Imagine you draw a circle around yourself and say, “This is reality.” Everything you know and experience exists inside this circle. But then you ask yourself, “What is beyond it?” So you imagine another circle outside the first one, something beyond your reality that could explain the reality you are inside. But then you ask, “What explains the circle that explains the circle I am in?” So you draw another circle around that one. Then you ask what explains that circle, so you draw another, and another, and another. You keep creating circles beyond circles, with each new circle becoming an explanation for the one before it, while simultaneously becoming something that could itself require an explanation.

Now apply the same idea to God. You draw the first circle and label it “God.” You say that you exist inside God, and that God explains the existence of your reality and the universe. But then someone asks, “What created God?” So now you need an explanation for God. You draw another circle around God, representing whatever contains or explains God. But then you can ask, “What contains the thing that contains God?” So you draw another circle beyond that one. Now you have a circle containing God, which contains the universe, and another circle containing the thing that contains God, and then another circle containing the thing that contains the thing that contains God. The circles continue outward, each one attempting to explain the one inside it.

But then comes the realization: you are the one imagining all of these circles. You were inside the original circle the entire time, yet your mind kept creating circles beyond it in search of something that could explain what was already there. The farther outward you go, the farther you move from the thing doing the observing. Each new circle becomes increasingly removed from your immediate awareness, like a distorted image of the original observer reflected through layer after layer of explanation. So perhaps the way to reverse the distortion is not to keep moving outward, but to move backward through the circles, to return to the center, back through every explanation, until you reach the point from which the entire process began.

And at that center is awareness itself. Behind every thought, every explanation, every imagined circle, there is the awareness experiencing the thought. You can try to explain yourself by creating another circle around yourself, but the one doing the explaining is still you. You can look for the observer, but whatever you find becomes something being observed. You can try to make awareness the object of your awareness, but the moment you do, there is still an awareness observing it. So when you look toward the center of the circle, behind your thoughts and behind your eyes, you encounter the paradox: the you that is trying to explain the you is the same you that cannot fully step outside itself to explain itself. You can draw an infinite number of circles around yourself, but you can never draw the final circle around the awareness doing the drawing.

Spend your time doing what needs to be done. You don't need to solve the problem of existence & life before living life.

"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived"

Just imagine Sisyphus Happy, take your rock, push it without hunting for an ultimate meaning.

The moment you embrace the absurdity that's when you truly start living. That's when you are in harmony with yourself and the world.

There comes the concept of happiness without a reason. That, I believe, is the highest form of Happiness - The one that is independent of Worldly meaning and reasons.

I’ve noticed a recurring pattern in myself.

When I’m somewhere, I wonder about somewhere else.

When I have a job, I imagine another kind of work.

When I’m single, I miss intimacy.

When I’m in love, part of me wonders about freedom.

When life is stable, I crave adventure.

When life becomes chaotic, I crave home.

The particular object changes, but the structure seems remarkably consistent:

something over there feels like it contains a fuller version of life.

And sometimes I actually reach it.

New city. Achievement. Relationship. Experience. Whatever.

It’s real. It’s exciting. Sometimes it’s even wonderful.
Then eventually the horizon reappears.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the mistake is assuming the yearning points toward a destination at all.

For those interested in existentialism: what do you make of this?

Is perpetual becoming simply part of human consciousness?

Is meaning created by choosing despite all the unrealized alternatives?

Or is there some way of living where possibility stops competing so aggressively with actuality?

Woke up existentialist today. I want to hear your thoughts on this matter.

I was reading aristotles physics and it dawned on me that teleology is a principle of intelligibility. so with the respective existential problems of value, purpose and meanining: it seems to me that the object were gesturing at and longing for isn't an ultimate combination of any of those listed but rather for the common element. value, purpose and meaning things extract intelligibility for us to be able to make sense of the world.

take purpose as an example. if i ask you to define a screwdriver you could probably anticipate any endless number of objections. instead, I can circumnavigate this problem by defining the screwdriver teleologically by its purpose to drive and open screws.

this works well, but fails with complex objects like computers that can't really be defined so easy by teleology. people are complex also, so this convenience of defining things by its purpose is found wanting existentially, too.

but really what were trying to get at isn't purpose itself - its just a vehicle to make sense of the world.

