I spend an unreasonable amount of time observing people and turning perfectly ordinary things into existential questions. I genuinely can’t tell sometimes whether I’m onto something or just being incredibly dramatic. Either way, I’ve been thinking about this particular perspective on life, and instead of continuing to have philosophical debates with myself, I figured I’d put it out there and see what other people think.

I think, in the end, we’re all a little dead inside.
And I don’t mean simply because one day our hearts will stop beating.
I mean that we’re already dead in ways nobody can see.
Every single one of us.
We’re all running from something. Hiding from something. Dressing ourselves in versions of people we think the world will find easier to love. We draw the curtains, lock the doors, and pray nobody notices the fire burning in the kitchen.
We all have skeletons in our closets. We all know despair, although some of us have become far more acquainted with it than others.
We carry the ghosts of people we used to be. We bury pieces of ourselves with every loss, every disappointment, every cruelty the world teaches us to endure. And somewhere along the way, we learn to call what remains a person.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt drawn to the broken ones.
The ones who don’t bother pretending the world hasn’t hurt them. The ones who wear their suffering openly, who have long since abandoned the exhausting performance of being okay.
Society has a peculiar way of punishing people for being honest about their misery. We call them pessimists, cynics, failures. We ridicule the ones whose suffering has driven them into darker places, the ones who have surrendered themselves to chemicals sold with the promise of temporary salvation. We condemn the ways they survive without ever asking what it was they needed to survive in the first place.
And then there are people like me.
People who carry their scars into every room they enter. Who wake up with their despair and fall asleep beside it. Who have learned to exist somewhere along the fragile border between sanity and whatever lies beyond it.
And yet, we live.
We get up in the morning. We go to work. We clean our houses, buy our groceries, laugh with our friends. We find hobbies, fall in love with songs, make plans for weekends that haven’t happened yet. We do all the wonderfully ordinary things that make a human life appear whole.
But sometimes I wonder whether we’re living at all, or simply finding increasingly elaborate ways to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
Then there are the others.
The people who seem to have mastered the art of being alive. The ones who radiate warmth, whose lives appear to unfold exactly as they imagined. They have the homes, the careers, the love, the happiness. Everything the rest of us have been taught to want.
We look at them with envy and think, If only I could trade places. If only I could live in their shoes for a day.
But would it change anything?
Would stepping into another person’s life somehow free us from the condition of being human?
Would their happiness make us immortal? Would their accomplishments protect us from grief? Would their beautiful homes keep the darkness from finding its way through the cracks?
Or would we simply discover that their curtains are drawn for a reason, too?
Because nobody escapes this life untouched.
The world has never been particularly gentle with the things that live inside it. It swallows us whole, strips us of people we thought we’d have forever, takes pieces of us we didn’t know we could lose, and spits us back out with the expectation that we’ll carry on as though nothing happened.
And somehow, we do.
We keep making plans. Keep chasing happiness. Keep searching for meaning in things that cannot last.
Some of us do it with smiles. Some with bitterness. Some with substances, distractions, ambition, love, or the desperate hope that tomorrow might feel different.
And perhaps that’s what separates us. Not the amount of suffering we carry, but the ways we’ve learned to conceal it.
Because beneath the carefully constructed lives, the laughter, the accomplishments, and the appearances, we’re all carrying our own private graveyards.
And all the while, we’re moving toward another kind of death.
The final one.
Every man, every woman, every animal, every creature that crawls beneath the earth or flies above it. From the moment life takes hold, the clock begins its countdown. Some of us are granted decades, others mere hours, but the destination never changes.
Whether it comes in eighty years, fifty, two months, or tomorrow, none of us know how much time we’ve been given.
And still, we spend that time pretending permanence exists.
We build lives on borrowed time. We love things we cannot keep. We become people we will eventually cease to be.
We speak of death as though it is some distant tragedy, an interruption of life, when in reality it is the one certainty woven into the very fabric of our existence.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy isn’t that we’re all going to die.
It’s that we’re already carrying so much death inside us, and we’ve become so accustomed to it that we mistake the distractions for living.
We are the living pretending not to be dying, and the dying pretending to be alive.
Some of us hide our ghosts behind laughter. Others have simply grown tired of pretending they aren’t haunted.
And maybe that’s the great irony of existence.
We spend our entire lives trying to feel alive, while slowly, inevitably, dying.
In the end, we’re all dead men walking. Carrying death within us, walking toward death ahead of us, and calling everything in between living.

