r/Pessimism

Recently what I have realized is that, there is a good chance of pessimists being mistakenly equated to incels, particularly by the feminist community.

Lets say for instance, a person sees through "Devil's Laughter" so seeks chastity to guard against his sexual desires, which he sees as the starting point of "blind will". But ordinary people would not understand his reason and identify him as an incel who hates women and then withdraws himself.

A vida é sofrimento, a vida é sofrimento por que o sofrimento é mais intenso que o prazer, resumindo, a vida é uma bosta mesmo, melhor seria se nunca tivéssemos nascido!

Hi guys！I'm looking for some good books to read. Like Cioran. I really like his books.

So I hope you guys can recommend some of your favourite. Thx！

For me it was my anecdotal life experience, always when I try to think positively about things I end up disappointed, I didnt read anything about pessimism but I believe that my attitude towards life is pessimistic, always thinking about the worst case, unable to see anything good in the future for me or any other one I know.

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.

From a cursory glance it seems like most pessimist philosophers root their pessimism in human consciousness, the will, etc, but I feel like the real problem with existence is the fact that the universe is utterly random, indifferent and that entropy is a thing, as this effectively means that practically infinite horrible fates can occur as the universe is gigantic and continuously expanding, and entropy ensures that everything constantly moves towards decay and disorder.

Did anyone alse have this line of thought and explore it further?

why involve in relationships when you can be self contained

I am not sure people are aware of this as much as they need to be.

Life itself as a cold, irrational self-renewing force is the most horrifying concept in universe.

Being based on pure ability of sufficient replication of matter, it uses, tests and eventually kills its host.

People need to be aware of how natural selection works and what are the hidden tragedies of it.

The possibilities for suffering increase with the complexity of organism but that doesn't dismiss every single suffering that exists.

Life creates incredibly big number of mutations, "players of game of life", which are then tested by both environment but also internally. This is inevitable process which simply "is" and cannot be avoided. Pure inevitability filters "that which can replicate" further into the meaningless life game.

But in that process, the "host", now being the conscious observer, is not even important. There are basically near infinite ways in which that conscious observer can be tortured because of this game of inevitable filtering and testing. I'm not sure people understand the vast potential of suffering that can arise from this. This is incredibly important argument for antinatalism in my opinion.

Imagine human being with mutations in its brain that simply cause him excrutiating pain all the time? Or bizzare hell-like hallucinations that feel completely real? Or imagine your brain somehow being wired (of being affected by illness that you genetically aren't able to defend from) to experience absolutely bizzare things like having urge to torture yourself due to some internal "demon" forcing you to do that? Imagine being wired to not experience space or time properly? Imagine having extremely overactive amygdala that you feel extreme despair, fear, terror all your life, but you cannot die because you are also terrified of dying? Possibilites are literally infinite. Combinations, types of "locking" you into a state of pain...there are no limits to what suffering can be.

Natural selection necessarily involves sacrifise of big number of hosts, in more or less painful ways. It also creates the concept of "normality" which then works as filter-in-itself by creating mutations whose phenomenological exerience is well-suited for replication and life and giving them cognitive ability to even further enforce their ways of existing and "exclude" all mutations and hosts that aren't suitable. Society simply creates "normality" and is "locked into" mechanisms of preserving that.

So, natural selection can and is creating those "bubbles" of reality, suitable mutations and phenomenological experiences which are the most pro-life. They simply ARE, inevitably, and they are also naturally selected to have urge to eliminate anything that violates that structure.

The fact that you feel anything at all is a product of natural selection. Your feelings of beauty, love, meaning, purpose, etc. - all were once random mutations that persisted because they connected positive phenomenological experience with life-affirming characteristics. At beggining of rise of consciousness - life had no internal value, it didn't "feel good", valuable. Everything that people value in life is consequence of natural selection of random mutations. The "appeal of life" was created de facto out of nothing. It is because it is. It's like making 100 conscious robots and making one randomly feel positive emotion about living - and then saying life is good and appealing. It is not.

It was made like that due to potential of conscious experience to be positive/negative filtering certain beings who linked life-affirming things with "positive phenomenological experience", generally (or at least good enough to lock them into replicating).

And it continues, with every second. Life filters itself more and more. It creates concepts like belief in free will, it creates optimistic bias, it silences those who are "too ill" to be listened to.

Life itself is the first "cancel culture".

Just how many of conscious observers (hosts) were forced to emerge in life and whitness excrutiatingly painful lives? How many had to deal with horrible psychotic experiences, negative and fearful experiences due to this "inevitability of natural victims"?

And it can happen today. Genes are not untouchable. Mistakes can amd do happen. You or your child can easily be affected by random mutation that will make your stomach burn from acid. Or to lose ability to every feel positive emotion. Or to have misfolding in your brain proteins that will cause you to never sleep again.

Possibilities are near infinite.

Life is irrational malevolent process that selects what will hosts think about it and which ones will replicate those opinions.

Life is the master that punishes even good slaves, not alone the bad ones.

I believe my own views somewhat approximate to the individuals here, but I'm unsure to what degree.

How would you describe your central views? Central as in, those primitive views from which other views follow.

How would you justify those views? Are there appropriate grounds for them?

If you are or were to be social for whatever reason and to get to know someone and be known in return, how would you explain your pessimism sincerely? How much of yourself would you reveal? What would you say? How would you explain yourself to a regular friend versus a close friend?

As for people you need to get along with but not necessarily intimately, such as in an academic or work environment, how would you explain your pessimism euphemistically or less intensely? Say you work in academia and explaining yourself and your worldview comes up at some point in the conversation. How would you explain it without outing yourself as a pessimist? What terms would you use?

When perceiving the world in all of its splendor, both the beautiful and the powerful, the lack of time as a meaningful explanation begs a question of motivation. Time is not an object, it is not constructed or a process--what some may call the entropic principle is not itself time but the accumulation of disarrayed events into ever more complex structures of actualization. Time as an aesthetic is something we create and is the only thing we can know. We cannot know what 2 and 2 makes 4 is as a quantitative fact in itself even if we can recite it and it makes sense through our inductive reasoning; we can know only the aesthetics of 2 and 2 making 4, that is of a qualitative experience.

Every experience we have and feel and see was already there eternally as a single point of numb existence and we alone having the innate experience of the passage of time do we give it colour and meaning and definition. Our suffering doesn't exist outside of it but inside because we are forever aware of its movement, of its cruel and ceaseless march to the final. Suffering is a product of the incongruent reconciliation of the sentiment and the sensual, the feeling and the being, and that is what opens the world to us.

And all of those events and episodes and scenes that emerge as we encounter them are there only because we have the sense of time to locate them in a space that transcends the stage they take place on.

Why do we feel sentiment over the loss of the time? It is not because we feel the closeness of the end, but because we feel the eternal image of that point within us and it speaks to something outside, something we are alienated from, neither will nor body, but that very picture of time crystalized in that singular moment. It is why paintings move us so because they are pictures of a world existing outside of time; and why photographs and memories sadden us because we wish to live forever in that moment.

We are just the brushes of time used to create these landscapes of experience, for everyone view of a sunset or a rive or the world is another stroke that never was before but now is there forever. I think that is what has always pained me most of all. The want to hold onto those moments that time pulls away from me and to preserve them, like paintings in a gallery. But I can never have them again.

cioran was wrong. in our deepest hell, every moment is no longer a heroic action or miracle, but a mortifying defeat for we're still not killed ourselves