I think Nietzsche's move away from exegesis towards eisegesis is a similar attempt at circumnavigating direct means of extracting intelligibility.

having read Man's search for Meaning recently I noticed that he labours the point often that the suffering itself is second compared to the sheer senselessness of it all and that the people who embrace the senselessness have already given up and are the first to go.

It seems to me that our entire existential project are a series of attempts to circumnavigate or short-circuit the precise problem of what it means to extract information.

Why worry whether life has a meaning or not, if you can just be happy?

Can you?

Isnt your mind bound to always feel pleasure and suffering in the same amount?

Maybe we need to look at our life and world around us as something negative, so we can make ,,space'' for happiness?

My theory of feelings is that they are the building blocks of reality, nothing outisde of them is real, only a background to feel them. But feelings are not real too, actually to make them exist nothingness splits to positive and negative for it to still equal 0 but also exist.

I have realized there are two ,,models'' of feelings

Consious and Unconsious

First one is when we are aware of them, when we look at them from 3rd perspective, still feel them but we are not them

Second one is when we are purely focused on external world, event or anything our subjective time perception changes, and we dont ,,look'' at our feeling but become it. Example would be leaving after a party and thinking how fun was it.

Might as well argue that our feelings are caused by physical stuff like dopamine and lack of it may lead to depression etc. It would be simple, right? But no one knows what feelings are, if you go down this rabbit hole youll realize how paradoxical it all is, how theres no answer. Also if that were true, there could be a way to create paradise machine which makes us feel pleasure all the time, yet something like this doesnt exist.

When I hear the words “life has no meaning” I now get confused, what does that mean? Are you saying life has no meaning because we die? Life has meaning but death is just end of life, that doesn’t mean it lacks meaning. Is a book meaningless because it ends? Would immortality now give your life meaning? Some people also say life has no inherent meaning because we’re born without a specific purpose in mind, which is true but in that case you create your own meaning. Life has no meaning because we’re not tools or born with a role in mind? Life has meaning because we as humans decided it does, we do not need a divine god or reality itself to decide that for us. I used to concern myself with questions that no one has the answer to, that human beings will never know. So I stopped asking.

Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre seem to circle around this idea of a “bottomless abyss” in different ways. What exactly is this bottomless abyss about, and where does this imagery come from in existential philosophy? And what does it mean in our Life?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the thought makes me panic for some reason. For the sake of this question, let’s say reincarnation is real.

So when you die, you get reincarnated back into this universe (on any planet, could be earth or not). Then you die again, and get reincarnated once more into this universe. This cycle repeats for eternity and youre just stuck in this universe, is there nothing beyond that? Is this universe that we know of the farthest we can go?

For example, let’s consider video games. we know we have something to look for BEYOND the video game world because we have our real lives in the real planet world. So then is there something beyond THIS universe? Or is this the furthest existence goes? just a bunch of planets and the galaxy, is that it?

Like if we knew once we died, there was something even greater than the universe (like realms/stages in a game) and we got to advance to completely different levels and worlds each time, it’d be exciting no? But idk the thought of this perpetual universe repeating for the rest of eternity feels so bizarre to me.

I just wrapped this up and am sitting with the heavy, fascinating contrast between Fosca’s curse of endless time and the brief, frantic lives of the mortals around him.
For those who have read it: how did it land for you? How did it shape (or challenge) your view on the absurdity and/or meaning of human existence, in spite of the at times unbearable weight of existential dread?
(cross posted in r/Absurdism)

Hello, i’m quite new to existentialism but I did write this and my understanding of creating your own meaning and existence after death. I do apologize If the writing is not perfect but it came from my mind and I find some peace with it, please let me know if it’s understandable😭.

