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Ever wondered if life's worth living?
Let's face it. Life is pretty pointless. Between birth and death most people do the exact same things that billions of other people do, things that are essentially no different from the things even the stupidest animals do. Eat, drink, sleep, seek shelter, reproduce, die. There is no originality there, no authenticity, the core of human existence is determistic and mechanical.
Some say that things like love, excitement, friendship, art, beauty, sex, achievement, and other things like that make life worth living. But the only reasons that we value these things are cultural and genetic stimuli - either our genes or our upbringing tell us that we should consider them valuable, and so we consider them valuable. But in reality, they're absolutely contingent. We could value a completely opposite set of things, and it would be equally valid, equally "true". We value what we value because it's valuable, and it's valuable because we value it. Our true measure of things in life is how we feel about them, and how we feel about life itself. Yet those things are entirely determined by neurotransmitters, and a few pills or a single shot of drugs can change our feelings altogether. Unhappy? Just take one single pill every day, and within a few weeks your shitty life will look all bright and sparkly. Bored? One single pill can send you into blissful ecstasy for the entire night. Introverted? A few lines of white powder will make you feel like the king of the world. Our most basic feelings can be radically changed by simple chemical substances. And let's look at freedom, or free will. We experience it, believe it exists, and base our lives around it. Yet in reality, all freedom is, is the conscious experience of your brain and body moving towards a certain action. There is no actual alternate choice there, no independent soul that determines your course of action. There is just your physical, determined reality, and a consciousness that is tricked into experiencing this reality as if it were shaping it instead of just futilely riding along. Now, if that were all, it might be bearable. Being conscious animals, or even machines, with random desires and values, often essentially futile, is undeniably bad, but it wouldn't be as bad as it is were it not for the fact that we are both mortal and subjected to the brute randomness that is life. From the day we are born, we are dying. Death is inevitable and unavoidable, and all our lives consist of is an extremely limited amount of time, which is utterly insignificant on the grand scale of things. Not only that, if even that tiny amount of time is at least spent in a pleasant way is determined by brute luck. Every moment gone is a moment lost, and if fate decides to step on us all we can do is squirm in pain. There is no logic to it, no rationale, no fairness - a good person can be ripped from life before even reaching adulthood, while a mass murderer may have a long, enjoyable life. Some are born both stupid and ugly, while others are born beautiful and intelligent, and both can have their life shattered at any moment by the most insignificant little thing and be forgotten within decades. Yet death doesn't make them equal, because while the one may have nothing, the other has even less. Think about it, the next time you are watching tv, working or playing a video game. You are spending time which can never be regained, and for every shitty little thing you do, there is an infinity of experiences escaping you. Ever wondered if "this" is all there is to life? Well, you have your answer. Yes, this is all - your life, your death, everything in between, it's all summarized in the trite, boring, insignificant moments it consists of. And even the very peak of your existence, the most glorious point in your life, can easily be topped by a single shot of heroin. |
I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man When I put a spike into my vein And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same When I'm rushing on my run And I feel just like Jesus' son And I guess that I just don't know And I guess that I just don't know I have made the big decision I'm gonna try to nullify my life 'Cause when the blood begins to flow When it shoots up the dropper's neck When I'm closing in on death And you can't help me not, you guys And all you sweet girls with all your sweet silly talk You can all go take a walk And I guess that I just don't know And I guess that I just don't know I wish that I was born a thousand years ago I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas On a great big clipper ship Going from this land here to that In a sailor's suit and cap Away from the big city Where a man can not be free Of all of the evils of this town And of himself, and those around Oh, and I guess that I just don't know Oh, and I guess that I just don't know Heroin, be the death of me Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life Because a mainer to my vein Leads to a center in my head And then I'm better off and dead Because when the smack begins to flow I really don't care anymore About all the Jim-Jim's in this town And all the politicians makin' crazy sounds And everybody puttin' everybody else down And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds 'Cause when the smack begins to flow Then I really don't care anymore Ah, when the heroin is in my blood And that blood is in my head Then thank God that I'm as good as dead Then thank your God that I'm not aware And thank God that I just don't care And I guess I just don't know And I guess I just don't know |
i used to argue this in high school pschology class. the subject of suicide came up and since i enjoyed pushing peoples buttons, i offered that i was fine with it and would even encourage it for those who are unhappy or just done with it. i continued by saying that we are all going to die anyway and in a cosmic sense our life is insignificant and on a cosmic timeline... we practically never existed anyway.
everyone was in shock. they started saying how selfish it was because of all the people that care about you etc... but i maintained that there view was in fact rooted in selfish behavior. more than anything, they would be upset at their own personal sense of loss. if they genuinely cared about the wants of the individual and were not selfish, they would respect the decision. |
life is like a box of chocolates
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I see the world as totally fucked, as we continue to destroy the environment. The rate of number of natural disasters is increasing, and many are just bad weather.
