r/Pessimism

Everyone is running around trying to find their "purpose." They want to know why they were born, what they're meant to do, and what their legacy will be. But the universe doesn't have a plan for you. There is no cosmic destiny waiting for you to fulfill.

We are just conscious beings on a floating rock, trying to make sense of a meaningless existence. The sooner you accept that there is no purpose, the freer you become. You stop chasing a script that was never written and start living your life on your own terms. There is no grand design. There is only the absurdity of existence, and the peace of accepting it.

A lot of times I hear how lovely it is to be alive because of the small moments of love and beauty along the way. But is this enough to justify living in the first place?

Are these temporary goods that we experience (in life) such as moments with family, laughter with friends or experiencing nature enough to justify the burden of continually having to live and strive?

Doesn’t the nature of those temporary goods depend largely on the final destination. For EXAMPLE, if you run a marathon the goods can be a runners high, cheering from the crowd or a refreshing break of water. But do those things in themselves justify running the marathon or why someone starts running in the first place. No. One runs it for the achievement, satisfaction and health rewards in the long run. In this example, the painful nature of the marathon is justified by the many positives aligned with the end result. That is not however the case with life. We on the other hand strive without choosing too and towards nothing in particular. In that case why are we supposed to be grateful for the small moments along the way. We are simply blindly striving for something that we will never attain (a lasting sense of contentment) by a force which we do not completely understand.

One may in contrary to this argue that some goods have value in themselves such as spending time with someone that you love. This can be viewed as something you do for its own sake rather than seeking encouragement for a larger reward. But is love something that is truly something you want to experience or is it simply a manifestation of your biological instincts with the eventual goal being to procreate and in turn propagate/ transfer this suffering to others in the long run? I also agree with Schopenhauer’s view on the fact that if we were properly in charge of our own intellect, we would choose people very different that the ones we fall in love with.

To conclude I do believe that we are simply blindly striving towards nothing in particular, against our will and experiencing a great deal of suffering across the way. And these small moments are nothing, but delusions created by those that are drunk on optimism to justify living by subverting our expectations towards the very nature of our existence.

A reality without sentient beings can never be improved upon through the creation of them, for nothing is lacking beforehand. In contrast, a reality where sentient beings are born that suffer as a result their own existence from the second they come to exist to the moment they die without any justifying value to be found is certainly a terrible one. To me pessimism is the obvious response to such a situation as painful as it is to accept when we have no control over the origin of our existence or even any actions at all in any morally important sense.

And yet, pessimism is pathologised and actively suppressed in conversation (along with other serious 'undesirable' topics like veganism) despite the clear and unavoidable evidence it is derived from. In comparison to the advanced teaching people receive at academic institutions, pessimism as a philosophy is so simple even a child can understand it. This judgement of pessimism comes not from a lack of ability to comprehend it, but willful ignorance and the refusal to reflect on the world and the nature of the experiences for the beings within.

Society serves as nothing more than a coping mechanism, people reproducing and continuing the cycle of suffering and death again and again to no avail, only delaying the inevitability of the future and for nothing of value to retain in the end once the last sentient being dies. So many distractions, so much conflict and so much violence and for what? At what point does one consider the insanity of this situation, or at least the immorality of it all? Perhaps if humans were morally inclined to reduce the suffering of existence in the long-term society could be justified as a lesser of evils, but in its current state it is dominated by needless exploitation and subservience to the authority (both of individuals and psychological factors) that creates such suffering.

At some point, the question has to be asked as to why we continue to live if we are only prolonging our agony until the same end of obliteration, but even when you think you could be removed from it all at last you are shackled by your own sense of morality. Reality is certainly horrifically bad, but as you are burdened with this knowledge you are to find yourself acting on it so that it may be less miserable for others worse off than yourself. As much as you want to leave, you stay because leaving it all behind when you could have done something is unacceptable. And even if you were to die, there is to be no reprieve for you, for you no longer exist. The only solution to ending the cycle of desire and suffering is one that cannot be enjoyed and which comes at the price of your existence itself.

No matter how hard you try and cope, no reasoning can delude you when up against what is undeniable. No matter how much you distract yourself, you cannot avoid facing it forever. No matter what you do, you will suffer and die. People may run from the truth, but nobody can hide from the world they inhabit. Sooner or later, when society faces the end, I wonder if people will still maintain the delusion or if they will accept their situation. I suppose the denial and absurdity is to be expected when all life is a result of unreasoned reproduction.

How tragic.

When I was a child I thought, that if I work hard, studied hard, everything will be all right, and I would live a peaceful and happy life.

But now as I am adult, that is not the case.

