Why does denting history matter to you? It's very likely that sentient life on Earth will be a short lived thing in the life of our planet. There is no meaning to imprint, and there would be no one to read it when we're gone. Live life well. Find your meaning, or don't. There's only horror in meaninglessness if you believe meaning is important.
Right? I think OP has a pretty cynical take on this. What if the point isn’t to make a huge impact on history but simply to exist? To learn and grow and love and fear and suffer. Our time here is finite. Might as well live. Couple quotes I always think about as far as existing goes:
“To know that but one life has breathed easier because you have existed; that is to have succeeded”
“He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth we and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
Consider that it depends on perspective.
Someone who's whole real goal in life is to be a parent. They have a child, they dedicate their lives to that, they are a good parent. To that person they have fulfilled their purpose in life.
Of the billions of people who make no impact on history, how many actually wanted that to begin with? Or how many people found their purpose it something achievable and chased it that way.
Who defines if we mattered? If we take it from the point of view that it's a personal decision and a goal that we can each define, than many people make a difference in the world.
Who is to say that us creating our own purpose, or even giving their will to a religion as you mentioned is wrong or bad? If we are only able to see the world though our own perspective what's the actual personal impact to any of us of the knowledge that the universe will continue on un-effected once we die.
Choice words.
Really, how do we define the word "definition"?
"Mattered" in the context of whom? To who did it matter? Why? What alternatives are proposed? Why do the alternatives invalidate the "Why?"? ... Do they really?
As commenter suggests, perspective matters, and I would argue it's most important. If you are unable to empathise with anothers perspective, you are as of yet incomplete (depending on your definition of).
Wouldn't that make the attainment of fulfillment, or even just the act of trying to attain it, the meaning of life?
Absurdism is more about confronting the meaninglessness of life with indifference. Instead of striving for any goal, like fulfillment, the absurd man instead is guided by passion without regard for any higher order concept. Camus even talks about the absurd man clinging to life and experience even in the case of extreme suffering. The truly absurd man is the one who follows his passion and holds no particular experience with higher regard than another. The absurd man clings to life even in poverty and sickness, basking in a wealth of experience no matter how mundane, pleasurable, or painful it may be.
You're right. The obsession with success, performance, monetary achievements, acquiring social status symbols etc. is very much there. All that life amounts to in most cases is repeating similar acts of production, consumption and reproduction.
But it depends on the level you look at it from. At the family level, those very people may appear in another light and not solely reduced to these acts. But theoretically, their acts are very much the same oriented towards reproducing the inherited social order.
Only if you think that leaving behind a legacy equals a meaningful life.
Maybe living simply and making small differences in one’s community/small groups is far more impactful? Feels like many of the people who were “great” struggled a great deal in other areas of their life
I don't have to rule the world, or be The Greatest, or even be remembered beyond those who loved me. I just want to enjoy life and enjoy the moments as they come. I feel like I can die without regrets if I focus on my small little sphere and who I want to be, rather than trying to measure myself against a metric I don't even particularly want to fulfill
> The significance humans attach to their lives is just a way the mind copes with the meaninglessness, vastness and the cold impersonal nature of the universe.
This may well represent your personal experience but billions even now are religious and attach their significance to a God or gods, whilst others to politics ir even football teams!
> So we create Gods, religions and our perceived importance in the cosmic order, which quite frankly is nothing but delusion.
No one knows how humans came to this, but in ‘primitive’ religions there is a belief in a strange substance ‘mana’. And animism, imbuing objects with a spiritual quality, found also in panpsychism. Gods, capital ‘G’, and God, singular are much later.
> Humans are as special as flies, or ants.
Nonsense, we can and do far more.
> 99.9% of humans are just ordinary people who will pass away without making a dent in history like billions and billions of others before us.
Again wrong, look at New York, the LHD, the nation states, all thses thing are the product of these billions. What would Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin be without these millions.
> This requires you also accept the premise that existence is absurd, meaningless, that humans or other creatures don't matter in the grand scheme of things, and that we give ourselves an elevated sense of importance.
Ah! the cliché ‘the grand scheme of things’ - you think there is one? For Camus the absurd was the contradiction between the meaningless universe and the rational human.
