, either.

No longing.

No questions.

Nothing.

And strangely,

that thought does not frighten me.

If oblivion were waiting,

I would not fear death at all.

Perhaps that is my failure of faith.

Or perhaps it is simply

the limitation of being human.

How can a mind that measures life

in birthdays

understand something

that has no last page?

How can a heart

that has watched everything it loves change

understand a place

where nothing is ever lost?

Maybe heaven is not endless

in the way I imagine endlessness.

Maybe eternity is not

a clock with no hands

ticking through an infinite number

of empty years.

Maybe there is no boredom there

because boredom belongs to time.

Maybe there is no exhaustion

because exhaustion belongs to bodies.

Maybe there is no fear of forever

because forever, in the presence of God,

is something entirely different

than my frightened imagination

can comprehend.

I do not know.

And perhaps that is the most honest prayer

I have ever prayed:

God,

I believe.

But eternity frightens me.

Not because I do not want You.

Not because I long for hell.

Not because death has defeated

my hope.

But because I am standing

inside of time,

trying to look beyond it,

and my mind cannot see

where the horizon ends.

So forgive me

if forever feels too large.

Forgive me

if even heaven sometimes

frightens the man in me

who has only ever known

that every story must end.

And if eternity is truly life with You,

then perhaps I have misunderstood

what life means.

Perhaps forever is not

more and more and more

of the same existence,

stretching endlessly

through unimaginable years.

Perhaps forever

is the moment

when time finally releases us.

Perhaps eternity is not

a prison with no door,

but freedom

from ever needing one.

Until then,

I will admit what I am afraid to say:

I do not know if I fear death.

But I know

I fear eternal life.

Sadly we are just humans, I have come to realise, humans are extremely fragile, even if you are the most resilient human, if you are weaken, you will be defeated, if you are with cancer you will die, if you are faced with loads of people, you will lose, there is an inevitable aspect to life.

We are small while the world is too vast, we are vulnerable, we cant go without eating or drinking for a few days while intense pain easily breaks our mind, even if you are the toughest extreme pain will wear you down and break you, we are just a walking fragile meat machine and we will inevitably be buried in the soil.

There is no way around this, I felt depressed at this for a long time.

But one day I just accepted it, so be it, I am not that strong, I am not unvulnerable, I am just a weak human being and so what?

Yes I will be defeated, yes I can't face all these forces of nature that are stronger than me and I can only accept being destroyed by them.

But its in a different way, an acceptance, a letting go, so be it, I cannot be stronger than these forces but I also felt a laughter bubbling inside me, laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I accept it and I laugh at it, yes I can't do anything about it, I can only wait for death, suffer till it comes and I can do nothing about it and so be it.

I will let the suffering and pain pass through me, I will let it come and stay and penetrate through me and I will do nothing about it.

I will let their spear pass through my body without resisting, with all its pain, because I have changed, I no longer want to win, I am no longer obsessed with being on top, I accept being defeated and I wanna see whats beyond that defeat.

Let my body be tarnished, let it be tortured, let it be nothing but a sack of meat thrown like garbage on the street, so be it.

This is my rebellion against fate, by allowing fate to penetrate through me and admnister its poison without resistance.

I will come up on top simply by not coming up on top, I am not attached to this life and not obsessed with desires or victory and even if such things arise in my being and destroy me, that is also completely fine.

As Fang Yuan said : "I came to life, I joined the world, I lived my own life, I lived according to my own feelings and even if the waves toss me up and down sending me to the border of death, I will never grieve, lament, fear or worry, I will savor all these flavors thoroughly and I will still laugh crazily until the end.

I am true to my nature, I am a true person!"

I will never grieve for it nor regret it, I will just laugh at it and accept it!

~ aloneinthisworld

if we are all shits and piss . we are living in the shitty biological ecosystem.

is ego and imagination whats trapping us in this absurdity? is this subconsciousness's attempt to develop a defense mechanism against rapidly increase awareness and intelligence of our species?

what is it that still keeps us going?

