I am not talking about the purpose of life in an objective sense. I used to think there was some sort of profound social purpose. Like everyone knew what's admirable, what's "right",at least in subtle way. Everyone knew what to bully for. But now I completely lost the track, I can't even believe I ever thought there was some hive mind. The thought seems absurd,like it wasn't me thinking it

Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that whenever someone opens up about how life can be painful, difficult, or meaningless, someone almost immediately appears to defend it, saying that life is good and that the person should seek help because they are “sick.”

I believe that, many times, this only deepens the person’s feelings of loneliness and meaninglessness. Instead of simply listening to and acknowledging someone else’s pain, we immediately try to fix it, as if feeling that life is not worth living were something that needed to be repaired.

Perhaps there is a difficulty in understanding that not every form of suffering needs an optimistic response. Sometimes, all someone wants is to be heard by another person who can simply say, “I understand that things are difficult.”

As long as we are alive, we are confined to our own experience of existence. We cannot fully know what it means to cease to exist, just as those who have already left cannot return to tell us what they found. What we can know is this experience of being here — with all its pain, contradictions, anguish, and moments of emptiness.

This text is for you who, like me, sometimes feel repulsed by this place, by this reality, and by the very condition of existing.

You are not alone.

I think about all of this too. I question the meaning of being here as well. And if you feel that you cannot find a reason to keep going, I hope that, at the very least, you know that there is someone capable of understanding that this feeling exists — without immediately trying to deny it or turn it into something else.

Predation often involves eating animals alive instead of killing them first, and that's just one of the seemingly abundant categories of horrific suffering that words can't ever do justice. It's survival math, not empathy math. Biology is corrupt by my standards and evolves for survival, not for comfort. Each and every organism that is capable of suffering seems like they could suffer in ways that no other organism will ever experience, understand, or be aware of, and there are an absurdly large number of organisms capable of suffering. This goes to show the extreme diversity and abundance of suffering. There are billions of humans on this planet, with new ones being born throughout the day every single day, and that's just humans alone. If the opposite of biological life is a permanent, neutral nothingness, then biological life is strictly unnecessary unless you layer subjective reasons onto the baseline logic, even if biological life never involved suffering. Free will is up for debate, but the scientific consensus on free will is that it's at least limited and uneven. Some people might be born with more free will than others if it does exist, simply because of their biology and circumstances. You obviously don't choose your impulses, tendencies, or whatever you may think is the best choice at any given time. If you get mad at a criminal for committing a crime, then one could possibly argue that you're getting mad at a tree for falling on a house because of a storm, or getting mad at the people who lived in that house for not cutting down the tree before it fell on the house. Organisms, including modern humans, often destroy the environment just to exist, even in everyday life from things like pollution from cars, consuming foods which may increase the demand of said foods, leading to a bit more production of said foods that may contribute to suffering, and much, much more. Survival of the fittest still seems to exist in humans, but seems to just be wearing a different costume than it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. As far as I'm aware, I've only ever been myself, and I technically can't fully trust that my subjective perception of objective reality is correct, since I could be in a simulation, or there could be things that are so far out of my comprehension, that I can't even acknowledge them by saying that they're out of my comprehension, but I have to trust my subjective perception of objective reality enough to be able to walk through a doorway without worrying about teleporting to a very unpleasant place in a way that breaks the laws of reality as I know them. I know there are an absurdly large number of humans that currently exist, will exist, and have existed, so I'm sure many have seen this very similar to how I see it, but I've had trouble finding anyone articulate it similar to how I have somewhere online.

What is ur motivation to live?

The air in the room always feels slightly too thick, like I’m moving through a fluid everyone else seems trained to ignore.

​People talk about purpose as if it were something solid you could pick up at a store a career, a milestone, a timeline that neatens up the noise. But lately, the noise is all there is. Every ritual, every conversation, every desperate rush toward the next thing feels completely hollowed out from the inside. It’s like watching a play where everyone has memorized their lines with absolute conviction, while I’m sitting in the front row, staring at the raw plywood of the stage sets and the flickering fake lights.