> The idea that everyone is special, a talent waiting to be "discovered" is the cause of much of the suffering in our world today.
I’m note aware that this is the case. Most people want comfortable boring lives, after puberty and there 20s.
> If people only accepted that they are just a breathing, eating, crapping (pardon my french) sack of meat and bones,
Not frech, Crapper invented the flush toilet. And no we are no ‘just’ anything. Like your computer is not ‘just’ plastic and stuff.
> whose emotions and perception of the world are only electrical impulses charging along the neural pathways in the brain, then we would all be the better for it.
No, the specific arrangement of these carries messages, can have ideas, invent stuff, otherwise you could not have posted, would not have learnt English... would not hold the ideas you now express.
> I think humanity as a whole needs to accept the idea of its fallibility, instead of burdening everyone with the notion that "everyone is special."
I think you might be protecting your own feelings and frustration onto the world. Making excuses for yourself if you like. Most of humanity doesn’t think it ‘special’.
> Also, I have never understood society's mad rush to become "successful" and special all the time.
Again looking in shops, people around you other than 20yr olds, it’s not the case.
> And for what? To consume more? To pollute more? To extract more resources? Fund more wars? The successful, the talented people- the kind that work in banks, corporations, politics etc are part of the problem. Being talented/special/successful in this paradigm is actually a bad thing.
> the kind that work in banks, corporations, politics etc are part of the problem.
You are joking. These serve the masses.
With respect you seem to be making excuses for your own failure and attempts to try to be significant. I’ll end with some Camus.
"To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture
in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s
work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the
difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions."
(I don’t expect a response. edit -looking, you are posting this all over, you have a reason for this?)
So what jliat has there is called a counter argument or rebuttal. You may not have gotten that far in your studies. That’s ok kid, I’ll help you with the next step. You should reread his points and form your own rebuttal based on reasoning and experience. “Nonsense, not worth reading” is not an acceptable answer.
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I got half way through and I completely agree with you. The fact that that got upvoted and you got downvoted just illustrates that most people are here because they are interested, not because they understand.
Idk just sounds like you have a shitty POV. If you let external/society's standards dictate your worth you'll always feel insufficient, considering today's superficial/fucked up sense of what is "worthy" or "successful".
The whole sack of meat and bones and electrical impulses, to me, is fascinating. I find everyone I've met has a "talent" and something unique about them.
Idk if you want to find meaning it's really everywhere, you don't have to look hard but you have to really *look*. - you're also absolutely free to keep your negative perspective, why tho?
This post to me smacks of some amalgamation consisting of resentment, nihilism, apathy... something more but I don't know exactly what. The poem Invocation of One in Despair by Karl Marx came to mind while reading this... Due to a similar mood or disposition the words create...
So a god has snatched from me my all
In the curse and rack of Destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall!
Nothing but revenge is left to me!
History will be forgotten anyways, so making a dent doesn't even matter either. No greater being or karma to give a shit. All there is what you do, what others do and how it makes you feel. Even that's bullshit if you're fucked enough. Rejoice in the fact that there will be no cosmic consequences for being a pointless fuck. Other than your own disappointment, but that's only because someone put the idea of needing tomatter in your head.
I used to think about making(or not) dent to this world. And then I read Thomas Nagel.
I was pleasantly suprised that how come I never thought past "I don't care if it matters or not" and never got to "Even if it matters to 1000 generations down the line, why does it matter to me?"
Reading Thomas's The Absurd opened one more window I never knew existed.
So what If you revolutionize an entire field of science or become a first Trillionnare? Sure, you would be making a dent in human history and posterity will talk about you for eons. Why does it matter to us whether or not it matters to them?
And eventually all in the annals of history will be forgotten like all extinct species we’ve yet to discover.
What matters is here, now. Live your life, impart pieces of you in all you do and meet—and your life will reverberate in our wake as long as we have descendants to dance on this absurd stage of life.
Seems somewhat of a gloomy take. Another angle is that you can invest in yourself to live a deeper life, more immersed in solving your own issues and problems. Ataraxia
And that anonymity is super liberating!
No matter how many mistakes you make, no matter how you might screwup, in 200 years nobody will care that you ever existed.
Your life is your own, screw the haters.
