Existential disappointment

[Foreigner]

I previously made a thread about not being able to handle stupid people, but I'd like to get more specific about that now: existential disappointment. I honed in on this idea earlier today as I was reading some of the usual covid19 news. I was reading about the stupidity and selfishness of some politicians, as well as every day people who seem to have no sense of communal consideration. Rather than blame them as I did in the previous thread, I figured out where it's coming from in myself.

Anyway... what really got me thinking deeply about this is how I realized I was raised by my family, my schooling, all my peers, their families, etc... to be a "good person". This looks like being someone who always considers others, does the "right thing", obeys the rules to a degree, and thinks about the common good. Essentially, as children, we are (mostly) taught to respect one another, share, and to work together. As I got older and experienced human systems more and more, it became apparent, through personal experience, that the people in power tend to behave oppositely to this model. We are taught to strive for a unified world, yet the centuries old rivalries between different countries still exist and persist. Friends one day, enemies the next.

I can't help but feel like I was raised with an incredibly naive, one-sided view of humanity, and it has cost me a lot of personal suffering as I blindly moved through systems and institutions that I thought had my back, when really they were just parasitizing me for their own opportunistic agendas. It also made me vulnerable to people who wanted to take advantage of me, which I feel is a very real human condition that operates on a global scale. Humans can be nice to each other but they can also be competitive and cruel.

Really though, what made me feel down today, was reading about how Trump has ordered that all Federal retirement plans invested in the Chinese economy must be pulled. It got me thinking about how the friendliness between nations is mostly smoke and mirrors. It's built upon convenience, and what lies beneath is the same petty, ancient rivalries between nations, between kingdoms, between human rulers, between old powers and old money, old hierarchies. And it got me thinking -- what progress has humanity really made? Yes, we have lots of fancy tech now, but have the underlying human behaviours really changed? Are we really that different? It seems like... same shit, different pile. Instead of tribes living in caves throwing spears at each other or forming tentative alliances, we are now billions of humans with high tech doing more or less the same thing. How many people really stop to ask why we're here, what we're doing, and what we're actually living for?

I feel like I've been conned and the only way I have ever been able to really reconcile this is spiritually. There have been really good people in my life, but no relationship can make me bypass what I see going on in the world. It doesn't eat me up inside exactly, but it does disappoint me. My motto has been to do my best, be true to myself, and do right by people... but it pains me to know that even an entire nation of people behaving the same as me could have themselves and all their rich accomplishments obliterated by one psychopath in control of an army... and those psychos are real, and they still run most of the planet.

I am tired.

 

[ReadmissionRied]

I feel this. I wish I could offer more words that may be helpful but I wanted to say you're not alone. When I read the news I think, am I in the minority? Am I wrong for wanting to reduce harm on others? The views are twisted. I've met people IRL who got very angry about the lockdowns. "If I can't go out and have fun what's the point of living?". Ended long time friendships. Life has been cruel.

 

[Shady's Fox]

Again, we say words to warm ourselves, to create this bubble for no reason. Life's about money, man -- born to pay. Take 2 photos of your favorite vacations, laugh and eat something sweet and that's about it. Other than that we are pretty much primitive in terms of what we can do, even if we are the only one who can think emotionally we're at the end of the rope. I don't see a spaceship by 2040, I don't see how we gonna know everything bout our planet until 2080. It's a useless rat-race. At least we have something really cool, music. Music connects people.

 

[ReadmissionRied]

Right, we can live in the now and do what we can to better our existence while we are still aware of it.

 

[Vastness]

My motto has been to do my best, be true to myself, and do right by people... but it pains me to know that even an entire nation of people behaving the same as me could have themselves and all their rich accomplishments obliterated by one psychopath in control of an army... and those psychos are real, and they still run most of the planet.

Consider this - everyone, including those psychopaths, is doing their best to live in this reality, by the rules they have been taught, or simply interpreted from their experiences of being.

Existentially speaking - I don't see a real difference between the accomplishments of the entire human race being obliterated by an extinction-level asteroid strike which annihilates the biosphere of the Earth, or the same endpoint (annihilation of the biosphere) resulting from an event triggered by a human (or several humans, either by accident or design, carelessness and greed or calculated malice), ie, catastrophic nuclear war, or something slower but just as deadly in the long run like runaway global warming.

It's tempting to see one event as an uncontrollable natural disaster which we realistically couldn't hope to predict, and the other as an entirely avoidable result of stupidity, carelessness, ineptitude, malice, "evil"or some other weakness of character or explicit moral failing perpetrated by thinking human beings acting against the common good, when these same humans should have known better, could have done better, but because of their failings, we all must suffer for it. But I think this is a mistake. Humans are a complex extension of the forces of nature, and the flow of immutable causality, and as such the destruction wrought by human beings on the Earth, on ourselves, on the likelihood of any number of seemingly possible, bright futures for our descendants is no less a natural event than an asteroid strike, nearby supernova, or aberrant gamma ray burst from an unstable pulsar. The same is true for any good that we choose to put out into the world - but this doesn't absolve us of any moral responsibility for our actions.

