To my brain, nothing is worth pursuing or trying. “How can you guarantee that you’ll be alive to finish anything you start?” My brain asks. And it’s right. I can never make that guarantee.
It directs me to spoil myself with instant gratification because it knows I will still be alive to experience it. There’s no risk of working towards nothing. Don’t make goals. Don’t take risks. Embrace mediocrity. Do the bare minimum needed to survive. That way, you will never be disappointed.
I’m so tired of thinking like this. It started when I got a serious chronic illness that couldn’t be diagnosed. I always manage to survive for longer than I predict, and then I look back and notice that I have done nothing for the last 3 years.
I hope that I don’t continue to make the same mistake in response to Current Events™. I’m sure that falling for it again would be helpful to the exact people I really don’t want to be helping.
The only answer is radical optimism: trust that things can turn out better than the facts say they should.
Any moderate/rational takes on reality predict only failure so we have to lean into radical optimism on the off chance that we can pull off a miracle with enough determination and work.
At the very least don’t squish someone else’s radical optimism!
This is one reason I refuse to carry pepper spray despite it being a reasonable response to the realities in my area. To do so is to treat each stranger as a potential threat and I refuse to live like that (this isn’t advice don’t put away your pepper spray! Just an irrational choice I’ve knowingly made so I can squash reality into the kind world I think is worth living in).
The answer that my mind seems to be converging on is: “We can use the power of local community to help insulate ourselves from outside forces and replace technological addiction with genuine social connection to achieve a more natural and healthy state of existence.”
Or, put simply, “Friendship is magic.”
It doesn’t answer existential questions about the future, but I think it makes them less relevant by making the present nice enough that work towards the future is less of an emotional sacrifice.
I like that. Building community spontaneously builds coalitions because people naturally become mutually invested in protecting eachother and pool their various skills to do so.
That is a radical way of living! I like your example. Cops are living the exactly opposite world view I guess. Radical negativism?
Yeah I’d say so with their shoot first vibe, also think some true crime fans I know fit in the category of ‘radical negativism’ (haha I’m going to try to normalize your term).
Thanks for sharing yours! :)
I just wrote that off the top of my head because I couldn’t think of the opposite of optimism being pessimism, lol. Only nihilism popped into my mind but that’s different from what we’re saying. Radical pessimism is most likely better, but same meaning. Maybe nihilism could go hand in hand with either term. If everything is meaningless you can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic, would you agree?
Yes I agree! Nihilism lets you dictate the terms so dealers choice how you decide to create meaning.
Also agree that pessimism is probably the more immediate opposite but I kinda like negativism because it feels like it carries a little more agency for some reason.
You are like the opposite of cancer patients that know they are going to die. They appreciate every single day, watching the sunset, seeing their loved ones. Because it’s about to end.
You are appearently thinking nothing is worth doing. That sounds more like depression.
Depression can be secondary to many chronic illnesses, perhaps this is the mental mechanism that explains it.
The only thing that’s guaranteed is that nothing is guaranteed
The only constant is change
Thanks for sharing. There was a recent asklemmy post asking what one would change if we only had half a year to a year left. I found the only answer I could come up with was work hard on what matters. But your post makes me realize I already live like I’m going to die tomorrow. I think this started around covid for me when I was just bored inside and drank too much. Was hard to drop. I can see your post in myself wanting to game too long, stay up too late, eat too much, etc. It will be there tomorrow.
Maybe the take away is to plan and work like you only have a year but gratify yourself like you have until 100.
I’m glad you’re physically healthy after the scare.
Finally, after all these years… styropyro’s hidden Lemmy account.
It may be worth looking into ADHD. It kinda sounds like you’re describing executive dysfunction. In addition, a symptom of ADHD is not being motivated to work towards long term goals. Worth conferring with your doctor at the very least.
Thanks! Though it’s worth noting that I tend to exaggerate. During that 3-year period, I actually did do some long-term projects and kept my attention on them; I just wasn’t satisfied with the overall impact of them on my life because I was playing things way too safe.
This post is basically me taking a common self-defeating pattern I exhibit and calling it out as silly, perhaps to better help me recognize and challenge it within myself. It is one of the final things holding me back from ditching the dopamine machine and returning to the real world.
I was doing good for the past couple of days, but recently, I had a relapse. My brain’s excuse was: “If you go cold turkey, you might never get to experience these feelings ever again, since you could die before forming the relationship required to feel them legitimately.”
It sounded compelling on its face, but then I realized that all of the time I spend indulging myself in various ways eliminates time that I could be spending on pursuing real connections. Using technology to partially fill the void was consuming all of the time that I could have spent actually filling said void. That’s what inspired me to make this post—recognizing just how counterproductive that mentality really was.
You gotta push past absurdism and get to either nihilism or existentialism. Which ever one vibes with you better.
I think you mean push past nihilism to get to absurdism or existentialism? Because it seems like OP feels like nothing matter in a negative way, the intense pessimism caused from the chronic illness is holding OP back from experience anything.