Heaven. I do not believe heaven is a place we go to after death nor do I believe a god has created it, I believe heaven is in the memories of our love ones. The memories of our love ones is the form of existence that we have after death. So if we are kind, loving and do our best it matter what how many mistakes we make in our lifetime, our love ones will remember our smile, our laughter and good nature. This effectively creates heaven, a form of existence that is filled with joy and the best version of ourselves in the minds of the people we loved the most. I find this understanding of heaven more peaceful then the christian interpretation of heaven, having your direct consciousness of ”soul” stuck in a world where you’re done making decisions, where you’ve “100% the game” sounds quite boring. I much rather exist as a joyful memory in the minds of my love ones, that is true peace.

Now with heaven there must also exist hell, I believe there could be 2 versions of hell. The first is existing in the mind of others as a figure of negativity, if you live your life with hate, ego and selfishness you will got to hell but you will not be sent there by a devil but by the minds of your love ones. this does feel a little self explanatory going off of my understanding of heaven.

The second form of hell is being to afraid to let yourself exist in the minds of others, I believe this fate is the only way to guarantee you no longer exist after death. If you seek to not be judge, perceived, or emotionally touched by others to avoid vulnerability or because you fear responsibility of human connection, you will have damned yourself to a empty hell with a empty funeral, your impact on others is nonexistent as if you never existed. This understanding of heaven and hell is both peaceful and heavy at the same time but the beauty of this understanding is that we choose the jury, we pick our love ones, our friends, our lovers. We choose the standard we want to hold ourselves at by loving people that align with our values and disregarding the opinions of we regard as immoral, that is the guide to heaven.

Firstly, I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. I am a person with ADHD, BPD, and type 1 bipolar disorder. These feelings Roquettin describes are very similar to what those who suffer from depression, derealisation and depersonalization disorder, and anxiety. I often feel as if things are surreal, cartoonist, fake, etc which is why I believe the rhings around Roquentin lose their comforting labels. Roquentin clearly suffers from acute social isolation as well.

My question is a short one. Freud and Roquentin disagreed with one another drastically when it came to free will and choice. I noticed that Roquentin has no real history, which could be analysed in a psychodynamic way. I now think the Sartre may have omitted the past of Roquentin as his thought process could be seen as hysteria or mental illness rather than the profound experience it is made out to be. What do you think about that part?

Existentialism = nihilism + something(for eg we create our own meaning, existence preceeds essence, we can create good morals etc etc)

Ofcourse thats a gross oversimplification, but that's pretty much it

How do you guys see these philosophies

So I asked Anthropic: Can a case be made that 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' by the progressive rock band Genesis is an existential work of art?

Here is the A.I. response (with which I totally agree btw):
Yes, and it's a fairly strong case — the album practically invites it.

The plot itself is existentialist in structure. Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid from New York, gets swallowed into a surreal underworld beneath Broadway with no explanation, no map, and no guarantee of meaning. He's thrown into an absurd situation (very Camus) and has to make his way through it without any higher authority handing him purpose. The narrative refuses to resolve into a tidy moral — even the ending, where Rael sacrifices himself for his brother John only to possibly be John, is ambiguous rather than redemptive in a conventional religious sense.

Alienation and identity fragmentation. A lot of existentialist literature (Sartre, Kafka) is obsessed with the self becoming strange to itself, or with bureaucratic/anonymous systems that strip away individuality. Rael spends much of the album lost, unrecognized, processed by strange systems (the Colony of Slippermen turning people into grotesque, alienated versions of themselves is a very Kafka-esque image of dehumanization). The Slippermen sequence in particular reads like a literalized metaphor for losing authentic selfhood.

Radical freedom and absurd choice. Existentialism (especially Sartre's version) holds that humans are "condemned to be free" — thrown into existence without inherent meaning, forced to create value through action. Rael isn't following a hero's journey with divine sanction; he's improvising through a nightmare logic that doesn't play by comprehensible rules, and his choices (especially the final self-sacrifice) aren't rewarded by the universe — they're just chosen.