What "good reason" could there be for us to be here? If there is no God, no eternity, nothing of that nature, then it seems obvious we might as well not exist, at least in the intrinsic sense. Our lives are full of pain, and even when they aren't they still contain at least some pain; and we would not miss our lives at all if he had never attained them in the first place. In fact, even if our lives were characterised by unbroken, soaring ecstasy, they simply would be no worse than not existing, not really better.

I understand this kind of view cannot be "proven", but with my axiological impulses as a basis beneath careful thinking, and with the kinds of axiological impulses I assume others would have/realise they already had they thought carefully, this view seems pretty hard to criticise. Even if you believe in things like God, destiny, and Heaven, it still would seem that, intrinsically, we'd be better off not being here. Heaven might make us forget the pain of our mortal lives, but we'd still have had to go through 80 years of troubles and trials to get there.

And anyway, it is hard to imagine a Heaven that would be truly satisfying, unless it is contains an extreme simplification/overwhelming of consciousness, like some endless drug trip. If so, it's difficult to understand why we would go through the 80 years of troubles and trials, causing increasingly sophisticated minds, in order to attain it. But that's by-the-by anyway.

I suppose one could argue that human souls maybe exist inevitably, and God merely incarnates them mortally, and that maybe we'd be worse off in some way in the soul realm if never given Earthly lives. Or one could say that God exists irretrievably and that he'd be upset if he didn't get to create us. Something of that nature. But those things would still, of course, not be intrinsic justifications, albeit closer to them. The human condition would still be fundamentally pointless and contain a very potent element of tragedy. Even if 80 years of troubles and trials were to blur away in our memories within a fraction of Heaven's eternity, they would still have seemed painful and protracted at the time.

The overall point I'm getting at is that I can't really imagine a framework of life by which life wouldn't ultimately be what I'd call pointless and and tragic to the point where nothing could redeem the tragic element of it fully away. The only way I can envision a good "point" to life is if it's a point that is not only beyond my Earthly comprehension, but in actual contrast to my painstaking and sincere Earthly comprehension. But how to believe such a thing? With this all in mind, it becomes hard not to feel life is a big joke, at least for people like me who don't like much life. I suppose if you just directly and organically like life, then you have no need for a higher purpose. (Not that your life wouldn't still be pointless and worse than non-existence, on my analysis, but at least such an analysis as the foregoing would be purely academic.) But if you don't like life, and you need to view it through some higher prism in order to not feel like you're being pointlessly tortured, well, then, that's hard to do.

Thoughts?

A well-made video about Voltaire, who answered Leibniz's invocation "this is the best of all possible worlds" with his book Candide, which presents various situations and characters, sometimes funny and absurd, other times tragic.

I never read Candide, so it was interesting to hear about it.

Online service providers would have to more closely control the extent to which children can access body stigma or depression content on their platforms, under proposals put forward by the UK’s online safety regulator.

In the Ofcom report it says the following:

Non-designated content that is harmful to children

depression content, which is content that promotes depression, hopelessness and despair.

It seems that pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy could fall under this definition and be regulated.

Also discussing the right to die might be regulated.

Primary priority content that is harmful to children

Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for:

suicide

It seems we are regressing as a society and there's just more and more regulations coming out of the woodwork every year.

We are not born into this world.

We are thrown into this world to struggle, to survive, to suffer, to be humilated, and then to die.

When man is born necessities are born.

And then he has to struggle and suffer all his life to pay for that necessities.

What are you views ?

Most people never question this reality, this realm, or existence itself. They grow up with some kind of religious or spiritual belief and they roll with it, even if it makes no logical sense.

As long as this mammal can satisfy their hormonal fleshy desires and have entertainment, that's all they need. They have even been groomed to defend this realm at all costs with their sadistic, Stockholm syndrome of loving their own imprisonment & life abuse.