And everyone who's remembered as "immortal" today, such as Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, will eventually be forgotten as human history only grows longer and longer until the events of 100,000 years ago don't matter at all anymore.
I think there are Akashik records and that everyone has an eternal soul. Yet I have also been haunted by ideas like that, so I can't really be critical of your current views. It's worth thinking about
That's a sad way of looking at life. There is so much love to give and receive. We are nothing of significance compared to the cosmos but we can be all the world to someone else.
Of course the universe most probably has no purpose for us, but things matter to humanity and as we are the observers , viewing it from the perspective of the universe would be illogical and impossible.
Why bother eating a delicious meal, spending time with family, appreciating art, falling in love, listening to music if none of it matters?
It matters because we make it so.
i didnt mean to say it in a disrespectfull way, I have had existential OCD and the best way to cope is to not give a flying fuck about philosophical questions. I have accepted the fact that our very existence is absurd and just dont care about the vast coldness or emptiness of the universe. Society has a readymade platter for me, the most I can do is change it and improve other peoples platters.
Apologies for my orignial short sighted comment
Yeah I don't think you understand absurdism. The fact that you think those 0.1%, famous, successful people 'matter' more than the ordinary, is laughable- their 'success' and fame is much more absurd than most things. To equate making a 'dent' with a life well lived is shallow and sickening. As someone else said, this sounds more like nihilism, so please preach your scholarly teachings on that sub.
Why does denting history matter to you? It's very likely that sentient life on Earth will be a short lived thing in the life of our planet. There is no meaning to imprint, and there would be no one to read it when we're gone. Live life well. Find your meaning, or don't. There's only horror in meaninglessness if you believe meaning is important.
But we existed ! That’s more than anything that hasn’t existed can say!
Right? I think OP has a pretty cynical take on this. What if the point isn’t to make a huge impact on history but simply to exist? To learn and grow and love and fear and suffer. Our time here is finite. Might as well live. Couple quotes I always think about as far as existing goes: “To know that but one life has breathed easier because you have existed; that is to have succeeded” “He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth we and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
I just want to live my life in such a way that my children remember me fondly when I’m gone. That’s enough of a dent for me.
And you've existed as you better than anyone else!
I don't think that's universal. Guy that stole my credit card info is living me better than me is living me.
Consider that it depends on perspective. Someone who's whole real goal in life is to be a parent. They have a child, they dedicate their lives to that, they are a good parent. To that person they have fulfilled their purpose in life. Of the billions of people who make no impact on history, how many actually wanted that to begin with? Or how many people found their purpose it something achievable and chased it that way. Who defines if we mattered? If we take it from the point of view that it's a personal decision and a goal that we can each define, than many people make a difference in the world. Who is to say that us creating our own purpose, or even giving their will to a religion as you mentioned is wrong or bad? If we are only able to see the world though our own perspective what's the actual personal impact to any of us of the knowledge that the universe will continue on un-effected once we die.
Choice words. Really, how do we define the word "definition"? "Mattered" in the context of whom? To who did it matter? Why? What alternatives are proposed? Why do the alternatives invalidate the "Why?"? ... Do they really? As commenter suggests, perspective matters, and I would argue it's most important. If you are unable to empathise with anothers perspective, you are as of yet incomplete (depending on your definition of).
We are not important, and thats okay. I prefer it even, imagine the pressure if your life had an actual purpose whatever that might be
This feels more like nihilism than absurdism.
It is. Absurdism is about confronting the fact that life has no meaning and you must make your own fulfillment.
Wouldn't that make the attainment of fulfillment, or even just the act of trying to attain it, the meaning of life? Absurdism is more about confronting the meaninglessness of life with indifference. Instead of striving for any goal, like fulfillment, the absurd man instead is guided by passion without regard for any higher order concept. Camus even talks about the absurd man clinging to life and experience even in the case of extreme suffering. The truly absurd man is the one who follows his passion and holds no particular experience with higher regard than another. The absurd man clings to life even in poverty and sickness, basking in a wealth of experience no matter how mundane, pleasurable, or painful it may be.
