Philosophy Now Forum

Posted: **Fri Nov 17, 2023 9:54 pm**

Tom Perrotta

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish. Tom Perrotta

Let me extinguish yours. Or, sure, if you'll let me, enflame it.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

That ever happen to you?

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

If only all the way to the grave.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

Nope, never have myself.
Uh, yet?

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Or, here, virtually silent.

Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.

Okay, but...the Rapture?

Posted: **Sat Nov 18, 2023 7:59 pm**

Elizabeth Wurtzel from Prozac Nation

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

Or, for that matter, the pleasure.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

Otherwise, why would she be posting here?

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.

So far anyway.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

Like posting here: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up.

What would you call it?

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.

Let someone else pay the bills.

Posted: **Sun Nov 19, 2023 1:22 am**

God...

“I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up.” George Carlin

God Himself, perhaps?

“Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades." George Carlin

Let's keep it going.

“We almost made it to thirty seconds without an insult. I think we set a new record.” Sherrilyn Kenyon

In other words, here, your Stooges or mine?

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wrong?

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Sarcasm, let's call it.

“Let me put it this way, my father believed in a righteous God. Deus volt, that was his motto- 'because God wills it.' It was the Crusaders' motto, and they went into battle and were slaughtered just like my father. And when I saw him lying dead in a pool of his own blood, I knew then that I hadn't stopped believing in God. I'd just stopped believing God cared. There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don't think it matters. Either way we're on our own.” Cassandra Clare

So, once and for all, does God care?

Posted: **Sun Nov 19, 2023 7:17 pm**

Existentialism...

“In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.” Werner Herzog

Who doesn't?

“One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.” Kurt Vonnegut

Click?

“Nothingness haunts Being.” Jean-Paul Sartre

If only all the way to the grave.

“The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?” Cormac McCarthy

Hmm, does virtually count?

“Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes." W Somerset Maugham

Supposing there is though?

“Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges which will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.” Leo Tolstoy

Any bubbles here?

Posted: **Sun Nov 19, 2023 10:20 pm**

Sue Monk Kidd from The Secret Life of Bees

When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

Of course, that actually has to be an option, doesn't it?

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?

Coke with peanuts?

Sunset is the saddest light there is.

Though for some it's sunrise.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.

Start here: https://youtu.be/msvcPGVX-70?si=pONQ82CVGKenSb3k

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

Actually, it's choosing what doesn't matter.

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

I'll bet you know it, don't you?

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2023 6:09 pm**

Despair...

“What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from underground, indeed.

“Some days simply lay on you like stones.” Patrick Rothfuss

He means boulders, of course.

“Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God wil open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that has been denied.” Elif Shafak

Next up: the Gaza Strip.

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.” Christopher Hitchens

Nope, not for some of us, Chris.

“To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.” James Hillman

You tell me.

“With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair” Søren Kierkegaard

Let's call it the sickness unto death.

Posted: **Tue Nov 21, 2023 6:10 pm**

Margaret Atwood from Oryx and Crake

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

He wished they would sneak up on him.

The male frog in mating season, said Crake, makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.
So?
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

Next up: male frogs and philosophy.

You can’t buy it, but it has a price, said Oryx. Everything has a price.

Next up: you can buy it.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Okay, who here is living mine?

Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.
As a species were doomed by hope, then?
You could call it hope. That, or desperation.
But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.
Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.

Tell me about it.

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Of course: Praise the Lord!

Posted: **Wed Nov 22, 2023 6:36 pm**

Suicide...

“Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.” Terry Pratchett

And, of course, the equivalent of that here.

“Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.” Leah Raeder

If he's not the one pushing you over.

“I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am.” Amy Sedaris

You'll reach that point or you won't.

“She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more”. Alan Brennert

You'll reach that point or you won't.

“Bye-bye. I'm off on a journey to the real world. 'Cause within this meta-reality what's real is this -- my death.” Natsuo Kirino

Yeah, all the best?

“Can you no longer see a road to freedom? It's right in front of you. You need only turn over your wrists.” Seneca

Or, sure, trudge on.

Posted: **Wed Nov 22, 2023 9:08 pm**

Charles Darwin from The Origin of Species

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

That again...

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.

Then fools invented the welfare state, in flagrant defiance of Nature.
Right?

But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

And certainly to those of Philosophy.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die --- which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Yep, a single solitary grain sometime.

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

Tell me this can't be taken all the way to the reeducation camps and the gulags and the gas chambers.

