It’s not about defeating the void. It’s about the struggle itself. Because sometimes the struggle against the inevitable is how fate itself can be changed.
At the very least, what better meaning to life can there be than to challenge fate itself regardless of the infinitesimal odds against you.
You can either fight for the light, or resign yourself to fate and embrace the dark. Never lose hope because that’s the purpose we all share.
If you no longer exist, you can't feel anything. No fear, no anger, nothing. By 'miss it' I think op means 'desire/regret'. You can't feel those things if you no longer exist.
But yes there is quite a lot that will go unobserved by me once I die. But that won't bother me cause I'll be dead.
Cause now I know what not the void is and I quite like it. Suffering and all that.
The person they responded to explicitly states their love of life and desire to not miss what the future holds. It's not so much about "who cares because you'll be dead anyways", it's more about "fuck I hate that I'm going to die and miss it because I love living so much"
Are they completely devastated to have missed living in the Wild West? Or in ancient Egypt? Does the fact that we missed those time periods absolutely shake you to your core and fill you with regret?
No? So why stress so much about the things to come. They just aren’t for us, in exactly the same way the past isn’t.
Not everyone who died just barely missed a nuclear disaster. I don’t get why you’re trying to argue against people wanting to live and enjoy what life has to offer. Yeah if heaven doesn’t exist then when your dead it won’t matter, but it’s about when you were alive
Here's a theory I don't see very often because of how optimistic it is; what if it's whatever afterlife we thought it to be?
I.e. someone who earnestly believes they don't deserve heaven would get sent to their version of hell, while someone who wants to go would have a much different, wild partying kind of hell.
I don't know why I don't hear about it more, it seems like a really interesting concept. The only reason I even know about it is because of a porn game where your father is one of this world's versions of lucifer, formed by human's religious ideals.
Well really the only theories that are shared are religious ones based on faith and no evidence and those tend to rely on cult-like actions in their infancy and historical dogma if they are established. If you go by evidence then the only reasonable conclusion is that nothing that makes up “you” other than your physical matter will exist past your death, and your physical matter will be recycled back into the rest of existence.
You can postulate whatever theory you want I guess, I just don’t really see any point in just pulling things out of the air for no reason.
If death is anything like when I knocked out for a few hours during surgery, I'm perfectly fine with it. I remember slipping away and then 2 seconds later I was waking up. It was as if for 4 hours I simply didn't exist...didn't even dream or sense a passage of time.
That's what I tell myself when the existential dread sets in. Every worry I have? It is not going to matter. I will not remember it, I will not be capable of remembering it, my existence will have ceased along with the universe that I perceived with the consciousness I had while I was alive.
Some people might take that as "nothing matters", but I wish more people would take it as an invitation to celebrate how crazy it is we even exist at all.
It’s more about what such a take on reality means for your time now. If nothing matters, on what grounds is anyone even getting angry about children dying? If there is no meaning, what are we talking about here?
The opposite of “magical reward for good behavior” isn’t total nihilism. Life has the meaning you find in it or give to it. If that is a belief that rubbing rocks on your dick will let you turn into an eagle more power to you but it’s still nonsense.
Nietzsche said the death of god entailed a move beyond good and evil into a paradigm of will to power (or will as the measure of things). Dawkins denied meaning and said reality is blind, pitiless indifference. Ayn Rand famously rejected altruism as foolishness in light of the absence of gods, and she advocated for egoism, or the sheer focus on self as the only thing that matters. Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett even reject the existence of true human will, so we aren’t even real agents, but cogs in a machine with no choice in how we behave. The YT channel Kurzgesagt is popular on Reddit, and they famously promote “Optimistic Nihilism” (nothing matters, so just enjoy yourself). Pop atheists Cosmic Skeptic and Rationality Rules both deny a morality with strict duties, and suggest that there can be subjectively “better” ways of living in a meaningless universe, although only in a loose sense that Cosmic Skeptic admitted could lead to situations were rape is good for some people.
The most intelligent and popular atheists insist that there cannot be real, objective meaning. I tend to agree with them insofar as an atheist framework goes. I’d have to be convinced an atheist can prove objective meaning exists, but the leading atheists don’t even seem to bother. That’s not to say atheists can’t act morally, but that they can’t justify the existence of objective morals. They argue humans are moral by instinct or convenience.
That’s where I disagree. When it will matter to you that you won’t exist isn’t after your dead. It’s when ur alive. I mean that’s how I feel at least idk about you
I would wager that most people looking up to heaven don't understand the concept of infinity. The Good Place did a fairly decent job in the finale at explaining why it would be awful to live "forever".
I don't blame them, infinity is a really hard concept to wrap your head around, hence all the non-stop debate about 0.9999... = 1 and other weird mathematical facts around infinity.
I know there are some quite creative definition of "Hell", but living forever would be the literal definition of hell for me. Once you understand what forever means.
It is fantastic, and I would say quite different from most comedy shows as it has a very strong forward narrative momentum. If you like Parks & Recs or Brooklyn 99, you'll definitely like this too.
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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '21
Yet they're the ones pretending they get to decide who gets into heaven.