Discussion Has anyone else got a deep sense of existential dread when it comes to just how hellish life truly is?

[SmellyRat]

Has anyone else got a deep sense of existential dread when it comes to just how hellish life truly is?
Nature is organisms eating and cannibalizing each other for millions of years.

"To be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive."
-Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race

 

[OrdinaryDay]

I do and quite often. In fact so often that it has become a norm and when I'm not in this state of mind I immediately begin to think that something's is wrong. I remember thinking to myself some years ago "is that it? This is what life is? We are not in a Marvel/DC universe where something extraordinary happens everyday? Am I suppose to live like this until my body gives up from natural causes etc" and I have never been normal ever since. Reality is dreadful and its creator is a maniac.

 

[SmellyRat]

I do and quite often. In fact so often that it has become a norm and when I'm not in this state of mind I immediately begin to think that something's is wrong. I remember thinking to myself some years ago "is that it? This is what life is? We are not in a Marvel/DC universe where something extraordinary happens everyday? Am I suppose to live like this until my body gives up from natural causes etc" and I have never been normal ever since. Reality is dreadful and its creator is a maniac.

If there was a creator i would imagine it would look like this

 

[Endeavour]

Yes, I have an existential crisis with life. In the end it's just so pointless. In the fullness of time no life will exist any more, so what was/is the point?

I think it just happened by chance, there is no meaning to it or higher purpose.

 

[Deleted member 23885]

I agree to the extent that life is mostly suffering.

 

[Endeavour]

The only reason we know about death is because we're alive, and the only reason we're alive is because we've briefly stopped being dead.

I believe that when we die there is nothing. It's difficult to imagine what nothing will be like, because everything we know comes from experiencing something.

But when we die and go to nothing we won't be able to take anything with us, not even the knowledge that we are dead, or that we were ever alive.

It makes the whole enterprise of being alive nothing more than an elaborate waste of time.

 

[SmellyRat]

The only reason we know about death is because we're alive, and the only reason we're alive is because we've briefly stopped being dead.

I believe that when we die there is nothing. It's difficult to imagine what nothing will be like, because everything we know comes from experiencing something.

But when we die and go to nothing we won't be able to take anything with us, not even the knowledge that we are dead, or that we were ever alive.

It makes the whole enterprise of being alive an elaborate waste of time.

Death is just dreamless sleep.
That's probably why i enjoy sleeping so much

I agree to the extent that life is mostly suffering.

Pointless suffering aswell since life has no objective meaning.
Nature and its cruel pain receptors make existence for nearly everything hell.

 

[timetofly]

a deep sense of existential dread

I constantly live in it, sometimes getting a break when I manage to get a good night's sleep, but this happens so rarely lately.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is a fantastic read, it felt like home.

 

[Teal_Blue_Dreams]

Death is just dreamless sleep.
That's probably why i enjoy sleeping so much

Pointless suffering aswell since life has no objective meaning.
Nature and its cruel pain receptors make existence for nearly everything hell.

#dirtnap4eva lol

 

[yive]

> a deep sense of existential dread
I constantly live in it.

same. life is a terrible mistake :(
pointless suffering. i want the Universe to be destroyed forever

 

[Good4Nothing]

Yup.

 

[SmellyRat]

I constantly live in it, sometimes getting a break when I manage to get a good night's sleep, but this happens so rarely lately.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is a fantastic read, it felt like home.

Yeah it's a great book that encapsulates what philosophers of pessimism, and nihilism already knew.

 

[demuic]

It's not even that life is meaningless to me, it's more like does it have to be so fucking cruel, evil, and stupid while being meaningless.

 

[SmellyRat]

It's not even that life is meaningless to me, it's more like does it have to be so fucking cruel, evil, and stupid while being meaningless.

I agree.
Lifes pointlessness could be forgiven if it wasn't for nature and its disgustingly cruel pain receptors that is meant to keep the organism alive long enough to propagate its genes only to die anyway...it's sickening tbh.

 

[stygal]

I also hate that it's beyond my powers to stop any of those cruel/violent things (war, crime, injustice) from happening. Like I'm just a bystander who's doomed to watch it like a helpless baby. All the while being in physical pain myself.

 

[Deleted member 22624]

Yes, I have an existential crisis with life. In the end it's just so pointless. In the fullness of time no life will exist any more, so what was/is the point?

I think it just happened by chance, there is no meaning to it or higher purpose.

There must be something nature achieves by summoning our consciousness, trapping them, and forcing them to do its bidding by trick and by stick. What did nature gain by not just making us mindless machines

 

[Captive of Mind]

Yes I do. Organisms only made it this far by out competing other genetics into extinction. The driving force of this whole carnival is that unfit genetics are annihilated from the gene pool. But as modern humans, we get the special gift of getting forced to be here many decades while having a brain capable of more suffering than any other creature.

 

[it's_all_a_game]

Yes, I think it's sad that all you get is reality and that's it. Especially since I don't believe in an afterlife, I will be mostly in pain until I ctb.

 

[Pookie]

 

[MindFrog]

Every time I watch the news...

 

[ARW3N]

My profile picture says it all.

 

[Bigpink]

Victor Frankl posits that we essentially have to suffer in life, if we can accept that.,.....
Quote from a Woody Allen film 'we're alone in a godless universe' captures it for me.