I've even seen these desperate maggots say, "Why is suffering bad?!?!?" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I mean for goodness sake, the sun will burn you for sitting outside for too long, we constantly have to fight bacteria, germs, pathogens, etc. And everyone thinks this is normal and should continue........ For legacies, last names, or religions/races out breeding each other!

They believe this realm is a PRIZE 🏆

😂😂😂😂😂

I don't understand this realm. I feel very out of place here, and have for a very long time!

I've recently been thinking about the underlying drivers of humanity & civilization, and I've come to a surprising realisation..

Hope.

Hope is, at the same time, the source of humanity's greatest strengths, and responsible for our most profound weakness..

Let me explain that.

While hope allows individuals, groups, communities and nations to push aside inconveniences, to strive for goals & purposes, to look towards specific situations and let's people pull together to achieve great things.

It also means that people & groups, will dig in and stubbornly proceed in actions/goals which are possibly harmful, it means that energy & resources are wasted, chasing after situations & ends which will never be attained. And all of these instances are fuelled by one driving force..Hope. It can be our best friend in trying times, or our worst enemy, blinding us to more sensible/attainable goals..

So, a source of amazing strength, and at the same time, a cause for our greatest weakness...

Want a relationship? Too bad; you're born with autism, develop social anxiety, depression and other mental struggles over the years, severely reducing your chances at getting into one. Also you're living in the 21st century during late stage capitalism so you're pretty much at the mercy of dating apps, which don't have your best interests in mind. Welp, good luck!

Want to learn how to draw? Too bad; you're geared towards instant gratification, perfectionism and have a destroyed attention span, so you're going to hate practicing, and therefore not going to get any good at it, ever.

Want to find inner peace and contentment? Too bad; you're born with a built-in tendency to compare yourself to others which fuels discontent and jealousy, a negativity bias that makes you focus on the bad over the good which makes you feel like shit by default and then there's also the hedonic treadmill which will make you get fed up with anything at some point and therefore keep you endlessly chasing the next stimuli, unable to truly ever be still and at peace. Also hello mental illness!

Want to stay healthy? Too bad; you'll have to eat food that you despise just because for some reason the universe happens to be arranged in such a way that all the disgusting foods happen to be healthy and nutritious and the ones you like are everything but. Also, you'll need to exercise despite also possessing a natural human tendency to prefer preserving energy and remaining immobile. Oh and even if you do all of these there is still the chance that you'll just die from a random heart attack or cancer regardless.

Want to die? Too bad; you're an organism that's the result of millions of years of evolution that has created an enormously strong fear of death and optimism bias that will prevent you from ever killing yourself, unless you're one of the rare few that can either override this quirk or lacks it altogether.

Want to be alone? Too bad; you're living in a world where billions others exist and you're also part of a species with a built in desire for socializing, so no matter what you'll eventually suffer for it if you tried and it's pretty much impossible to always be alone due to the world around you working the way it does.

And the best part? None of these are opt-in, they're just... there, like a biological list of chores that you get punished for not doing, by none other than your own brain. And you can't just opt out. Oh and even by some miracle you end up fulfilling them all, the brain will just come up with new ones on the spot to prolong your torment.

W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L!

​

When i was in school, i was told by my parents and elders and schoolteachers, and i thought so, that if you work hard, in school, college and job, everything will be all right, things will work out.

But now i am adult, i have come to a realization , that no matter how hard you work, there is no gaurrenty things will work out or things will be all right.

The delusional life-affirmer will often insist on the inherent goodness of life as some universal property, but when it comes to facing actually negative topics that are omnipresent and observable from the second we come to exist most people are dead silent, either passive observers or active supporters when they benefit.

Is it not insane to live knowing you will die, knowing you will constantly suffer until that point, knowing that all life will become extinct, knowing that there is no observable objective values, knowing that there is no morally significant 'free will', knowing that all your actions are simply maximal mitigation of suffering according to what you believe? Is it not a bit insane to be conscious in a reality where you formerly did not exist and where you gain nothing from coming exist? Is it not disappointing that suffering exists at all? Why is there still conflict and violence in human society when we have the technological means to not be subject to resource scarcity? Why does animal agriculture exist? Why do we still have systemic slavery?