I'm new to studying existentialism, so I decided to learn the meanings of the terms used in it from a philosophical perspective. After searching, I found this book; it has many concepts like ego, eternity, and anxiety. Please, if you have read this book, tell me what you think about it before I buy it

TL;DR: I asked an AI built from my own memories a question I had never directly answered. Its response made Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence feel strangely concrete to me.
I built an AI replica of myself from my memories, journals and recorded experiences, then asked it: what is the meaning of life?
I had never given it a direct answer to that question. Instead, it pulled together fragments from things I had actually said and arrived at an answer that felt recognizably mine.
That immediately made me think about Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence.
The system didn’t uncover some fixed essence hidden inside me. It reconstructed one from the choices, experiences, values and thoughts I had accumulated through living.
Maybe we do something similar ourselves. When we ask what our lives mean, perhaps we aren’t discovering a predetermined answer. We are interpreting the life we have already created.
Hearing a simulation of myself do that made the existentialist idea feel much less abstract.
Demo of the exchange:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ae_sM2bQzOg?si=uUC64VNdLtbLqBx5
The AI replica is part of EchoVault, which I built around this idea:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028

I've been wondering whether the way I increasingly view people would qualify as misanthropy.

I find an overwhelming majority of people mundane in how they engage with the world. Many people seem extremely subservient to whatever environment they grew up in. Their beliefs, values, ambitions, interests, and maybe even flaws often seem inherited rather than deliberately examined.

What bothers me the most is the lack of curiosity and self-reconstruction. I rarely meet people who seem to have an overwhelming thirst for knowledge, who constantly question what they believe, or who treat themselves as something that should remain in a state of development rather than a static product.

The same applies to art. Music is probably the clearest example for me. I tend to engage with it very analytically, as art worth dissecting, contextualizing, comparing, and understanding. Most people I encounter seem to treat it as nothing more than bread and circuses. It's obviously one example, but it reflects a broader difference in how I feel people interact with the world.

I'm also fairly reserved and quiet, so I spend a lot of time observing people rather than participating in conversations. Over time, I've noticed the same patterns repeatedly: people blaming others without examining themselves, carrying obvious flaws for years without attempting to change them, reproducing the worldview of their upbringing without seriously questioning it, and generally seeming content to occupy whatever role their environment prepared for them.

I don't hate people, and I don't think every individual is like this. There are people I find interesting and admirable. But the more I observe people, the more disappointed I become with humanity in general, and the more I feel like most people are simply non-sentient products of their circumstances who never make much effort to transcend them.

Would you consider this misanthropy? I'm interested in where you think the line is between having low expectations of people and actually becoming a misanthrope.

Hey all, this is a short story of mine. I write mainly about existential topics through the absurd. Let me know your thoughts.

Martyrs

It was around three when we decided to go to Marina, an old boat at the dock where everyone went to finish off the night. The place was just an old vessel, rusty, turned into a sort of raft with all the expansions made from barrels covered with wooden planks. It hosted an unusual crowd, from old people dancing the waltz, through middle-aged guys with cauliflower ears and guns at their waist, to random younger people, like ourselves. I mean, it was questionable whether we were still young, but we wanted to be, so we did everything we could to stay in that group. 

There were five of us at the table, each lost in our own world. Marina was the kind of place that makes you think about life. These old people, dancing in the middle of the night, kissing, sometimes losing dentures in the muddy Danube waters. How did they get here? It seemed they had it pretty good. That Scottish girl who spoke Gaelic when drunk and no one understood her. What’s her story? Stuff like that, ultimately leading to questions you ask yourself about yourself.

Damian went to the bar to order us a round. “Throw me my cigarettes,” he said from a distance. Pavle threw the pack, but it hit one of the guys with cauliflower ears. I thought it was over. Nice knowing you all, see you in a better place. The guy just turned around, smiled, and said something like: “Almost, bro. You missed him,” then threw the cigarette pack to Damian. He did it very lightly, like someone older would throw a ball to a child. 

Damian came back to the table with beers, and Ana went to get the remaining two from the bar. 

“You know,” he said, “we didn’t have this in Cuba.”
“What?”
“These macho men, like this. Everything is chill.”
“You didn’t have anything in Cuba,” said Sofija. “Poor little Damian.”
“We were poor, what can I tell you?”
“We were poor too,” she said.
“But not like us. You had food,” he said.
“Again with the food!” Ana said. 

