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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
This ideology may work decently for you individually, although I think it takes a heroic individual to truly accept that brutal state of affairs.
Over time though, and on a societal level, this type of thinking will inevitably descend back into the might-makes-right, strong eat the weak world that we rose from. During the Axial revolution back around the time of Socrates, men realized that they could make themselves better. That there was a different way to live than simply accepting Nature as red in tooth and claw - we could master nature. But more importantly, we could master ourselves.
All the beauty and ease your life is filled with has been delivered to you from generations of your ancestors that rejected this naturalistic worldview in order to build a better future for their descendants. You can spit on their sacrifices and just focus on getting yours, man, but I reject your worldview as fundamentally selfish, and wrong.
I hate the world my ancestors have made. I hate the shiny metal prison that uses drugs and manipulative interactive propaganda to try and convince people they're happier or have more agency than a medieval serf.
I yearn for brutality and its reality. I yearn for the truth of man's condition in this Chtonic age of lies.
But most of all I despise those that, as you do, hide their cowardly quest for mere comfort behind a communal social standard that only exists to leech on their betters with impunity.
If rejecting this giant daycare is egoism then egoism is a moral duty.
Feel free to travel to Somalia, Syria or Ukraine with brutality available to experience. Personally I am entirely not looking for more brutality in my life, thank you very much.
They have. (for "happier" I do not really have enough knowledge to answer, but I also expect that)
Claiming that typical people nowadays have less agency than medieval serf is a quite wild claim. What kind of serfdom you compare to modern life?
I mean I've been to places like that. It is refreshing in a way, but you don't really get the proper experience as a tourist.
Plus none of that is needed, I can just go to my cabin in the woods.
But all my personal tribulations make your quest for comfort that has sacrificed freedom and humanity no less evil, of course.
How many years of manual labor do you need to buy a dwelling for you and your family? How much free time do you have per day? Per year? How much control do other humans have on the way you live your daily life? How many hours do you have away from anybody? How much do you pay in taxes? Can you be conscripted in an army against your will?
I don't find it wild at all personally once you actually look at what is going on instead of the stories people tell about what is going on.
But of course the only answer when we start to look at the grim reality of modern man is to clutch at the true purpose: comfort. Oh but wouldn't you just get sick and die, wouldn't it all be very hard work? Yes, but at least you would have lived a human life and not that of a machine.
How many times have you had to fight for your life against an angry mob? A wild animal?
How many times have you had to face starvation, or thirst, or truly look the spectre of death in the face?
When in your life have you had to sit back while a corrupt noble comes in and rapes your wife and daughter?
You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.
More light, less heat, please.
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