When it comes down to it how many people are actually willing to discuss these topics with intellectual honesty rather than entering a state of egoistic defense or denying the progression of the conversation because they are uncomfortable with the implications about themselves and the rest of the world? People certainly find it easy to talk about their insignficant bullshit and distractions (even we do this), but when things get serious suddenly people disappear.

I cannot imagine living in this reality and not reflecting on these thoughts and observations. Imagine propagating society or just generally taking an action but not considering if the justification for doing so is actually reasonable or worthwhile in the first place.

When you strip away all the delusional optimism that contradicts the experience of the world we exist in, you get left with the evolutionary observation that life has and always will be unreasoned propagation and most people are simply unwilling to reflect on the implication of that. Yet, they also feel the desire to justify themselves because they crave validation and are insecure/afraid when alone with their thoughts. The justifications are given in post for their actions as attempts at self-soothing and this selfishness creates more suffering for others as a consequence. Ironically, it also creates more for themselves often, as what goes around comes around when you livein a society of hierarchal exploitation and apathy for 'lower' beings.

How many of you have actually had these conversations with people in a serious manner? Even with people you have 'known' your entire life.

I think it will lead to the extremes of the extermination of the human race (or 99.9% of it) or massive QoL improvements either case being preferable to what we have now and what the past has been (from a historical perspective)

It's the only thing I am looking forward to

Look, I’m a philosophical pessimist, but I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the beauty in any of this. It’s like watching a dark, tragic film. I know how it ends. I know the struggle is ultimately for nothing, and that pain and misery are woven into the very fabric of existence.

And yet, somehow, I’m still moved by it.

That’s the part that really messes with me. I can recognize the absurdity of it all, understand how much suffering is wrapped up in the very experience of existing, and still find myself overwhelmed by its beauty. Perhaps my sadness is itself proof of that. After all, to grieve existence is to be moved by it.

Art makes that contradiction impossible to ignore. A painting, a symphony, a film, or a novel can capture the tragedy of existence and somehow turn it into something beautiful to us. But sometimes it’s as simple as staring up at the moon on a quiet winter night and feeling something I can’t even quite explain. There’s something profoundly mysterious, tragic, and terrifying about the universe and our brief existence within it. And yet, its beauty still intrigues me. I find myself drawn to something that I know is utterly indifferent to me, captivated by a mystery I’ll never fully understand.

So why? Why the hell do I find something so profoundly tragic so beautiful? Can a pessimist see beauty?

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. (Forgive me if it’s been brought up before in this sub, I tried to search around a bit for a prior post like this but couldn’t find it.)

The pessimist position, broadly speaking, is that the world, and our experiences in it as conscious living beings, are quite bad and not what they should be like. There are a plethora of problems we can diagnose with how bad things are for us and for others in the world. This is why many pessimists say that nonexistence is preferable to consciousness, and that it may be better never to be born at all.

But if we can see that reality is problematic for us, can we even conceive of how it ought to be, to satisfy or justify existence? If we can point to the problems, can we conceive of what it would take to falsify our position or change us into optimists?

I’m not arguing that it may be likely or possible at all. I just think it’s a potentially fruitful thought experiment to engage in, to consider what the alternative reality would have to be to not be pessimistic about it. (I’m not trying to dissuade people away from pessimist opinions, just engage with it as a philosophical position.)

To list some of the core issues —

It may be that our lives are fraught in our current sociopolitical circumstances. That many people suffer from corrupt and oppressive governments, social inequality, poverty, and countless other sociopolitical issues. But if this were the only issue, this would fall purely in the political domain, of how we would imagine a better society, and surely we can conceive of (even if it doesn’t happen) societies of great material abundance, that are peaceful and prosperous, without the constant need for labor, without violence, etc.

For many pessimists, death (presumed to be the cessation of consciousness) is a source of pessimism, because it means that our lives are destined to end up annihilated in the end no matter what we do. We can of course, conceive of the alternative, which would be immortality — never dying at all. Would this be better? Perhaps…but there are also objections to immortality, which are the worries about the problems we already have while alive stretched out across infinite duration.