You say you have moved past blame, but from the rest of your post it's not clear to me that you really have, since the tone of this post is very similar to the last one. "Why bother being good, when there are bad people in the world, and any good I do might not matter anyway?"

I admit I'm finding it hard to understand what you want from reality. That every human should value what you do, and act in a way that you deem correct?

To what end? Avoidance of extinction? The preservation of life on Earth? These seem like "good" objectives to me too, but neither may turn out to be achievable in the long term, and on truly cosmological timescales the likelihood of either is likely to be slim. They also discount the value of the present moment. Simply trying one's best to continue to be a good person even if stopping the tide of destructive forces seems impossible has value too. Just being nice to another human being, or another animal, or plant, or just appreciating the inherent beauty of an inanimate object is in most cases a good thing to do, and the fact that the chequered road of human history might end explosively, destructively, and with much suffering that, seemingly, could have been avoided if only enough humans chose to behave differently, does not diminish the value of these things.

 

[Foreigner]

What I'm having difficulty discerning is whether human nature rears its ugly head in ANYONE who achieves power and thus the cycle is endlessly perpetuated; or if the same set of dynastic powers are keeping humanity trapped in this rat race, and if they are eliminated it would make the world 1000x better.

I've read some interesting studies on how among social mammals, most individuals who achieve power experience physiological and biochemical changes: increased testosterone and growth hormone, higher competitiveness, higher risk taking, more sexual promiscuity and proclivity, a tendency toward cruelness, and leadership. You can tell who the top cat is among the alley cats because he is big and looks mean. He also gets all the females. In the studies, human females experience the same changes -- it isn't confined to men.

So I wonder... if power itself always corrupts and therefore leads to a miserable world of opportunism and survivalism because that's how the people in power perceive it, and therefore they inflict such systems on everyone else. At the same time, competition creates innovation, so simply decentralizing power and removing competition could be bad for humanity.

Or is it just that old families with old power and old money are controlling everything, and perpetuating this bullshit? It seems like most of humanity just wants to live in peace. We raise children with this ideal, perhaps hoping that their generation will make it a reality, but the powers that be always prevent it.

Reigning this in, and bringing it back to just myself, I wonder what my role could be. My nature seems to be a helper, one who is of service, one who wants to see people reach their potential and be better tomorrow than they are today (however they define that), and do no harm. Yet in doing this, I realize that I must choose to have no goal, because there is no "end point". I could help build a utopia and it could be obliterated tomorrow, by selfish humans, by a natural event, or something else.

I kind of side with the views of Kierkegaard who was the opposite of Marx in that he believed all empowerment lies with the individual, and the aggregate of a society full of empowered individuals leads to a better world. Marx believed the opposite which was that collective will influenced everything. He envisioned an egalitarian end game where nobody was in charge and workers own the means of production. I believe if everyone allowed themselves to face the existentialism that we all feel at some point in our lives - instead of filling our lives with pointless crap in order to distract ourselves - we could walk through it and come out the other end more self-actualized. Victor Frankl said that self-actualization is self-transcendence, meaning that one must invest themselves fully into purpose and meaning that goes beyond their egoic neuroticisms in order to feel a sense of peak human experience.

So really, it's both: the individual must be empowered before the collective can make empowered moves. However, it seems that a small group of people are the main obstacle to this balance, and I'm not sure how to reconcile that. If you kill them, they will just be replaced with someone else. If you invent a system that redistributes power, someone will just end up gaming the system. If you willingly give the "most qualified" people all the power, they eventually get corrupted by it. It seems that with every cycle, humanity learns very little. We repeat it over and over again. Even my desire to be a helper... how many helpers have there been in human history? The roles are the same but the actors change. And it seems like every choice one COULD make to make this better, is a choice that has already been done ad infinitum before in history. It's a recursive error that repeats forever. Are we permanently flawed as a species or are we evolving into the answers?

How do I get off this merry-go-round, or can I? Or do I resign myself to the functions, talents and limits of my nature, and simply live those out, knowing that it's all been done before?

 

[Vastness]

Reigning this in, and bringing it back to just myself, I wonder what my role could be. My nature seems to be a helper, one who is of service, one who wants to see people reach their potential and be better tomorrow than they are today (however they define that), and do no harm. Yet in doing this, I realize that I must choose to have no goal, because there is no "end point". I could help build a utopia and it could be obliterated tomorrow, by selfish humans, by a natural event, or something else.

The lack of a guaranteed end point, I do not believe is something unique to the goal of helping to build a utopia, or any other altruistic and lofty ambition. Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of any endeavour any individual might choose to undertake, but it doesn't devalue pursuing that goal regardless of whether or not you will achieve it.

I kind of side with the views of Kierkegaard who was the opposite of Marx in that he believed all empowerment lies with the individual, and the aggregate of a society full of empowered individuals leads to a better world. Marx believed the opposite which was that collective will influenced everything. He envisioned an egalitarian end game where nobody was in charge and workers own the means of production. I believe if everyone allowed themselves to face the existentialism that we all feel at some point in our lives - instead of filling our lives with pointless crap in order to distract ourselves - we could walk through it and come out the other end more self-actualized. Victor Frankl said that self-actualization is self-transcendence, meaning that one must invest themselves fully into purpose and meaning that goes beyond their egoic neuroticisms in order to feel a sense of peak human experience.