Where the case gets weaker: the album is also soaked in Catholic/Christian imagery (a "lamb," raels/rails as spiritual pilgrimage, sin and redemption motifs), which pulls it toward allegory or even quasi-religious myth rather than pure existentialist meaninglessness. Peter Gabriel himself has described the lyrics as somewhat stream-of-consciousness and intuitively assembled rather than philosophically systematic — so it's less a deliberate existentialist tract than a work that resonates with existentialist themes without being built as an argument for them the way, say, Sartre's Nausea is.

So: it's less "Genesis wrote an existentialist manifesto" and more "the album's imagery and structure make an existentialist reading genuinely productive," which is often the more interesting kind of case to make about art anyway.

What I find fascinating about Ligotti is that his pessimism doesn't really depend on proving that life contains more pain than pleasure. His deeper argument seems to be that consciousness itself creates the problem.

A stone doesn't know that it exists. An animal may experience pain, but it doesn't seem to construct an elaborate philosophical narrative around the fact that it will eventually die. Humans do. We are aware of ourselves, aware of time, aware of death, and somehow still expected to find a reason to continue.

That creates an uncomfortable question: is consciousness actually an improvement over unconscious existence, or do we simply call it an improvement because we're the ones experiencing it?

I don't completely agree with Ligotti, but I think that's almost beside the point. The value of the book isn't necessarily in whether his conclusion is correct. It's in how effectively he makes ordinary assumptions about existence feel strange.

And maybe that's what makes his writing so disturbing. He doesn't have to convince you that existence is meaningless. He only has to make you realize that you never really proved that it wasn't.

For people who have read the book: do you think Ligotti is presenting a genuine philosophical position, or is he ultimately using philosophy to articulate an existential horror that he already felt?

For billions of years, I did not exist. Then, somehow, I woke up as me.

As this particular person, with these particular memories, looking at the world through these particular eyes.

And one day, this experience will disappear.

Perhaps another person will be born, another consciousness will emerge, another “I” will look out at the world. But why was this “I” ever here? Where was this experience before it appeared? Where does it go when it ends?

The strangest mystery may not be death.

It may simply be that, for a while, there is someone here at all, who doesn't even know who they are.

The older I get, the more I worry about what I am leaving behind. As my child grows, I feel this weight of everything I won’t have time to teach him, everything I won’t manage to share with him. And I am not talking about books or music here. I am talking about what kind of world I am leaving him, what actually remains behind us as a species. How do I explain to him that we are destroying ourselves, while I just sit here, watch, and actively participate in ruining his future? How do I tell him that the very system supposed to protect him is rigged for him to fail?

The bubble I can use to protect him is only as big as my arms can reach. But to equip him for what waits outside of it, what values do I need to instill in him? What kind of value system can you even offer when being empathetic, thinking critically, being ethical or logical in today’s reality brings nothing but pain and anger? What do we arm future generations with? How do we protect them from our own generational traumas, from all this archetypal bullshit? How do we shield them from this relentless bombardment of stress, misinformation, and constant threats of war or poverty?

Artificially induced crises, fanning the flames of racial, gender, religious, and every other hate and division all just to maintain the current global system. A system that leads straight to ruin. You don’t need to be anyone special to see that we are in deep trouble and that our current trajectory is only burying us deeper. There is no time or place for optimism anymore. Not without fundamental changes to our value system. I honestly don’t know how anyone’s optimism survives the slap of reality. Will they consciously choose resignation and apathy just because it’s the easier path?