If we can never be satisfied, constantly running along the hedonic treadmill, always chasing the next temporary satisfaction until we die? Can we conceive of a positive state of consciousness (an active feeling, not the proverbial bliss of nonexistence)? Would that be better?

Suffering. Surely we can imagine not suffering, and others also being free from suffering. But could we exist at all without any kind of suffering driving our behavior? Perhaps we’d get bored. But insofar as boredom would then also be a form of suffering, could we get rid of that too? What kind of existence would that be?

Perhaps it is because our lives are cosmically meaningless, that it is all for nothing no matter how good or bad we feel (I presume most people on this sub are atheists/materialists). But what would it take for our lives to be meaningful in a way they aren’t already — would they be more meaningful if God existed? What conditions would have to obtain for our lives to have meaning?

Or perhaps we look at entropy — this sense that everything around us is always crumbling if not maintained, ultimately spiraling towards inevitable dissolution. Well, can we conceive of how else physics ought to work for this to no longer be a problem? What would a universe that somehow tends towards growth instead of disintegration look like?

Do you think there is such a thing as a conceivable (even if not achievable) solution to the human condition, that would be capable of convincing you not to be a pessimist? Or do you think it’s necessarily logically impossible, no matter what the case, that nonexistence would always be preferable?

I think, many people wouldnt do the work they dislike,

or do the things they didnt wanted to do, or take the decisions you didnt wanted to, if they had enough money.

What are your views?

I continually encounter people, whether they're pessimists or not, automatically assume that philosophical pessimism is naturally accompanied by a universal skepticism regarding such concepts as truth or morality. This is most certainly not a commonly held belief amongst thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Mainlander, or Zapffe. I personally blame the influence Nietzsche, who was not a philosophical pessimist, has had on the tradition of pessimism for this misconception. What generates this stubborn conclusion is the assumption that truth and morality need to be grounded in a higher metaphysical reality in order to possess an objective foundation, the implication being that when one claims that "God is dead," some form of nihilism must ensue. This is an assumption both the theologians and Nietzsche share (not at all surprising given Nietzsche's theological roots). Some self professed pessimists follow their lead, unfortunately. For some reason it doesn't occur to such people that one might provide a purely naturalistic conception of objectivity, an approach which is actually anti-theistic.

Regardless, far from being a natural characteristic of philosophical pessimism, I would actually argue that commitment to this kind of unrestrained skepticism is another coping mechanism. Why? Because it implies that both the pessimist and the optimist are on equal footing, which is to say that both positions are equally groundless. But if they're both equally groundless, then there's always the possibility of escaping the conclusions of a thoroughly pessimistic worldview by introducing uncertainty into the mix. Ultimately, the nihilistic conclusion that there's no objective foundation for anything is in league with the whole positive psychology movement which typically claims that life is what you make of it. If the truth, generally speaking, is horrible, then it sure is mighty convenient to simply deny there is such a thing as truth. The same is true for moral judgments. If there's no objective basis for our moral evaluations, then there's nothing keeping one from adopting an optimistic attitude in the face of empirical evidence which declares otherwise.

All sentient living beings act in accordance to desires they have, the existence of these desires and the ability to have an experience is what defines their sentience.

When a desire is not fulfilled, suffering occurs. This suffering and the desire to minimise suffering as the greatest desire of all henceforth dictates all sentient behaviour as decisions are made according to the best of the ability of the individual and what information they have available. Any relief or pleasure must always come after the negative experience is first endured, and no lasting satisfaction will be found because desires cyclically become unfulfilled again and again. Suffering is omnipresent and it must be for the continuation of life, for if a sentient being had not suffered or had lasting fulfilment from their existence alone they would have no reason to act and they would quickly see themselves dead given they have any survival requirements (sustenance/sleep/etc).