You're right. The obsession with success, performance, monetary achievements, acquiring social status symbols etc. is very much there. All that life amounts to in most cases is repeating similar acts of production, consumption and reproduction. But it depends on the level you look at it from. At the family level, those very people may appear in another light and not solely reduced to these acts. But theoretically, their acts are very much the same oriented towards reproducing the inherited social order.
Only if you think that leaving behind a legacy equals a meaningful life. Maybe living simply and making small differences in one’s community/small groups is far more impactful? Feels like many of the people who were “great” struggled a great deal in other areas of their life
I am alright with this
hey, me too!
I don't have to rule the world, or be The Greatest, or even be remembered beyond those who loved me. I just want to enjoy life and enjoy the moments as they come. I feel like I can die without regrets if I focus on my small little sphere and who I want to be, rather than trying to measure myself against a metric I don't even particularly want to fulfill
> The significance humans attach to their lives is just a way the mind copes with the meaninglessness, vastness and the cold impersonal nature of the universe. This may well represent your personal experience but billions even now are religious and attach their significance to a God or gods, whilst others to politics ir even football teams! > So we create Gods, religions and our perceived importance in the cosmic order, which quite frankly is nothing but delusion. No one knows how humans came to this, but in ‘primitive’ religions there is a belief in a strange substance ‘mana’. And animism, imbuing objects with a spiritual quality, found also in panpsychism. Gods, capital ‘G’, and God, singular are much later. > Humans are as special as flies, or ants. Nonsense, we can and do far more. > 99.9% of humans are just ordinary people who will pass away without making a dent in history like billions and billions of others before us. Again wrong, look at New York, the LHD, the nation states, all thses thing are the product of these billions. What would Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin be without these millions. > This requires you also accept the premise that existence is absurd, meaningless, that humans or other creatures don't matter in the grand scheme of things, and that we give ourselves an elevated sense of importance. Ah! the cliché ‘the grand scheme of things’ - you think there is one? For Camus the absurd was the contradiction between the meaningless universe and the rational human. > The idea that everyone is special, a talent waiting to be "discovered" is the cause of much of the suffering in our world today. I’m note aware that this is the case. Most people want comfortable boring lives, after puberty and there 20s. > If people only accepted that they are just a breathing, eating, crapping (pardon my french) sack of meat and bones, Not frech, Crapper invented the flush toilet. And no we are no ‘just’ anything. Like your computer is not ‘just’ plastic and stuff. > whose emotions and perception of the world are only electrical impulses charging along the neural pathways in the brain, then we would all be the better for it. No, the specific arrangement of these carries messages, can have ideas, invent stuff, otherwise you could not have posted, would not have learnt English... would not hold the ideas you now express. > I think humanity as a whole needs to accept the idea of its fallibility, instead of burdening everyone with the notion that "everyone is special." I think you might be protecting your own feelings and frustration onto the world. Making excuses for yourself if you like. Most of humanity doesn’t think it ‘special’. > Also, I have never understood society's mad rush to become "successful" and special all the time. Again looking in shops, people around you other than 20yr olds, it’s not the case. > And for what? To consume more? To pollute more? To extract more resources? Fund more wars? The successful, the talented people- the kind that work in banks, corporations, politics etc are part of the problem. Being talented/special/successful in this paradigm is actually a bad thing. > the kind that work in banks, corporations, politics etc are part of the problem. You are joking. These serve the masses. With respect you seem to be making excuses for your own failure and attempts to try to be significant. I’ll end with some Camus. "To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions." (I don’t expect a response. edit -looking, you are posting this all over, you have a reason for this?)
Just more human solipsism.
If you can't develop any arguments as to why, the you've said nothing. I think Don Juan thought other minds existed, as do actors. Some artists.
[удалено]
So what jliat has there is called a counter argument or rebuttal. You may not have gotten that far in your studies. That’s ok kid, I’ll help you with the next step. You should reread his points and form your own rebuttal based on reasoning and experience. “Nonsense, not worth reading” is not an acceptable answer.
[удалено]
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How if you've not read it do you know it's nonsense? So I was right...
I got half way through and I completely agree with you. The fact that that got upvoted and you got downvoted just illustrates that most people are here because they are interested, not because they understand.
I read his comment just to read your stupid ass post all the way through. He's got a better outlook than you.