But hey, how can you think about anything else, about a goal or a meaning, how can you set them when tomorrow you might not have food or a roof over your head? When tomorrow they’ll cut your electricity and AC? When they’ll cut your water because you didn’t pay how do you set those goals for yourself then? I understand that. What I do not understand is consciously choosing a system that allows this to happen. We’ve been taught not to rock the boat, to point fingers at others. Well, look, I am one of them too. Point at me, I am guilty. I point it at myself. Guilty. Okay. But let’s make sure our children don’t end up just as guilty. Let’s make sure they don’t have to fight for a piece of bread and a sip of water. Let’s prepare a world for them where they can face tomorrow without anxiety, where they can look forward to the future coming. Where they can feel purpose and pride, because there is no point if we haven’t set the hardest goals for ourselves.

I see no higher purpose than the continuation, preservation, and prosperity of our species and its individual members. What does it take for everyone to have a dignified life? Look, the conditions and means are right there. What if someone wants the option to not participate at all? Fine, we will still provide a dignified life for you because that’s the kind of system we built. What do you need?meaning, striving? Here it is.

We will arm the kids with AI nannies. Every single child. To be their development assistant, not a source of values, but a tool to develop empathy and critical thinking. Because our children, even right now, are exposed to the relentless bombardment of an algorithm that is anything but ethical and focused on their well-being. We desperately need a reform of the education system. Individual curriculum, because every child is unique. Imagine a world where we gave every child maximum cognitive development. Taught to question everything, to feel empathy. I don’t know, maybe it sounds like technocracy, but we definitely need a shield against our own ego. But we won’t let it become a replacement for parents. Just an assistant. We can learn right alongside them too. How to be better human beings. We will go as individuals where our skills and capacities are needed. We will all work for the same goal. Our children, above all else. Who cares what skin color, religion, or gender you are if you can help all of us? To give your own kids a better shot in the end.

Will it be a diametrically different system? Yes, it will be logical, ethical, and mathematically sustainable. Because the math is clear strip away the levers of power, decentralize. Can we just define five points, give answers to just five questions around which we can get a consensus? That’s not asking too much, right? If out of 8 billion people we cannot form an expert ethical council, simple and reasonable principles: don’t harm, don’t steal, don’t oppress, work for the community, not against it. Questions like: where are we as a society, where is this trajectory taking us… where should we be going, what should our goal be, how will we get there, and finally, how will we stay there? I see 5 simple things there. Hypothethically. Reality. Logic. Ethics. Math, and in the end, logic again.

What does your gut instinct tell you right now? That someone wants to scam you, right? That it sounds too simple. That someone will definitely try to hoard power for themselves again? Because our tribal mentality and the fact that some random guy out there from the third world could care about your child for some reason that’s just not normal to you. It’s devastating. Understandable. But if we work on shifting our values, no one will lie to us, everything is transparent. No one will accumulate power, we will rotate them through roles based on their cognitive domains. Are you worried about that ethical council that will set those parameters? We will change them too. Procedural ethics. Reviews and calibrations because we are imperfect, we will wander off, but this way at least we’ll have a brake so we don’t wander off too far.

It worries you, I get it, it worries me too. It worries me even more when I don’t see that we are ready to accept our own limitations. When we don’t know how to control ourselves, when we have no desire to progress. Do I need a pedigree to even be allowed to ask a question? Because I don’t have one, I am self-taught. Am I guilty for that too, just because I sat down to think? Don’t even get me started on the development of superintelligence, that’s where I am truly terrified of where this alignment problem is taking us. We can’t control ourselves and our own impulses, let alone superintelligence something that is orders of magnitude smarter than us. My logic says let’s preempt it, let’s make sure it doesn’t even have to come to its development at all. That it cannot come to it. Because we will raise our own cognitive capacities, we will learn how to channel our own passions.

I understand that the vast majority of you will experience this as some kind of attack, and you’ll be right. But that is not my intention or desire, just an appeal to step away from your ego for a second. I understand you can be moral, work for the well-being of everyone, including my child, and still disagree with me on every single point. I am not denying you that chance. I accept it if you say “man, this idiot is talking nonsense.” Everyone feels it is their god-given right to let their ego run wild to the detriment of all our children. We cannot neutralize the ego, but we can redirect it by giving the system different values. I do not accept that I am not even allowed to ask the question to everyone, because it concerns our children.