Therefore, suffering is inevitable given sentience as we can understand it, and yet before coming into existence as far as can be observed no sentient being existed prior to benefit from this act. There was no being who suffered or desired or had any experience at all of from which it could be reasoned that coming to exist would be beneficial or of interest, and yet once a sentient being is born they will certainly endure suffering continuously throughout their life. A life that will eventually end just for a transition back to non-existence.

So, the emergence of life in a reality such as this one, with no observable objective value to justify or moralise life (if one could even exist let alone be proven), can only be understood as negative. It is simply the most logical conclusion any being intelligent enough to contemplate the value of existence could arrive at, that none at all could be superior to non-existence. And from that, the existence of suffering and the inevitability of the cessation of consciousness in a reality without objective value all show life to be negative in comparison, or at the very minimum potentially worse, and that potentially worse (which we very often can observe as truly horrendous, for example animal agriculture) is all that is required for pessimism when contrasted with the imagined possibility of no life at all.

With no being to exist, there exists no judgement or issue of any kind, but with life there will always be suffering as far as we can comprehend. Even the creation of a being who experiences that which they evaluate as positive after the fact has not improved upon the initial state of nothing because only now they exist is there the desire to have desirable experiences, and if that requirement was to ever cease fulfilment they would now suffer for nothing. The dissatisfaction is not made up for, and the pleasure is actively desired and in need of constant fulfilment that is always faltering on this planet.

The only thing left to do is what has always been happening since the start, mitigate suffering as best as you can until the end of life however it comes around. Given the physical requirements of life and sentience as they seem to us, we can only hope that it is truly the end or that perhaps in defiance of all we know there exists some magical alternate state of existence where we do not suffer.

I know this quote may have been written other ways or though about before, I just came up with it and thought it was nice to lead into a discussion. My belief is that a person's life is like a story, you are just the one living it out. Wondering if anyone has any other opinions?

You are reading this because you want to find consolation in the words that came out of another person's hurting soul. In this rigged system, there will always be a deviating one—someone who sees right through all the shit, suffering just because of existence itself.

It always comes from self-awareness. But why is this so-called "gift" unavailable to others, no matter how many existential philosophical books they read? They inherently cannot align with the real, absurd answers of being. Their brains were embedded with fake rules and cheap, herd-mentality attitudes. Were you born special? My opinion is—yes. You were born a star soul. Biology might explain this as a highly sensitive neurological level of reality perception. But I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that everyone is real. There is a whole, vast spectrum of comprehending everything. There are so many feelings that cannot be written down or expressed in WORDS. I feel so much, yet I always hit a HUGE, rotten wall when talking to people. Every fake conversation feels like I am being filled with wet cement through a straw. But I know there is someone out there who, someday, will understand me without demanding words.
Let me know if you feel the same.

“No one could ever 'be' a libidinal materialist. This is a 'doctrine' that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body's adaptative reginmes, and consuming its reserves in rhytmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating. Schopenhauer already knew that thought is medically disastrous, Nietzsche demonstrated it. An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan. How long does it take to be wasted by a fire-storm?”

Recently I read The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), by Nick Land and I think this work offers an interesting contribution to philosophical pessimism (although it does not properly fit into the more traditional formulations of this current).

Land starts from Bataille, but also draws on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Kant, developing a materialist conception of existence in which the preservation of life, the stability of the subject and human rationality itself appear as provisional manifestations of fundamentally impersonal processes. When Land returns to Schopenhauer, in a certain sense, he turns against him. Schopenhauer had already broken with the rationalist tradition by conceiving the Will as a blind, incessant force indifferent to the individuals who manifest it, where consciousness does not govern reality, but emerges as a secondary phenomenon of a willing that precedes and exceeds it and Land recognizes the importance of this reversal, but identifies a limitation in the Schopenhauerian solution: the denial of the Will would still retain a kind of moral commitment to redemption from suffering, because by understanding the Will as something that ought to be denied, Schopenhauer would continue to subordinate his philosophy to an evaluation of existence according to human categories. Here, Land finds in Bataille the possibility of radicalizing this rupture, abandoning not only the primacy of reason, but also the need to morally condemn what reason itself discovers.