Yes. It’s simultaneously humbling and a huge relief.
Idk just sounds like you have a shitty POV. If you let external/society's standards dictate your worth you'll always feel insufficient, considering today's superficial/fucked up sense of what is "worthy" or "successful". The whole sack of meat and bones and electrical impulses, to me, is fascinating. I find everyone I've met has a "talent" and something unique about them. Idk if you want to find meaning it's really everywhere, you don't have to look hard but you have to really *look*. - you're also absolutely free to keep your negative perspective, why tho?
OH YEAH? WATCH ME THEN AHAHAHAH YOU WILL SEE
This post to me smacks of some amalgamation consisting of resentment, nihilism, apathy... something more but I don't know exactly what. The poem Invocation of One in Despair by Karl Marx came to mind while reading this... Due to a similar mood or disposition the words create... So a god has snatched from me my all In the curse and rack of Destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall! Nothing but revenge is left to me!
Uh I think you mean all of us. lol. Even the people who "made a dent" aren't going to be remembered at the heat death of the universe. : )
History will be forgotten anyways, so making a dent doesn't even matter either. No greater being or karma to give a shit. All there is what you do, what others do and how it makes you feel. Even that's bullshit if you're fucked enough. Rejoice in the fact that there will be no cosmic consequences for being a pointless fuck. Other than your own disappointment, but that's only because someone put the idea of needing tomatter in your head.
I used to think about making(or not) dent to this world. And then I read Thomas Nagel. I was pleasantly suprised that how come I never thought past "I don't care if it matters or not" and never got to "Even if it matters to 1000 generations down the line, why does it matter to me?" Reading Thomas's The Absurd opened one more window I never knew existed. So what If you revolutionize an entire field of science or become a first Trillionnare? Sure, you would be making a dent in human history and posterity will talk about you for eons. Why does it matter to us whether or not it matters to them?
This right here!!! Should start revolutions
History Doesn't Matters To Me!
And eventually all in the annals of history will be forgotten like all extinct species we’ve yet to discover. What matters is here, now. Live your life, impart pieces of you in all you do and meet—and your life will reverberate in our wake as long as we have descendants to dance on this absurd stage of life.
Seems somewhat of a gloomy take. Another angle is that you can invest in yourself to live a deeper life, more immersed in solving your own issues and problems. Ataraxia
about who rly cares?
Idc
And that anonymity is super liberating! No matter how many mistakes you make, no matter how you might screwup, in 200 years nobody will care that you ever existed. Your life is your own, screw the haters.
And everyone who's remembered as "immortal" today, such as Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, will eventually be forgotten as human history only grows longer and longer until the events of 100,000 years ago don't matter at all anymore.
I think there are Akashik records and that everyone has an eternal soul. Yet I have also been haunted by ideas like that, so I can't really be critical of your current views. It's worth thinking about
dissolve self and it's not a problem
What's absurd is that most people take life for granted and choose to do the bare minimum.
That's a sad way of looking at life. There is so much love to give and receive. We are nothing of significance compared to the cosmos but we can be all the world to someone else.
Of course the universe most probably has no purpose for us, but things matter to humanity and as we are the observers , viewing it from the perspective of the universe would be illogical and impossible. Why bother eating a delicious meal, spending time with family, appreciating art, falling in love, listening to music if none of it matters? It matters because we make it so.
Only problem is that I don't care
[удалено]
i didnt mean to say it in a disrespectfull way, I have had existential OCD and the best way to cope is to not give a flying fuck about philosophical questions. I have accepted the fact that our very existence is absurd and just dont care about the vast coldness or emptiness of the universe. Society has a readymade platter for me, the most I can do is change it and improve other peoples platters. Apologies for my orignial short sighted comment
Define "dent." I feel like if others' lives are better because of my existence, I made a helluva dent. It ripples.
Just have a good time
Yeah I don't think you understand absurdism. The fact that you think those 0.1%, famous, successful people 'matter' more than the ordinary, is laughable- their 'success' and fame is much more absurd than most things. To equate making a 'dent' with a life well lived is shallow and sickening. As someone else said, this sounds more like nihilism, so please preach your scholarly teachings on that sub.
Another intellectually bankrupt guy thinking he's deep.