 

[Endeavour]

There must be something nature achieves by summoning our consciousness, trapping them, and forcing them to do its bidding by trick and by stick. What did nature gain by not just making us mindless machines

You assume a purpose that nature has engineered, almost like nature is a living thinking thing, like a God that can summon us into being at will.

We appeared through a myriad of circumstances and became what we are, there was no grand plan to create a consciousness, all beings have some form of consciousness.

We have to have the consciousness to eat when we are hungry so we can be here long enough for something else to eat us, and to pass on our genes so our children can be eaten by their children.

There is no grand plan we are neither unique nor special, we just have different attributes to some of the other creatures.

We can think in concepts, cheetahs can run fast, ants can carry hundreds of times their body weight, birds can fly, etc.

I don't suppose you sit there thinking about natures plan for making birds fly, or fish swim, they just do because that's what they are.

But when it comes to us - there must be a special purpose.

We are different flavour of meat - that's it.

Although we probably taste like chicken.

 

[Raminiki]

Absolutely. Everything that has been said, I echo. I think I first became aware it when I was 14 and shown a documentary about how your meat ends up on your plate. All the hidden barbarism, suffering, violence, injustice and meaninglessness invited upon those poor, wretched animals was made undeniably clear.

My eyes and heart were opened. I can never go back to blissful ignorance and the weight of empathy and guilt and fury for the tragedy that is life, it crushes me.

There is great beauty, yes, but I can never forgive the enormous and selfish cruelty necessary for that beauty to be. It's not worth it.

 

[Deleted member 22624]

You assume a purpose that nature has engineered, almost like nature is a living thinking thing, like a God that can summon us into being at will.

We appeared through a myriad of circumstances and became what we are, there was no grand plan to create a consciousness, all beings have some form of consciousness.

We have to have the consciousness to eat when we are hungry so we can be here long enough for something else to eat us, and to pass on our genes so our children can be eaten by their children.

There is no grand plan we are neither unique nor special, we just have different attributes to some of the other creatures.

We can think in concepts, cheetahs can run fast, ants can carry hundreds of times their body weight, birds can fly, etc.

I don't suppose you sit there thinking about natures plan for making birds fly, or fish swim, they just do because that's what they are.

But when it comes to us - there must be a special purpose.

We are different flavour of meat - that's it.

Although we probably taste like chicken.

Yeah I guess I confused the issue by bringing the idea of nature being aware of what it's doing as cruel and by design. But birds fly and cheetahs run fast because there's clear advantage to that. But I don't see how consciousness is necessary for processing, calculating and scheming which is all an organism should need to do. What is it about consciousness, rather than calculating power that made it get selected? It surely doesn't add anything to the ability to do anything, it just feeds experiences to a soul. AI doesn't need consciousness, why should life? It seems unnecessary. And since life tends to be quite efficient, selecting out what's unnecessary, I don't see why anything's conscious. It must just be more efficient than a brain without consciousness

 

[demuic]

Yeah I guess I confused the issue by bringing the idea of nature being aware of what it's doing as cruel and by design. But birds fly and cheetahs run fast because there's clear advantage to that. But I don't see how consciousness is necessary for processing, calculating and scheming which is all an organism should need to do. What is it about consciousness, rather than calculating power that made it get selected? It surely doesn't add anything to the ability to do anything, it just feeds experiences to a soul. AI doesn't need consciousness, why should life? It seems unnecessary. And since life tends to be quite efficient, selecting out what's unnecessary, I don't see why anything's conscious. It must just be more efficient than a brain without consciousness

I see it as an accident of brains becoming more complex.

 

[Deleted member 22624]

I see it as an accident of brains becoming more complex.

Crazy accident. I can't imagine thinking of any other parallel or analogy in this world that comes close, other than the strange world of quantum physics, it's that level of weirdness. I think for some reason it's been an essential consequence of biology, even. At least it would bring a smidgen more meaning to the suffering

 

[Superdeterminist]

all beings have some form of consciousness.

I would dispute that. We haven't defined exactly what consciousness is, which makes things difficult. However, here's one simple, unscientific definition that I like and might be useful for now: "an awareness that something is happening". Right now most evidence suggests that, in all known organisms, a nervous system is required for consciousness, which would mean that most life on earth isn't conscious at all. If we accept that consciousness is (vaguely speaking) a kind of 'information processing', then it's likely consciousness can arise in systems other than nervous systems, but with what we've observed so far, it really looks like nature has chosen nervous systems as the basis for all consciousness, for some reason (maybe there's something intrinsic to neurons that makes them the only thing capable of producing it - so called 'substrate dependence'). Of course, this could be wrong, we have to explore further, and it's really exciting. But equally, I think it's also frustrating because of how hard the problem is - solving it will open a lot of doors for us to further push back suffering.

 

[Deleted member 22624]

solving it will open a lot of doors for us to further push back suffering.

Or to increase it by implementing it in our machines to do work

 

[Superdeterminist]

Or to increase it by implementing it in our machines to do work

That's definitely a huge worry that we need to consider. I expect, or at least hope, that the companies producing AI will take rigorous steps to ensure their robots never attain consciousness, but you never know, it's definitely a possibility - they might produce it accidentally, before we have even classified consciousness properly. Imo, they have no right to do that, and it kind of defeats the main purpose of AI - to be servants for us without any moral qualms. We'll see what happens, I truly hope the CEOs don't let their greed get the better of them, and the technologists don't get too carried away.