I am stuck in endless loop of work and daily chorus.

Life seems to be a never ending list of problems. A never ending ' to do ' list. When you behave with people properly, that doesnt mean they will behave with you in same way.You have to make numerous decisions everyday. And there is no guarantee, that later the decision will turn right. So is ' hope' something that is manufactured, so that you can go on living whatever may be circumstances, a " dangling carrot".

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

We can regard our life as a long, painful, humilating, repetitive, and boring process, in blissful repose of nothingness.

In the last couple of days I was wondering and asking myself really, what is hatred? Is it some kind of a mativator that light a flame inside you so you can achieve what you want or is it a curse, a sickness that devour you by time.

On Why I Loathe Existentialism

The Sartrean school loves to talk about human freedom and the moral responsibility that accompanies it: "Man can do what he wants, therefore he is free, and therefore he must be responsible for his actions." This is treated as some sort of self-evident truth, but it is precisely this premise that is untenable. Here is why:

1. For a person to bear responsibility for their actions, they must both need to and be able to take responsibility for their own nature (personality), because their actions are the direct result of their nature.
2. However, one cannot be held responsible for their own nature because nothing in this world can generate itself; nothing is causa sui (self-caused).

A person's nature is jointly shaped by genetics, heredity, external environment, and other factors over which they have absolutely no say. They did not freely choose their nature when they logged into this game of "Earth Online"; rather, they were assigned a nature by the game's system. This nature drives them to do what they desire, yet they cannot master their own desires. That a person can do what they want merely means their body is not physically restrained—it only signifies physical freedom. The question we ought to ask is: Is this person's nature free? Do they possess freedom in a moral sense, rather than merely a physical one?

The answer is no. Although individuals harbor a subjective illusion that their actions are self-authored and therefore free, they are merely experiencers of this world. Like anything else in the universe, a person's nature is simply an object of their consciousness and is thus subject to strict necessity (determinism).

Furthermore, if the world were not governed by strict necessity, it would be a living nightmare. It would mean humans could act with complete randomness—even a saint might attack you for no reason at all. If human free will existed in an absolute sense, moral responsibility would precisely thereby become impossible.

Moral responsibility is nothing more than a product of human social construction. Without human civilization, there would be no morality, only the law of the jungle found in the animal kingdom. Morality is not sacred; it is simply a set of rules that individuals must follow in order to live within human society. The Golden Rule—"Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you"—adequately summarizes morality in the eyes of the vast majority. As for those capable of unconditional, pure altruism and compassion, they are merely a rare exception. Without laws, people would very quickly understand the meaning of homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man). Therefore, it is not that morality birthed law, but rather that law birthed morality.

Figures like the ancient Chinese strategist Guiguzi tore away the mask of morality long ago, exposing the baseline of human nature. He mapped out human relationships in what is essentially a four-quadrant matrix based on desire and circumstance:

• When people share the same circumstances and grow close, it is because cooperation yields mutual benefit and a win-win outcome.
• When people share the same desires but remain distant and defensive, it is because their interests are mutually exclusive, destining them to a zero-sum game.
• When people share the same aversions (threats) and huddle together, it is out of a "lips and teeth" interdependence; if one falls, all fall.
• When people face the same crisis but distance themselves and shift blame, it is because as long as disaster can be redirected, one party can save themselves at the other's expense.

This matrix illustrates that whether people become allies or enemies is determined solely by human desire and external circumstances. There are no eternal allies and no eternal enemies. As Guiguzi further stated:

"There are no permanently elite individuals, and no fixed rules for handling affairs. The sage has no permanent allies, nor anyone he absolutely cannot ally with; he has no counsel he blindly listens to, nor any he absolutely refuses to hear. As long as it brings success to the endeavor and aligns with the strategic calculus, he will engage with it and make it his guiding principle."

If my loathing for Sartrean existentialism stems from a distaste for its pedantic moralizing, then my loathing for Camus’s absurdism stems from how his Sisyphean rebellion—against a cold, unfeeling universe that couldn't care less whether you rebel or despair—feels entirely like an exercise in self-indulgent ego-stroking. (I categorize Camus’s absurdism here as a broad subset of existentialism, despite his own adamant efforts to distance himself from the label).

Furthermore, Camus sidestepped the real issue: In a godless world, where death means absolute annihilation and the erasure of all life's meaning, why exactly should humans keep living?

Camus pulled a bait-and-switch. Right out of the gate, he declared: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." But I can't help but ask him: Who told you that someone confronting the meaninglessness of the universe would inevitably commit suicide? Who told you that asking "Why live?" (i.e., inquiring about the meaning of life) is synonymous with asking "What reason is there not to die?"

