I’m not depressed (at the moment, well maybe a little), just feeling philosophical.
Edit: the idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?
Just why?
You are asking as a mind alienated from its body. Your body has interests that are not your interests, and it uses suffering to bend you to advance its interests for it. We all exist in a state of conflict with our own biological inheritance.
Our bodies generate a mind to suffer on its behalf, because without awareness it isn’t really capable of suffering. That is the point of your existence as a mind. You exist to suffer on behalf of something that is not capable of suffering on its own, so that by your aversion to suffering, you will make choices that are in the interests of your body.
You have to decide whether to simply adopt the interests of your body, or whether to try to hold on to your own interests and make that the point of your life.
There’s no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There’s no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.
We’re also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.
And IMO that’s extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you’re here, don’t worry about the far future because it doesn’t matter.
It’s a bit ridiculous to me why you’d think that we’d be the last humans to exist. Habitable zones will keep existing after climate change kills 99% of the population. Even full-scale nuclear war will leave most dead, but not all.
The remainder will probably keep reproducing and survive. Even 0.001% of our current population would likely mean humanity would continue.
What else do you think would make humanity 100% extinct?
I’m not trying to convince you on this, but this is my personal belief:
There are runaway reactions already being triggered in the atmosphere that will make the planet hotter and hotter without stopping or slowing down for millions of years. Where are you going to live when the minimum temperature is 60C or higher? A difference of 30C or so is enough to make life impossible for us but isn’t even a rounding error compared to the temperature range of a planet. Look at Mars.
Will it happen in the next few centuries or even millennia? No. But those timescales are miniscule compared to the life of the Earth or the lifecycle of an entire species.
We will be the cause of not just climate “change”, but pretty much a life reset. Like the asteroid. EVERY animal larger than 10 or so cm will die. There’s no way out of it. This is the great filter.
It might be interesting to you that the total number of humans who have lived and died is about 110 billion. So in the last 100 years or so 10% of all humans who ever existed were born.
And regarding the warming for millions of years, I think we had multiple periods on earth with higher CO2 levels. No humans existed back then but life in general was quite fine. We are at about 400 ppm right now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Not to be too optimistic, we are heading for an unprecedented crisis. But reducing emissions matters because we are not going to go inevitably extinct.
I think the answer to your last question is “doomsaying”. Its a fucking cult and its hardwired in the Lemmy community. I agree with you though. Society might fall, a large portion of humanity might die, but we will not go extinct. We’re cockroaches. We don’t go out easily.
Yeah, we have hard times ahead, and probably a lot of people will die, but I don’t see humanity go extinct any time soon.
I recommend to watch “A case for optimism” from Melodysheep , which goes into that a lot more.
There’s no conflict with the whole chem stuff and life having a meaning. Something accidentally can still create its own meaning
There’s so much to explore. Not just physical locations, but our own minds and each other’s too. Learning about the laws of the universe, history, and seeing what’s to come. Even pain is a thing to be experienced that the dead don’t get to.
Is all that meaningless? All of us contain our own universe within us. Sure, it would be nice to care about all the other people (if there are other people) and what impact I have on them. But if in the long run nothing I do matters to them, fuck it. I’m mainly concerned with what’s going on in here.
I read something recently that explained every moment was like a mini death (referring to how Change is the only constant) and as such everything we do is to understand and integrate death-like processes and to see them as one cohesive whole, if we extrapolate this pattern to the process of death as a human we begin to realize that our death is so much more likely to be some pattern like that where we must question if the life we had was ever so subjectively experienced to begin with, at that point we begin to realize that our death is not to be feared any more than we should fear taking off our clothes to change them when they are dirty.
Hedonic threadmill: it’s the theory that we tend to a baseline level of happiness and on average, after some time, people who have won the lottery are as happy (or unhappy) as people who have gone bankrupt.
Look at us, we are apes, barely out of trees. We were fighting predators and cold and diseases that no longer exist. Just by being alive, we are the winners of millions of years of genetic lottery, through evolution, fights, love and ingenuity.
We have access to most of human knowledge through devices that fit in our pockets, can visit other countries that were legendary to our forefathers, instead of hunting wild beasts we have satellites that guide us step by step to the nearest McDonald’s.
Imagine time-traveling a few generations back, describing our life to our grand-grandparents, seeing their eyes grow wide. Now imagine, at the end, telling them how ennui got to us and we can no longer find meaning in our life.
are we just amusing ourselves until death?
Yes. That’s arguably neither a good nor bad thing; a life with a prescribed meaning or prescribed expectations would be scary in a different way.
