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Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 2024

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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You're touching on a concept that was summed up nicely in Beiser's Weltschmerz -- the problem of evil. The fact is, from a materialist lens all suffering is inexcusable. All discomfort is tragedy. When something bad happens in 20XX, we consider it a suboptimal move like we're chess engines analyzing life and trying to build the perfect path. The result is ennui. A game developer once said, "Give players the means, and they will optimize the fun out of the game". The same applies to life. Your favorite art was influenced by experiences that were almost certainly terrible. There is no Lord of the Rings without the second World War, yet if any of us were asked, "Does LOTR justify the war? Does Remarque justify the war?" none of us could answer in the affirmative. We bemoan the artificiality of the current world, but when presented with opportunities to really experience adventure, us conscientious adults shirk back in fear.

Look, the secular world view doesn't have to be this way. But when you place "comfort" as your guiding star, that's what happens. You become a chess player. You are a Hamlet in a world fashioned by Quixotes. You sit, you stand, you stare at your watch. There is nothing else to do. Hamlet is apparently terrified of death, yet he does nothing the entire play but make droll, apathetic remarks to people he doesn't care about. Is such an existence really worth protecting? Even before the old king's death, do you really imagine he lived well? No. Death was never the issue for him. Hamlet is terrified of life.

The one good thing Hamlet ever did was forced on him by complete chance. The real Hamlets of the world never have that moment. Parenthood is the one test of our ability to value something beyond ourselves. It's 2024, and everyone is failing. We're all Hamlets, and the world is dying.

Tolkien said that his LOTR wasn't an allegory for anything, including either of the world wars, but that some of his personal experience in the first World War probably slipped in. I don't know if he'd agree or disagree with the statement that LOTR wouldn't have happened without WWII, but I suspect he would want to deemphasize the connection, as he did many times when he was alive.

Source: wikipedia

Look, the secular world view doesn't have to be this way.

Doesn't it? It looks like you laid out an argument for why a materialist view will end up in this place.

We're all Hamlets, and the world is dying.

Maybe it should.

Doesn't it?

No. The materialist world is where we live, but we humans are sentient. Meaning we don't live solely in the materialist world, we interface with it through our brains, which are full of delusion and fantasy. Delusion and fantasy are how we overcome the randomness of the universe.

This is all old existentialist philosophy, with roots in stoicism. Camus said that the whole point of life was the revolt against death. To live and experience is to deny death for one more day. Through our offspring (genetic, artistic, ideological, political) we live beyond our own lives, and deny death into the future. It is our task to live our lives as seems best to us, to enjoy what we can, overcome what we cannot, and fight it out to the last.

The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play. But our own personal experiences are tiny, insignificant things, important only to us. There's six billion people breeding and fighting, all trying to get to the next stage, the next generation, into the future.

A materialist view can end up anywhere it pleases. We place comfort at the fore and abscond from reality? Our lives become mediocre and empty. You don't need fancy logic to create values here. Just look around.

A materialist view can end up anywhere it pleases.

No it can't. You can't simply summon up any arbitrary set of values out of the facts of reality.

You don't need fancy logic to create values here.

You cannot create values. Values, to be values, must be real, must come from outside us.

I disagree. Value can only come from within.

My philosophy is that value is created by sacrifice.

Things, people, institutions, are only worth what people give up to get them.

To become a better man, a greater man, you must find more to sacrifice. This is why the ancients burned their children, the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice.

There is no objective value in the Universe. The universe does not care.

Only our subjective experience imputes value to the randomness of nature.

And our subjective experience grants value to those things we give the most to get. By definition. That which is easily attainable is not valuable. Value is scarcity. Suffering is cheap. Making it produce something positive is hard.

You should read Nietzsche.