The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I wish I had an answer that easily assuages your existential angst, and it makes me all the more grateful that I find myself largely immune from it.
I've been inured to being a meat robot made of trillions of smaller robots for decades, and have found no loophole or reason to require the existence of something as stupidly incoherent as free will unless you have pathological axioms that require it's existence.
A concept I have found useful is the idea that even the most absurd or non-anthropophilic model of the world reduces to normality. Be it the Abrahamic god's Covenant or a phenomenon that boils down to the outcomes of quantum mechanics, a rainbow is beautiful to us all the same.
You can face reality:
—Eugene Gendlin
You've been withstanding the fact that you're in a deterministic universe that has no special carveout for humans as being above the laws of physics. It's not something you can't handle, and now remind yourself of that when it's come to your conscious attention.
(On a tangent, I consider myself especially lucky that I don't have the disease of a god-shaped hole in my psyche. It's akin to having your motivation in life being finding the very last digit of pi, the universe has no obligation to indulge your choice of goals, and it would be better to aim for one that's at least physically plausible.)
I don't really buy this. For one, plenty of people aren't enduring it because they've already killed themselves. For another, 'truth' itself is a funny thing in that all maps are wrong, and a more accurate map may actually be a less-useful map. But even this pushes us to consider what 'usefulness' means as it seems to imply some kind of overriding telos, which is, as far as I've ever been able to tell, not a matter easily able to be decided conclusively.
In regard to OP, there's also a matter of intelligibility. Perhaps there is a frequency of sound, for example, which is unbearable to hear. Those exposed to it are in such torment that they almost always end their own lives sooner or later, even if perhaps after years or decades of resistance. Only, most people can't hear this frequency. Does it make sense to tell those who can hear it that everything is fine because others are enduring it? Is this an appropriate thing to tell such a person if one is, oneself, unable to hear it?
If OP was outright suicidal, then I'd be recommending a doctor. Existential crises, while painful, are usually not lethal.
I'm not sure what you seek to point out with this. Sure, map ain't the territory, and the dozen or so corollaries that follow.
In this case, without getting into the metaphysics of it all, I think my map is both true enough and also more useful than what OP originally had.
Utility and use are both in the eye of the beholder, but in this case, I want OP to escape the angst he suffers from, and I personally find this useful.
OP's map, like many others, has a deeply subjectively meaningful equivalent of a dangling pointer to nowhere, and he's realized that fact. To the extent that he found any beauty or utility from the map he had, I ask him to look for it knowing that the map hasn't really changed, and he can rederive his sense of place without relying on a compass that never actually pointed anywhere.
Just because I personally don't suffer from existential angst from the non-existence of a god or the fact that I am 100% derivable from the laws of physics (and ignorance about how qualia arises is a fact about me and all of human society rather than a feature of the territory), doesn't mean I'm immune from existential terror altogether.
I don't want to die. I don't want to be subsumed by a hostile superintelligence. I want the reassurance that my parents are invincible and not flawed human beings, and that my 94 year old grandpa makes it to the Heat Death of the universe.
I have largely made my peace with the above, but I certainly suffered in the process. I found the Litany of Gendlin to at least offer some small comfort.
It would be a genuine miracle if something as kludged together as a human being was perfectly aligned with the ground truth of the universe, yet some suffer more from this misalignment than others.
The following is mildly inflammatory for the religious, so the reader's discretion is advised:
On a tangent, if I was Czar of the World, I would do my absolute best to cure the need for religion that a large fraction of humanity suffers from. I'm unlikely to successfully get the American Psychiatric Association to label the religious as suffering from a pernicious form of delusional disorder (because I think anyone with sane priors would eventually see the overwhelming weight of evidence and desist, and it takes a prior of either 1 or very close to it to never update successfully). Doesn't mean I don't genuinely think that's the case. After all, in this more enlightened age, someone foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues and claiming divine revelation is more likely to be treated for epilepsy than worshipped, and I am hopeful we find the misfiring neurons that produce more prosaic religiosity eventually.
Now, if the religious yet disillusioned were content with filling the hole with something physically realizable, I'd point at the AGI we might eventually create, even if I think worshipping it is both tawdry and unnecessary. Unfortunately, most of them probably don't think that counts.
Think of it as akin to as body dysphoria, but for reality itself. Your mind yearns for the soul, but it stubbornly refuses to actually exist, a condition far worse than mere phantom limb when we can graft on a prosthetic.
You either find a way to plug the hole, live with the pain, or die. I'm lucky that I lack this particular hole, and pity those who do. But if my advice helps them to live with the pain till we find a better solution, then I am nothing but grateful I could make a difference.
As a theistic person, your post reads to me thus:
I am asexual. I cannot comprehend how sexual people like the way they are and I regard it as a sickness rather than recognizing myself as the one who is sick. If I can, I will fix the flaw in human beings which causes them to desire romance with each other. That is disgusting and it is clear to me that so much unnecessary pain could simply be avoided. I know so much better.
What I'm saying here isn't an argument. It's an apology. Best wishes to you.
Being asexual is not a falsifiable epistemic position, it's a personality trait.
I see the analogy as being someone deeply in love, say a parasocial relationship that's utterly unrequited. They suffer immensely, yet can't shake off the shackles as much as they want to. This causes them to go to a public forum and ask for help in dispelling these thoughts and desires that are unachievable yet cause them a great deal of pain.
Of course, the situation is even worse, since the object of their affection is outright nonexistent.
In such a scenario, who wouldn't want to help them sever that love that achieves nothing but sorrow with nothing to show for it?
I do pity the religious, and particularly the people who are just sane enough to know that the desires they feel are likely unfounded, yet by some quirk of biology are fundamentally unable to get rid of the same even if they rationally can see otherwise.
Of course, I'm self aware enough to see that you likely pity me, and I appreciate that, because it's better to pity than to hate, and at least you're living up to your standards as a good Christian.
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