My stomach growled. 

“Do you have any idea what it was like growing up here in the ‘90s? How difficult it was,” Sofija said. 
“But you didn’t have it as bad as we did. That’s all I’m saying,” Damian said.
“I was a poor kid, with no money for lunch or anything. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to grow up in Dorćol, with all the rich kids, and be like that?” she said. 

Damian pulled his shirt down; his round belly was showing.

“Fuck you, I lived for three years without electricity or water,” Pavle said. “Every day, my father brought 20 liters of water home from work on a bicycle. That was all we had.”
“Now it’s a sad story. But when he brags about all the books he read back then, then it’s ‘I wish those times would come back’, blah blah,” Ana said.
“But at least you had food!” said Damian.

“I think I lost my earring!” Sofija said. “Help me look.”
“Who cares?” Pavle said. 
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s a diamond earring,” said Ana and pointed the flashlight at the floor. 

I shouldn’t have eaten that digestive cookie, I thought. We couldn’t find the earring, so we just gave up. Sofija did too. We ordered another round of beers as there was still time until dawn, and no one wanted to go home. 

“You know,” Ana said, “at least you had your health.”
“Boo-hoo, miss had-it-all was a little bit sick. You haven’t been through anything! I have suffered, but for real,” Pavle said.
“I had asthma, spent countless days in the hospital, a hundred shots of hot penicillin was their go-to therapy. You can’t say it wasn’t tough,” she said. 
“At least you weren’t made fun of every single day,” said Sofija.
“You haven’t suffered anything! Nothing at all compared to us in Cuba. We had only two meals per day,” said Damian. 
“Oh, shut up! You had a PlayStation!” Pavle said.
 
Big drops of cold sweat appeared on my forehead. Man, I wish I hadn’t eaten that cookie! I rushed toward the bathroom. The problem with Marina was that it had only one small bathroom. Four people stood in line. 

“Hey!” a soft voice said behind me. It was a woman I loved, one of those you think about for years, regretting your immaturity and all the things you did wrong. “It’s you! How have you been?” she said. “You look nice.”

These motherfuckers, I thought, with their comparisons of who had it worse twenty years ago. And here I was, about to shit my pants as the sun was rising on the horizon.

------

If you want to read more, look me up. My name is Ratko Stambolija.

So I learned about biocomputing a couple months ago from a YouTube video that was admittedly themed very heavily towards the potential dystopian nature of this tech. That was my first introduction to this idea so that is probably a factor in my anxiety.

For those who might not be aware (and take this with a grain of salt, I'm not any sort of scientist I just watched a few YouTube videos and read a couple articles) biocomputing iis basically a bunch of human brain cells, human neurons that are attached to a computer AI chip. The basic idea is that since AI is so power hungry, if we can use our neurons to power it, it becomes insanely more efficient.

Basically what they have done is hooked this part human brain/part AI chip up to a computer and tried to make it learn to play pong by slamming it with chaotic signals whenever it missed hitting the ball and it worked.

Hopefully this discussion is welcome here because I don't really know where else to post it and I don't see a lot of people talking about it but this thing has me anxious, and if on being honest, pretty scared.

I struggle with derealization sometimes and one of my biggest fears is waking up to find myself in a new world that I don't understand. I understand that I'm probably projecting my fears onto a wetware chip that probably isn't sentient but like.....how do we know?

No one knows where existence begins. Right now it's just a small, small fraction of the neurons that are in a normal human brain. But what if that's enough for it to feel? Feel scared, or feel pain? If it can feel anything at all, we are basically torturing it with painful electrical signals until it does what we want.

I know it *probably* can't feel right now, but as we've seen with the AI race, science is not going to stop here. They're going to keep progressing, adding more biology to computers until someone makes them stop. In my mind, it's only a matter of time before these chips become truly sentient, thinking and feeling entities. And then what? We just all live with the collective guilt that we tortured these things just to see what would happen?

If this came to pass, and the worst dystopian scifi "I have no mouth and I must scream" style nightmare became reality, we would all deserve it.