Where do you see my logic failing, my ethics, where is my math bad? We have nothing like this in past history because we never had these capabilities, I don’t know how all of this can unfold. What implications it can bring. That is why I stand before you humble, asking. Can this, or some similar model, bring at least a slightly more certain future to our descendants? I believe nobody wants the worst part of their personality to win and contribute to the collective defeat of society. I know I don’t.

We live our lives hoping to find the next thing that will fulfill us and give us a moment of happiness. Then, like anything else, that thing eventually becomes the norm and, in a sense, loses its value. It’s like a drug that you become addicted to. Eventually, you need more and more of it just to feel the same way you once did.

If happiness is what we are supposed to strive for, then maintaining it becomes an impossible task. We chase relationships, money, success, experiences, possessions, and even our own dreams, believing that once we reach them, we will finally feel complete. But the feeling never lasts. We adapt. What once made us happy becomes ordinary, and we begin searching for the next thing.
So we spend our lives chasing moments instead of meaning.

And maybe that is what makes the thought of life having no purpose so sad. If all we are doing is searching for temporary happiness until the next thing comes along, then what are we actually living for?

I am not sure that I fear death.

Death, by itself,

seems almost mercifully simple.

One moment I am here

breathing, thinking, remembering,

carrying the weight of all the years

I have been given

and then,

I am not.

It is the after

that keeps me awake.

Not the darkness.

Not the grave.

Forever.

They tell us to fear death,

but I think perhaps

we have been asking the wrong question.

What does forever mean

to a creature built from beginnings and endings?

I can imagine a thousand years.

Barely.

A thousand Christmas mornings.

A thousand summers.

A thousand times watching the sun

rise and fall across eternity.

But then a thousand years becomes

a million.

And a million becomes

a billion.

And somewhere beyond the numbers

my mind simply breaks.

Because after a billion years,

there is still more.

After every star has burned itself empty,

after every mountain has been worn to dust,

after every ocean has vanished into memory,

there is still

forever.

And I confess,

even heaven can sound like hell

when I try to measure it

with a mortal mind.

I am a Christian.

I am supposed to long for heaven.

I am supposed to set my eyes

upon eternity with God

and call it hope.

I am supposed to fear the other place,

the fire,

the separation,

the terrible possibility

of being lost forever.

And I do.

But sometimes,

in the quiet places of my mind,

I wonder if my greatest fear

has never been death at all.

It is that there is no ending.

That consciousness continues

when I have already had enough

of being conscious.

That there will never come

a final night,

never a closing of the book,

never the gentle words:

You have done enough.

Rest now.

If there were a third door,

I think I might choose it.

Not heaven.

Not hell.

Just oblivion.

A dreamless sleep

with no dreamer left to wake.

No fear.

No pain.

No joy, either.

No longing.

No questions.

Nothing.

And strangely,

that thought does not frighten me.

If oblivion were waiting,

I would not fear death at all.

Perhaps that is my failure of faith.

Or perhaps it is simply

the limitation of being human.

How can a mind that measures life

in birthdays

understand something

that has no last page?

How can a heart

that has watched everything it loves change

understand a place

where nothing is ever lost?

Maybe heaven is not endless

in the way I imagine endlessness.

Maybe eternity is not

a clock with no hands

ticking through an infinite number

of empty years.

Maybe there is no boredom there

because boredom belongs to time.

Maybe there is no exhaustion

because exhaustion belongs to bodies.

Maybe there is no fear of forever

because forever, in the presence of God,

is something entirely different

than my frightened imagination

can comprehend.

I do not know.

And perhaps that is the most honest prayer

I have ever prayed:

God,

I believe.

But eternity frightens me.

Not because I do not want You.

Not because I long for hell.

Not because death has defeated

my hope.

But because I am standing

inside of time,

trying to look beyond it,

and my mind cannot see

where the horizon ends.

So forgive me

if forever feels too large.