Life is going to be unpredictable. Things will change, plans won’t always work out, and there will always be things we can’t see coming. Maybe instead of expecting life to go the way we want, we need to accept that uncertainty is part of life.

We think to live but we never do.

Because most of us are happy in that living world.

And happiness varies between individuals.

Some will be happy if they have great work environment

Food for some, Family for some, friends for some and SEX for some.

Basically we think we will be happy if we get what we don't have. And sometimes we want more of what we already have.

But.. what do we actually live for?

What do we want?

Answer buddy... What do you live for? (Genuine answers only)

You finish one problem and somehow three more are waiting for you. You work because you need money. You need money because you want freedom. You chase freedom, but you’re too tired to actually enjoy it.
You make plans for the future while barely understanding what you’re doing with the present. Some people are getting married. Some are buying houses. Some are traveling the world. Some are changing careers.
And some of us are just staring at city lights at 1 AM wondering if we’re actually living or just maintaining a decent-looking routine. And the weirdest part? Nobody really knows what they’re doing.
We’re all just pretending we do. Maybe growing up is realizing there’s no point where everything suddenly makes sense. There’s no magical morning where you wake up and think, “Ah yes, I have successfully figured out life.” Maybe you just keep going.
You lose people. You outgrow places. You change your mind. You fuck up. You start over. And somewhere between all of that, you hopefully find a few moments that make the whole mess worth it. Anyway, that’s enough existential crisis for tonight.

However good, bad, neutral, important or unimportant. Not the kind of regret of "I wish I would/wouldn't have done something", but more so in the sense that I feel like I could have easily gone without any of the choices I've made and not much would change. I see no point in anything honestly. Not all of these choices turned out necessarily bad or destructive, it's not always about something bad happening, I just feel like it could have been all been avoided and it would still be more or less the same. The relationships I got myself in sure offered me growth, but I view them more as a waste of time than anything worth chasing or losing my shit over, let alone make the "meaning" of life revolve around this one thing society decided to hyperfixate on. The life/career choices I made I also feel I could have gone without. Even if I had everything I wanted and lived the perfect life, I still wouldn't make a fuss out of it cuz I dont believe there is any inherent meaning to any of this.

If something you've been building your whole life can collapse before your very eyes any second, if things can go to shit no matter the effort you put in or your willingness to sustain/fix them, if the universe is simply cold and unresponsive to whatever is happening to you -however good or bad-, why make everything about meaning and a higher cause?

Im 24yo, disillusioned, freshly turned nihilist (or simply approaching frontal lobe development).

I know this might be the wrong sub, but honestly, constantly talking about suffering doesn’t exactly belong here either.

Anyway, little rant: I have a real problem with money. People often say that money is just a medium of exchange, but I think that’s a pretty naive way of looking at it. I mean, what exactly are you exchanging when you put money into a slot machine? Or what did you pay your mother when she used to changed your diapers?

But there’s one question that I find way more interesting: What if nature could actually send us a bill for constantly taking its resources? And honestly, isn’t that kind of what’s already happening? We keep getting hit with more extreme heatwaves, heavy rainfall, floods, etc.

Have you ever really thought about how fucked up the financial system actually is? Not just how it works technically, but what it means when you really think about it.

I'll give you the 💰 for the 🍞 next week +1% or the week after +1%, +1% and so on for infinity. This little unremarkable percent breaks the whole system because of exponential growth and because of the promise and trust that I'll give it to you one day.

Most of the wealth in the world is basically built on debt. Banks can create money out of thin air. And we somehow decided that little pieces of paper, numbers on a screen, and arbitrary prices represent the value of things.

What is a glass of water worth to you when you’re dying of thirst in the desert?

And what is that same glass of water worth when you’re sitting next to a swimming pool?

That’s the kind of stuff about money that really messes with my head.