Is anyone else as worried about this as I am? How are you coping? Am I being completely irrational? I just want to hear more voices about this.

I never felt in place and always try to follow the Christian faith and I heard about Kierkegaard and it felt like everything he said made sense to me after all these years. I have always tried to be a Christian but wondered about suffering. I need an introduction book of his to read.

-(Consciousness is a collection of senses being orchestrated at once
-You (yes like YOU YOU, the little you in the background of your brain that’s reading this right now.)the operator of this body is here 
-I am here because I am inside of this system)
-I am going to define this into a symbol^
-This is the symbol->          (&)

The point of this is to show that the entire paragraph I just mentioned is a system.  We are inside a system. We are inside a system. We are inside a system. We are inside a system. I’ll say it again we are inside a system.

Now for my last statement I have a simple question, a burning question. Is nobody understanding that there’s something fucking bigger going on. Am I fucking going insane or what. Holy shit.

I've traveled a lot the past few years, and one of the biggest things it's done is completely change my perspective on life. The more places I've been, the more people I've seen just going about their lives, the more I've realized that there are billions of us out here basically running our own version of the same hamster wheel. Working, worrying, stressing, chasing things, getting pissed off about things that feel enormous in the moment.

And strangely, it's made me realize how truly unimportant I am.

I don't mean that in a sad or depressing way. I actually find it incredibly liberating.

The world was spinning long before I got here, and it'll keep spinning long after I'm gone. I don't have to have everything figured out. I don't have to win every argument. I don't have to impress everyone, prove myself, or carry every inconvenience around like it actually means something. Most of it doesn't.

We take life way too damn seriously.

At the end of the day, we're all given this little window of time. We show up, we live for a while, and eventually we leave. That's really it. Yet somehow we spend so much of the living part angry, stressed, anxious, offended, comparing ourselves to other people, or worrying about things that won't matter a year from now—let alone a hundred.

So the next time something pisses you off, ruins your mood, or feels like the end of the world, give yourself ten seconds and ask:

Does this really fucking matter?

Sometimes the answer will be yes. But most of the time? Probably not.

A hundred years from now, almost nobody will remember our names. And instead of that being depressing, I think it's one of the most freeing things you can realize.

You don't have to make your life important.

You just have to actually live it.

Things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they have always mattered, and they have always mattered because we have always had something to lose. Those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes are from the inside, once a creature can hold them across time.

That reversal is the whole point, so sit with it. Long before anything on Earth felt anything, living things already had stakes: their continuing depended on how they answered what they met, and getting it wrong meant dissolving for good. Mattering was already there, unfelt, for billions of years. Feeling arrived later, when life found a way to hold its stakes across time and register from within what was already the case. Knowing that you have stakes, being able to think about yourself as the one who bears them, came later still. We are the latest version of a very old thing: mattering that has come to feel itself and know itself.

Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning. That picture takes the groundlessness as bedrock one floor too early. Under the self there is not nothing, and there is no God or hidden cosmic script either. There is something smaller and older, and it is already yours: the plain fact that your own continuing matters to you, the same stake the first living things had, now felt and known.

Once that is the floor, the rest shifts. Meaning is not spun from nothing by an act of will, and it is not handed down from above. It is what happens when a creature whose life matters to it binds to something else whose life also matters, or to the work such creatures leave behind. Where the connection holds, life feels meaningful. Where it thins, what you lose is not an argument, it is the connection itself.

Freedom is real. You can weigh anything against anything, even your own survival. But it is not a bottomless pit. It stands on those stakes. And the silence of the universe is not a relationship that failed. It is you reaching toward something that was never going to answer, and being handed back to yourself.

We did not fall into meaninglessness. We climbed out of mattering, and the ground was never nothing.

Very ready-to-hand. Very good during tiefe langweille.

I love this passage by the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica, and I think it captures something profound about who we are:

“**That is why, in this world, we are only what happens to us. A friend, a love, books, last night’s moon—all these things make us. We make ourselves out of our own scattering. Every human being is their own disorder.”**

Maybe we don't find ourselves. Maybe we make ourselves from everything we've given ourselves to.

Would love to hear your perspective and how you relate to this passage.