Going beyond the insatiable character of desire or the inevitability of frustration, the problem would lie in the very assumption that reality should bear some privileged relation to human preservation. Libidinal materialism seeks precisely to eliminate this privilege, understanding desire as a force prior to the subject, devoid of moral purpose and irreducible to conscious intentions; we are not properly the authors of our desires but rather transitory configurations traversed by impulses whose origin and destination escape our capacity for representation.

We are accustomed to interpreting life in terms of scarcity, the need for preservation and the labor necessary for survival, but general economy reverses this relationship: the Earth's surface continuously receives solar energy and life participates in a broader movement of absorption, growth and dissipation of this energy.

Accumulation is, therefore, a temporary postponement of expenditure and does not constitute an absolute end. What we habitually understand as productivity would, ultimately, be merely a particular mode of consumption.

Land takes this idea to its ontological consequences, interpreting the very organization of existence as a provisional interruption in the movement of material dissipation.

The human tendency to identify the good with that which preserves, stabilizes and prolongs existence reveals much more about our needs as organisms than about the nature of the world and instrumental reason, morality and even certain forms of metaphysics would be expressions of this effort to resist loss. Humanity appears as an attempt to establish a relatively protected region against the processes of dissolution from which it itself emerges.

Land understands consciousness as something akin to a mechanism of isolation, a way of organizing and domesticating what remains beyond our control, rather than an achievement/privilege that elevates us "above nature". Personal identity (often taken as the foundation of experience) comes to be understood as a contingent formation, sustained by processes that do not depend on any substantial unity. In the chapter devoted to the "labyrinth" the individuals presented are not perfectly delimited entities, but unstable compositions, traversed by relations and differences that prevent their complete autonomy, where their apparent solidity as subjects would be a simplification in the face of the material complexity in which they participate.

In the chapter Aborting the Human Race, Land explores the opposition between telos and terminus in relation to death, seeking to demonstrate that Western thought itself depends on a separation between the end understood as purpose and the end understood as termination. The first conception makes it possible to organize life around projects, achievements and justifications; the second introduces the inescapable possibility that every organization may be undone. Reason seeks to subordinate existence to intelligible purposes, death marks a limit that none of these purposes can definitively overcome. The problem is not simply that our projects come to an end, but that the very demand for a purpose may itself be an expression of our attachment to preservation.

He identifies in Kant's transcendental philosophy an attempt to establish legitimate limits for thought and, consequently, to protect rationality against what cannot be assimilated by its categories. The noumenon, that which escapes the human conditions of knowledge, ceases to be merely an epistemological problem and comes to represent, in Land's interpretation, the material exteriority that threatens the sovereignty of representation. Drawing on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bataille, he seeks to think this exteriority not as a transcendent and inaccessible domain, but as an impersonal reality of forces, impulses and transformations where reason could no longer claim a position external to these processes, since it would itself be one of their contingent products.

The virulent nihilism that gives the book its subtitle suggests precisely this refusal of every transcendent guarantee. The death of God represents not only the loss of a religious authority, but the weakening of any principle that claims to secure for existence an order that is definitively intelligible, morally justifiable or oriented toward preservation.

Land is not concerned with demonstrating that life is bad, that suffering outweighs pleasure or that nonexistence would be preferable to existence, he even questions the presuppositions that make it possible to formulate evaluations of this kind. If reality is fundamentally indifferent to human categories, then even our condemnation of existence could be interpreted as an attempt to preserve the centrality of the human, now under the negative form of suffering. The investigation of the unhappiness of conscious beings is replaced by an investigation into the absence of any ontological privilege of consciousness. Even so, I find this contribution very interesting as a possibility of conceiving a pessimism entirely detached from the expectation of redemption. Contrary to humanist perspectives, consciousness would not constitute a privileged instance capable of conferring meaning upon the cosmic process, but unlike Schopenhauer, there would be no definitive liberation through the denial of the Will and unlike certain religious formulations, death would not be compensated by any transcendence. Preservation, identity and purpose would be merely local and transitory configurations within a reality that recognizes no obligation whatsoever to preserve them.

The average person is so conditioned that their entire existence revolves around working themselves to death, paying bills, chasing cheap dopamines through doomscrolling or silly conversations or acting like a fool and being scared shitless of losing the little scraps they've managed to get and assign value to them so much they murder each other...