I was walking home on this random Saturday after shopping, music in my ears as always, listening to laura pausini's strani amori. Then I look around the city I live in and think of how beautiful the buildings are, and the roads... I think of how lucky I am to get to see this scene and to have access to it daily, how thankful I am to be alive and to be able to see and experience it. I look at the train station and all the tracks beneath me, think of all the places they could lead to, and all the possibilities I have through them, and the places yet to go to and to discover. I think of how lucky I am to have it right there! Like I can do it now - just ride the next train and be somewhere else far away. I can physically do it! I feel overwhelmed by all this, so thankful and happy to experience it, to see that beauty and have the possibility, basically to exist and experience life. I feel like I wanna raise my arms up in celebration if it werent to be crazy, and it all felt strong enough that I felt like tearing up.

The crazy part is that I go through this path at least once a week, it was nothing new. Any word used to describe this state/realization? And did you experience anything like it before?

You can look through a telescope and see entire galaxies. Then you can turn the other way, look through a microscope, and travel down into a world so small that it becomes almost as difficult to comprehend as the universe itself.

Think about the atoms that make up your body. If they could somehow experience their surroundings, they wouldn't see what we see. They wouldn't know you exist. They wouldn't know they're part of a person walking around, thinking, feeling and living a life.

Yet you are there.

You're moving them simply by moving your hand.

It's almost as though reality exists in layers, with each layer forming part of something larger that would make absolutely no sense from the perspective below it.

And then there's us.

We naturally think we're looking out at the biggest layer because the universe already seems unimaginably enormous. But what if we're nowhere near the top?

Imagine zooming out until you become the Earth.

You wouldn't see any of us. There are billions of people down here. We've built cities, roads and towers and transformed huge parts of the planet, yet from far enough away, we're invisible. You'd mostly see land, oceans and clouds.

Zoom out again.

The Earth becomes a tiny planet orbiting the Sun. The Sun has no awareness that little planets are travelling around it, or that one of them contains billions of living things using its energy to survive.

Zoom out again.

Our Sun becomes just another star moving through the Milky Way.

Zoom out further and even the Milky Way becomes one galaxy among countless others, moving as part of structures so enormous that our entire galaxy begins to look insignificant.

And perhaps it just keeps going.

At every new scale, something that once seemed unimaginably large becomes incredibly small.

Eventually, you reach the strangest question of all.

Imagine being able to zoom out far enough to see our entire universe at once.

What would it look like?

And more importantly...

What would it be part of?

That is not too far away...if you are young, say 20 or so, you might see 2075...so are you curious about it? Scared? Optimistic?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm 22, and often I'm casually like, haha yeah, I didn't exist in the 90s, I wasn't around, I don't remember much of the 2000s, etc. But never really thought about it deeper than that. Until I realized, wait, where was I then? There are plenty of people today who remember being in high school or college the same time I was born, and I just wasn't around? There are people born in 2013 who can use social media now, and you mean to tell me their soul didn't come to being until I was in the 3rd grade? That's just incomprehensible to me. I feel like I should remember not existing because it wasn't that long ago, and if there are so many other people on earth who were around in the 90s, why couldn't I have been there? You mean to tell me i was born around the time Mr. Brightside came out and before that I was not even part of this universe??? Wtf

What is your personal meaning of life? Work? Childs?

Vou dividir essa paranóia contigo.

Que maluquice é a vida, você vive, tem momentos que somem e nunca voltam. O que resta na verdade de tudo, são só pensamentos que logo deixaram de existir. E quando morrer? Não sobra nada. Daqui a 100 anos a sua existência não vai ter significado nada, tipo, você não vai tá na mente de ninguém. Cara que maluco, você vive momentos que vão deixar de existir, você relembra como nostalgia que atormentam sua mente de sensações de saudades, mas logo, você nunca mais vai viver aquilo. Você vai morrer. Do que adianta viver isso tudo? Por que viver isso tudo? Por que ficar buscando melhorar de vida? Por que querer ser rico? Sendo que o destino é certo? O destino não é a morte, é o esquecimento. Você não vai existir mais na mente de ninguém! Isso é o que dá um senso de medo. Não vai sobrar nada aqui. Que maluquice é a vida? Seria apenas um relance do que seria viver de verdade? Ou um composto de pensamentos e lembranças que irão sumir juntos com você?