Whilst Man, however well-behaved,
At best is but a monkey shaved!

Another poet who knows it and hopes he doesn't blow it.

Posted: **Thu Nov 23, 2023 8:56 pm**

Nihilism...

“Alcohol removed the chains holding in check my wish for revenge over having to conform to the stupidity of everyday life. Alcohol turned Jekyll into Hyde. But Jekyll was merely a façade. Hyde was there all along. Hyde was hatred for the world. And Jekyll the attempt to hide it.” Keijo Kangur

Them again. But point taken.

“I am indeed afraid, Your Highness. Every moment of my existence carries such a burden of terror you could not imagine it. I fear I have no soul. I fear there are no gods. I fear there is no meaning to the pain I have known. I fear I have lost the capacity to love another human being or ever to see goodness in one. Among such fears as these, my lord, there is little room for you.” Carol Berg

And getting littler and littler all the time.

“People Die. This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone." David Wong

Of course, we've got out fair share of suckers here as well. You know, if that's what they are.

"A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!” Chad Hansen

Nietzsche, of course. It's not really even close.

“Some kind of philosophical mission, something that would push back, if only for a moment, against the inescapable nihilism of this place.” Marie Brennan

Here? Fuck that, right?

“There is an emptiness in life that cannot be described, about which one cannot speak. We must pass over it in silence” Simon Brass

Here? Fuck that, right?

Posted: **Thu Nov 23, 2023 11:24 pm**

Cave Man from Modern Human's Handbook

People, don’t commit suicide because they’re weak. They commit suicide because they have no reason to be strong.

Uh, unless you count coming here?

I think if we were to truly create a utopian society, the first thing we would do to tear it down, just to have a purpose.

Lets do it!

If I’m happy because of something --- even if that thing persists --- my happiness in time vanishes. But if I regret something or become sad about something that sadness or regret can follow me for many years, maybe even to my deathbed.

Let's explain that.
Or not of course.

Nothing can affect a person’s mind if he chooses not to be affected by it.

Let’s say -- for the sake of the argument -- whatever you do, doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things. But the thing is we don’t live in the great scheme of things. We live only in a part of it. So, even if it doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.

Sure, if you can actually believe that.

I think one of the things you need to realize, is that the things that you think you need in life are not, the things you, as a person need, they are the things that other people tell you that you need.

Especially halftime at the Superbowl.
Just 80 days to go now!!!

Posted: **Fri Nov 24, 2023 9:27 pm**

Tom Perrotta

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

Unless, of course, you find God.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Cue feminism?

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer — that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

Anyday now, Mr. Evangelist?

We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.

Anyday now, Mr. Evangelist?

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

Not counting Black Friday, of course.

I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them. I doubt I'll be lying on my deathbed in forty or fifty years, congratulating myself on the fact that I never had sex in an airplane with a handsome Italian businessman, or patting myself on the back for all those years of involuntary celibacy I endured after my divorce. If recent experience is any guide, I'll probably be lying in that hospital bed with my body full of tubes, sneaking glances at the handsome young doctor, wishing that I hadn't been such a coward. Wishing I'd taken more risks, made more mistakes, and accumulated more regrets. Just wishing I'd lived when I had the chance.

So, what mistakes didn't you make?

Posted: **Sat Nov 25, 2023 4:03 am**

Elizabeth Wurtzel from Prozac Nation

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

Next up: the matter of conditioner.

It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between.

Let's exchange degrees.

...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.

He truly doubted that...hypothetically of course.

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.

Of course: who doesn't?

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable…Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.

Rock bottom philosophically: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.

You know, before opioids.

Posted: **Sat Nov 25, 2023 8:50 pm**

God...

“Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?” Corrie Ten Boom

True Christians only please.

“Anything under God's control is never out of control.” Charles Swindoll

Comforting enough for you?

“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.” Jeanette Winterson

Back up: a 149 ways to God?

“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though." Richard Dawkins

On the other hand, whatever works?

“Hobbes: Do you think there's a God?
Calvin: Well, somebody's out to get me!” Bill Watterson

That makes two of us then.

“Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.” John Lennon

And now?

Posted: **Sun Nov 26, 2023 3:30 am**

Existentialism...

“In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Next up: virtual reality.

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.” Simone de Beauvoir

One by one as it were.

“Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.” Bertrand Russell

See, I told you.

“We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

See, I told you.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.” James Baldwin

The fire this time...eventually.

“Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?” Jenny Offill

Essentially, then, what's the difference?

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