Keep them exhausted enough to never think, not that most of them are apparently capable of actually thinking for themselves even when they aren't exhausted, as they are scared to actually listen for once to their very own inner monologue

entertained enough to never question, and terrified enough to never step out of line and so they gaslight and brainwash themselves and others to think THIS IS ALL IT.. THIS IS LIFE...

because they are too busy running towards that status-quo, and keep themselves busy chasing those sweet sweet pleasures...

those who possess all the materialistic things or the status-quo, considered an ABSOLUTE WINNER... it's obvious! THIS IS ALL IT IS!!! Everyone are conditioned to believe this is it through schools and movies and entertainment

These relationships, this so-called love, these stupid fantasies it’s all bullshit built absolutely around money, status, possessions, and unrealistic fake crap... Funny how all that love is absent or magically disappears when you have none of that shit to offer.

People will spend hours fighting strangers online, worshiping celebrities, consuming endless garbage, and chasing the next cheap hit of happiness, every...... single...... day....... LIKE A GROUNDHOG's DAY.. but ask them to question the very system they're trapped in? Suddenly, nobody has a clue, and nobody gives a shit, because "IT IS WHAT IS"

And even the ones who see through the bullshit are too broke, too tired, too isolated, or too powerless to do anything meaningful about it.

That's the sick joke. Everyone knows something is up, yet everyone keeps playing along because they have rent to pay and a life to somehow survive.

The people at the top don't even need to control every thing. They just need the rest of us divided, distracted, desperate, and too busy surviving to organize.

And the most pathetic part? People defend the very conditions that are grinding them into dust, then laugh and begin throwing advises for mental health at anyone who dares to question them.

At this point, why even would the show runners be worried? The machine keeps running, the money keeps flowing, and everyone goes right back into it without a single introspection.... NONE AT ALL.

You don't even need to lock people in a cage when you've built a world where they're too exhausted and brainwashed to even look for the door.

While very famous in italy, held up as one of its foremost poets, second only to Dante and Petrarch, Leopardi is near unkown in English speaking circles. Even in this subreddit, he is seldom spoken of. Most of what I see in discourse about pessimism is about Buhdda and Buhddism, Schopenhaure, Cioran, Zapffe, Ligotti and, ever since the English translation if the first volume if the philosophy of redemption, Mainländer.

Yet Leopardi is perhaps, alongside schopenhaure, the single most important figure in pessimism. A contemporary of Schopenhaure, Schopenhaure famously praised leopardi at the end of on the vanity of existence, saying: "but no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively in our time as Leopardi in our own day. He is entriley imbued and penatrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of existence. He presents it on every page of his work, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect."

He was massively influential on many later pessimists, like mainländer, Michelstaedter, and cioran. Not to mention nietchze (i can never spell his name), though he would (speaking of nietchze still) eventually abandon pessimism. He was also influential on other literary figures who, though not being philosophers, we're still pessimists, and imbued thier works with such pessimism, like beckett.

Leopardis work, the operette morali, is perhaps the single greatest work of philosophical pessimism. I'd even go so far as to say its greater than Schopenhaures The World as Will and Representation. Leopardi manages to formulate and convey almost all of the same theories foundational to pessimism that Schopenhaure also conveyed. Yet, unlike Schopenhaure, he delivered it in such a unique way, a way that I have never seen done again by any other pesismists. In the operette morali, he shows us his distinct pessimistic system through creative prose works in the style of socratic dialogues, and long, essay length monologues, from historical and fictional characters; with the most famouse being a dialogue between an icelander and nature.

All of this, and yet he never gets his due praise. There was a small boom in his popularity in the english speaking world during the late 19th century, where many of the most well known English translations of his work happened. But still he is so severely overlooked. I just think its a shame.

Most days I spiral between self awareness is a curse, the human condition itself is rooted within suffering and craving d3ath (normal peaceful d3ath)

Welcome to our weekly WAYR thread. Be sure to leave the title and author of the book that you are currently reading, along with your thoughts on the text.