A really depressing book is "A Short History of Progress" But I really enjoy living. Good food, good booze, great women. Great sex. I am a happy man! :thumbsup |
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So what makes life worth living for you? For me, it's eating, drinking, smoking pot, fucking, travelling the world, reading, appreciating art and generally enjoying myself. All of which are much more fun than being dead. I saw this Icelandic movie recently Reykjavik101 and there's this line in it (I'm paraphrasing here) "We're dead before we're born and we're dead after we die. So life is like a break from death." I'm gonna enjoy my break from death. How about you? :glugglug |
deep post!!
tony |
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The only basic point in life is to survive. :2 cents:
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We aren't dead before we are born, we are unborn. Non-existent. Thats something different than being dead. |
EMOs cut themselves to feel better...
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If you were able to put a price on living...
What would its value be? |
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Must be funny In the rich man?s world |
And from somewhere in our dark subconscious minds when were asleep
comes a haunting swelling mass of voice resonating it screams of forgotten victims and their cries of innocense and a desperate plea for recognition, and recompense tiny voices... |
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There is no objective reality or truth that we have access to, therefore we are forced to make all our decisions and judgements based on (empirical) experience, rationality and intuitions. Rationality helps us to combine experience and intuitions into a coherent whole. This coherent whole is necessarily entirely subjective, but at the same time it's the whole of reality as we can possibly understand it, and therefore it is, for all practical purposes, truth. If our subjective reality is all we have, and thereby all there is as far as we are concerned, then the thing to do would seem to be to control it in the best way possible, to experience life in the most rewarding, painless way we can experience it. This can be achieved by always keeping a certain level of detachment from the physical aspects of life, while at the same time cherishing the achievable pleasures of life, especially the ones that provide us with longlasting feelings of joy, beauty or fascination. Things like leading a temperate, dignified life, fully recognising the beauty of nature, attaining knowledge of the world, seeing different cultures and environments and appreciating the great works of literature and art seem like the best ways to achieve this to me. |
It has it's moments,but that's what makes you a stronger person.Everybody gets depressed every now and then,it's how you deal with it and don't sweat the little shit
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Life is worth living...
Everyone has his justification on why he/she is living. Mine is, we come to this world as a virgin energy that needs to be melded into a advanced form. Once this is achieved, we depart this world. There comes the randomness in life. |
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That's depressing...I'm gonna go pop some prozac...brb
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It would be foolish to give up on life now only to find out later your conclusions were all wrong. The finality of suicide just makes it a bad option based on our limited reasoning ability.
:winkwink: |
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i know what youre saying bro
life is completely fucking pointless, we are all born to die. learn, grow old, pay your taxes, die, your friends die, your family dies, no one remembers you in 200 years. I cant see how people can live life all happy and cheery EVERY day. wtf are they happy about? they will be dead in 80 years. they will prob die from some form of cancer and spend the last few weeks of their life in a dull hospital room waiting to die. how can anyone be happy |
punkworld seems like the most educated person here :thumbsup
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but a serotonin-induced hallucination" - Terence McKenna I don't know how many times I'll have to repeat that on this board. I enjoy the pains of life that come with the pleasures and do not take great measures to avoid things causing those pains. Much of the learning I or anyone else has done has been via some sort of pain through tough experiences. I even like the pain to help me achieve my less achievable goals that require the time, effort, and sacrifice that easier goals come without. "Knowing", as best I can, that we can never have any real truth or true wisdom beyond what we observe or can infer from observation helps fill me with the wonder and curiousity of other possibilities. I think its exciting, at the same time as being frustrating. The only thing that can be known with any reasonable degree of certainty is that we exist. Cogito ergo sum |
[QUOTE=punkworld] Let's face it. Life is pretty pointless. [QUOTE]
If you wrote a book I would buy it :thumbsup |
It is the best way to show the world that you could not hack it, and did not want to try. Noting in life is easy, including life.
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Some interesting ideas in this thread.
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always look on the bright side of life
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Putting life on a value system is dangerous.
Most of you should have stopped breathing years ago as an evolutionary step but thats just my 2 cents. The key to what makes life worth living is being content that it will end. Since living is merely a tempory state one may as well enjoy it or one can settle for the "inert" state at any time. A Lifetime MUST be about the details. If one is so bored with living, sun up sun down yada yada wondering what life is about perhaps one must wonder if they are missing somthing about life to begin with. |
In all honesty I think Mankind is on the brink of Immortality.
Technology is proving it so every day. Bringing dead dogs back to life really took me back some to realise the potential just yesterday. Nano tech etc. Its possible. What then? The only thing left to do is to find god, our maker and understand the things we are unable to grasp whether alive or dead. "In strange Eons death may die." HP Love Craft. |
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