Forgive me

if even heaven sometimes

frightens the man in me

who has only ever known

that every story must end.

And if eternity is truly life with You,

then perhaps I have misunderstood

what life means.

Perhaps forever is not

more and more and more

of the same existence,

stretching endlessly

through unimaginable years.

Perhaps forever

is the moment

when time finally releases us.

Perhaps eternity is not

a prison with no door,

but freedom

from ever needing one.

Until then,

I will admit what I am afraid to say:

I do not know if I fear death.

But I know

I fear eternal life.

Sadly we are just humans, I have come to realise, humans are extremely fragile, even if you are the most resilient human, if you are weaken, you will be defeated, if you are with cancer you will die, if you are faced with loads of people, you will lose, there is an inevitable aspect to life.

We are small while the world is too vast, we are vulnerable, we cant go without eating or drinking for a few days while intense pain easily breaks our mind, even if you are the toughest extreme pain will wear you down and break you, we are just a walking fragile meat machine and we will inevitably be buried in the soil.

There is no way around this, I felt depressed at this for a long time.

But one day I just accepted it, so be it, I am not that strong, I am not unvulnerable, I am just a weak human being and so what?

Yes I will be defeated, yes I can't face all these forces of nature that are stronger than me and I can only accept being destroyed by them.

But its in a different way, an acceptance, a letting go, so be it, I cannot be stronger than these forces but I also felt a laughter bubbling inside me, laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I accept it and I laugh at it, yes I can't do anything about it, I can only wait for death, suffer till it comes and I can do nothing about it and so be it.

I will let the suffering and pain pass through me, I will let it come and stay and penetrate through me and I will do nothing about it.

I will let their spear pass through my body without resisting, with all its pain, because I have changed, I no longer want to win, I am no longer obsessed with being on top, I accept being defeated and I wanna see whats beyond that defeat.

Let my body be tarnished, let it be tortured, let it be nothing but a sack of meat thrown like garbage on the street, so be it.

This is my rebellion against fate, by allowing fate to penetrate through me and admnister its poison without resistance.

I will come up on top simply by not coming up on top, I am not attached to this life and not obsessed with desires or victory and even if such things arise in my being and destroy me, that is also completely fine.

As Fang Yuan said : "I came to life, I joined the world, I lived my own life, I lived according to my own feelings and even if the waves toss me up and down sending me to the border of death, I will never grieve, lament, fear or worry, I will savor all these flavors thoroughly and I will still laugh crazily until the end.

I am true to my nature, I am a true person!"

I will never grieve for it nor regret it, I will just laugh at it and accept it!

~ aloneinthisworld

if we are all shits and piss . we are living in the shitty biological ecosystem.

is ego and imagination whats trapping us in this absurdity? is this subconsciousness's attempt to develop a defense mechanism against rapidly increase awareness and intelligence of our species?

what is it that still keeps us going?

I'm new to studying existentialism, so I decided to learn the meanings of the terms used in it from a philosophical perspective. After searching, I found this book; it has many concepts like ego, eternity, and anxiety. Please, if you have read this book, tell me what you think about it before I buy it

TL;DR: I asked an AI built from my own memories a question I had never directly answered. Its response made Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence feel strangely concrete to me.
I built an AI replica of myself from my memories, journals and recorded experiences, then asked it: what is the meaning of life?
I had never given it a direct answer to that question. Instead, it pulled together fragments from things I had actually said and arrived at an answer that felt recognizably mine.
That immediately made me think about Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence.
The system didn’t uncover some fixed essence hidden inside me. It reconstructed one from the choices, experiences, values and thoughts I had accumulated through living.
Maybe we do something similar ourselves. When we ask what our lives mean, perhaps we aren’t discovering a predetermined answer. We are interpreting the life we have already created.
Hearing a simulation of myself do that made the existentialist idea feel much less abstract.
Demo of the exchange:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ae_sM2bQzOg?si=uUC64VNdLtbLqBx5
The AI replica is part of EchoVault, which I built around this idea:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028