There’s been philosophers that got famous arguing it’s actually great and we should be excited, even, but “your mileage may vary”.
he idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?
There is a thing called quality-adjusted life years. To make decisions about certain things like transplants, and to measure the effectiveness of health policy, they absolutely will factor in how much time you’ll get from treatment and how much it’s worth living.
Nations like mine will also help you peace out gracefully.
Everything is meaningless, nothing matters. Therefore whatever you decide is important is all that matters.
You can look up optimistic nihilism if you want
Absurdism is another (IMO better, but that’s just me).
Point? Like most gifts, there is no point. You just got it.
Thats how I treat my life: as a gift. Because what makes me me, existed as matter for eons. Inert. And by an insane oddity it got “infused” with life, thought, wonder but only for an extremely short while. And after that short period it will go back into that inert state. So i do nice things which are within my reach. Things that makes me feel good. And modern (western) society gives us a lot of time to do that. I know it doesn’t always feel like that but if you look at it historically we have the most off time ever.
Nice things can be anything. Maybe meaningless on the Grand scale of things, but I like making my family happy. I love cuddling my stinky old dog(well, not that old), I hate gardening but love the outcome of it. And yes, I love wasting time on movies, reading, gaming, theater. Or hikes. Or travel in general. The smell of the sea. The feeling of being in a forest. That first time you played “The last of us”. that one specific movie. Or read that one fantastic book. That feeling when you finished it. Or when you went to that insanely funny comedian. Or just hanged out drinking beers (or whatever )with friends or colleagues. Its all fantastic.
And most of the times I like my job and try to forward my little society with it. (I work for a municipality) Within my own little means.
So… meaning? Of life? Experience shit. Make up your own mind.
And please: don’t use big tech socials. They’re made so you don’t feel good, get addicted to them. Get you hooked. It and it’s goals (sell ads!) are evil.
I’ve been inert for eternity. I will not waste that little time I have. Experience something. Anything.
are we just amusing ourselves until death?
IMO, yes. But just calling it “entertainment” is a bit reductionist, I think.
But yeah. And I don’t see anything is wrong with that. Having a cat is cool, video games are fun, and good company is fulfilling in a powerful, indescribable, way.
To experience that kind of stuff, and for others to do the same, as much and as often as possible, is what I live for.
Yeah, there’s a lot of bad stuff in the world. But I’m able to make my corner of it quite liveable. And not just for myself, but for friends and family.
I can’t save the world, but I can decide to make the sliver of it that I’ll interact with throughout my life, a little bit nicer.
The part I struggle with, is finding a way to make living, that makes things better, not worse. Jobs that don’t contribute towards people having less and less time for the things that make life worth living, are non-existent.
“Do good, die great”
There’s no right answer.
By that, I mean everyone dies with regrets: regrets about living too wildly, regrets about living too conservatively, having kids, not having kids, missing out on an opportunity, or risking too much.
You’re going to reach the end of your life and believe it’s unfinished, it seems.
I have no advice. Make the best choice at the moment, with all you know at the time, and then forgive yourself for it, I guess.
It’s what you make of it. Some people don’t make anything with theirs.
Personally, for me it’s to form community and to leave a positive lasting influence on others. Except fascists, they can rot in hell. For others, it might be to learn as much as they can or to impart their wisdom onto their children.
Purpose? Point? You make it sound like it’s something inherently positive. Can you give me an example where it could be inherently positive? Because the purposes I can think of are all negative to me since I have goals of my own and any purpose in life would stand in the way of that. I don’t want to be like a spoon (so humans can eat more easily) or a cat (To be human pets), so I’m really glad to have no point or purpose in life, as that means I am the master of my own destiny.
I have goals in life I want to achieve. That’s why I want to live longer. And if people can help me achieve my goals, that’s all the better.
If you want to find purpose in life, then I’m sure you can find another person in life that can give you one.
Life has no meaning, no purpose. Luckily enough we are social animals, which creates a (genetic) framework in which we feel good. Enjoy yourself, when it’s over it’s over 👍🏽😊 I also believe humanity will go through a population collapse in the next 50-200 years… we may actually go extinct. But this beautiful planet with all kinds of beautiful creatures will survive 🎉😍
Life has the meaning you choose to give it.
I remember when I learned about the vastness of space when I was, like, 6. I sat up that night just thinking about how incredibly huge the universe is, and how nothing on one random planet amongst it all could ever really matter. Then I thought “Well, I matter because I want to matter,” and went to bed. Sometimes the simplicity of childhood can help answer the most paralyzing of philosophical quandaries.
pet cats
and make things better