Inquiring about the meaning of life merely indicates that a person has fallen into a state of bewilderment. This question can be purely philosophical, not psychiatric. Yet Camus, striking a self-serious posture, displayed a kind of pity that is entirely inappropriate to direct at a nihilist.

If his The Myth of Sisyphus is to be viewed as a response to existential nihilism, it can only be seen as a clumsy, evasive, and self-congratulatory one.

My dissatisfaction with Heideggerian existentialism stems from the fact that he evades all the aforementioned problems and downgrades them to issues unworthy of discussion. What I dislike most is his repeated insistence that his concept of "Being-towards-death" (Sein-zum-Tode) is not a normative ethical standard, but purely an ontological speculation. What does that even mean? It means he fashioned himself as having diagnosed the fundamental flaw in millennia of Western philosophy, yet he shrank back at the exact moment he should have proposed an ethics. It is a duplicitous, hypocritical stance.

As for Nietzschean existentialism, my assessment of it can be summed up in four words: Putting on a brave face.

When Nietzsche realized the terrifying possibility revealed by Schopenhauer—that "Truth" does not equal "Good"—his reaction was not to hold back his tears and accept this dark reality, but rather to try and flip the entire table. In a manner that may have seemed subversive at the time, but today looks incredibly pretentious (with its underlying motives all too transparent), he attempted to prove that objective truth simply does not exist, thereby dodging the problem entirely. Accompanying this denial of objective truth was his insistence that one must "affirm the value of life no matter what"—a rhetoric that reads as though he were simply triggered by Schopenhauer.

Finally, there is Irvin Yalom. Though strictly speaking he is not a philosopher, I cannot bypass his Existential Psychotherapy here, because all my grievances with existentialism can essentially be encapsulated in my critique of this book's themes.

Yalom first defines the four "ultimate concerns" of life:

1. Death
2. Isolation (referring to existential isolation, meaning everyone is trapped in their own physical shell and can never truly merge minds with another)
3. Freedom (a seemingly infinite freedom accompanied by endless bewilderment and the heavy burden of responsibility)
4. Meaninglessness

It is regrettable that a book with such profound themes ultimately drifts into a quasi-cynical attitude—essentially advising readers not to overthink, not to ask "why," and to just focus on opening themselves up to the world and building connections with others.

But in reality, only Death and Meaninglessness truly matter here, and perhaps only Death actually constitutes a problem. Compared to death, meaninglessness is nothing more than the shattering of symbolic immortality. People do not suffer because the universe lacks meaning; they suffer because they realize that the universe's meaninglessness dictates that, no matter how hard they strive, they will leave nothing behind to be remembered by others after they die. It is the subsequent realization of their own transience and mortality as animal beings that causes them agony.

There is only one true philosophical problem, and that is learning how to face death—in an absolutely atheistic sense, of course.

"At that time, Prince Bala went to the assembly of the Six Heretical Teachers and asked Purana Kassapa: 'What is the doctrine you revere? What do you teach your disciples? What fruit is obtained by diligently practicing the holy life?'

The teacher replied: 'O Prince! The doctrine I hold, and the view I proclaim is this:
There is no giving of alms, no receiving of them, and no sacrifices. There are no good or evil deeds, no karma, and no karmic retribution. There is no this world, and no next world. There is no father, no mother, and no beings born through transformation. There are no Arhats in this world... All these things do not exist.

What possesses life is merely labeled as being "alive." When this body expires, the great elements separate, and there is no further continuation of life—this is called "death." Earth returns to earth, water returns to water, fire to fire, wind to wind, and the senses dissolve into the void. Four men carry the corpse to the cremation ground and burn it with fire; nothing remains but bones, entirely devoid of consciousness. In this, the fool and the wise suffer the exact same fate. Therefore, giving is an illusion, receiving is an illusion, and those who claim these things exist speak only falsehoods.'" (Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya)

I get the impression that philosophical pessimism can lead to two different attitudes: a greater aversion toward humanity, or greater compassion for human beings and other sentient beings capable of suffering (sometimes both overlapping).

Although misanthropy can mean withdrawal, disillusionment, or aversion toward humanity without necessarily implying cruelty, I see many people (especially online) who identify as pessimists but use pessimism to justify hatred or violence toward others. If existence is marked by suffering, frustration, and dissatisfaction, that seems like a reason to reduce the suffering of others, rather than to wish for or celebrate their suffering. After all, aren't we all fellow sufferers, trapped under the same burden?

After discovering philosophical pessimism, did you become more misanthropic, more compassionate, or some combination of the two?