So really, it's both: the individual must be empowered before the collective can make empowered moves.

Honestly I'm not too familiar with with the work of either Kierkegaard of Marx except in the most vague sense, but reading that it did strike me that yes - both are somewhat correct. The collective is most powerful when every individual is also powerful. Such a situation is not always feasible, of course, arguably it may never be achievable, but it's definitely more attainable now (IMO) than it was in the murky past in the times of highly centralised monarchies ruling disparate groups of struggling peasants. The effect of modern technological advances - specifically those facilitating rapid communication and dissemination of information, ie, the internet - I would argue has made the individual today more empowered than at any other point in human history. As such, we're also in a position as a species to make bold strides as a collective, as our ability to organise vast groups of individuals as a cohesive unit towards a common goal is - at least theoretically - at a level never before seen in the history of our species or any other. We already see this to some extent with modern nation states and superpowers, but we haven't quite got to the point of organising ourselves on a global scale. Maybe this is not possible and there's an upper limit to the ability of humankind to form large groups of individuals working towards a collective goal before deep seated maladaptive biases kick in that evolution has not had time to overcome, but we don't know this yet, so IMO, it's worth working on the assumption that utopia is an attainable outcome - if we can iterate towards the right social structure, towards the right cultural mindset, that we can overcome the self-destructive tendencies that, no doubt, are a part of our biology, a product as it is of a violent, chaotic natural world where evolution has selected for competitive, tribal, kill-or-be-killed instincts.

However, it seems that a small group of people are the main obstacle to this balance, and I'm not sure how to reconcile that. If you kill them, they will just be replaced with someone else. If you invent a system that redistributes power, someone will just end up gaming the system. If you willingly give the "most qualified" people all the power, they eventually get corrupted by it. It seems that with every cycle, humanity learns very little. We repeat it over and over again. Even my desire to be a helper... how many helpers have there been in human history? The roles are the same but the actors change. And it seems like every choice one COULD make to make this better, is a choice that has already been done ad infinitum before in history. It's a recursive error that repeats forever. Are we permanently flawed as a species or are we evolving into the answers?

Disagree that a small group of people are the main obstacle to this balance, this is a massive oversimplification in my view. These people you are referring to didn't come out of thin air - they're the extreme edge on a scale of variations of human psychology which is as much a product of the human psychology that's evolved into us, and the human culture that all of us contribute to, as we are.

Also disagree with your somewhat pessimistic assumptions, and the idea that you have any real basis for making these assumptions. Human history is not infinite, and the future is largely unknown. Yeah, there have been a ton of helpers in human history, and yeah, the same patterns have repeated often, but it's just as true that every time the pattern repeats it changes very slightly - imperceptibly, perhaps, but enough that over long enough timescales even the tiniest of changes can make a massive difference to the eventual endpoint, whatever that may be. Every species eventually goes extinct - as far as we can tell. But in actual fact, the extinction of a species has never been a clear-cut ending of any kind. Even when that species is the end of a lineage with no surviving relatives on the evolutionary tree, it will be survived by the descendants of an earlier shared ancestor, and the existence of that species still had value as an evolutionary effort to iterate against the oppressive forces of a harsh and incomprehensible universe which - for the most part - appears to be the enemy of biological life, and is largely inhospitable to biological life, despite acting as a cosmic womb for this same life.

There has never been a technological species like humanity on Earth - perhaps this gives us better odds to overcome our destructive instincts. But even if it doesn't, and the biosphere of Earth completely dies out - life on Earth will (presumably) be survived by the descendants of the same inanimate, pre-biological processes that allowed life to evolve here - and the efforts of humankind to survive - and individual humans to survive, and to protect the future of human civilisation - will always have value as one of many iterations to protect the strange light of biological life in a dark, vast cosmos. The fact that a single iteration of a given effort fails does not devalue that iteration, because success is typically an evolutionary and statistical process, and every failed attempt is a step closer to finally achieving the goal. Of course, the "goal", when it comes to the existence of a biological species is somewhat unclear, and maybe the very concept of such has no meaning outside our narrow sphere of consciousness - but until we have a good reason to stop searching for this meaning, it makes sense to keep pursuing it - but we should keep in mind that even if we fail collectively - this is not really a failure, for every species whether it persists or not is just a single unit of a much larger, almost inconceivably vast undertaking - that of life itself. The same is true for every individual - whether or not we fail to turn the tide of destruction, from forces both external from the wider universe and internal, evolved into us, once beneficial adaptations that helped us survive - now psychological tendencies that pose a real danger to us - the fact that we don't know whether or not we will succeed, whether humanity will succeed, isn't a reason not to try.

How do I get off this merry-go-round, or can I? Or do I resign myself to the functions, talents and limits of my nature, and simply live those out, knowing that it's all been done before?

So just to reiterate, you don't actually know that this has all been done before, and in fact, it hasn't. It's happened similarly before, for sure - but not exactly the same, and maybe this time round it will be different. You seem to want some kind of certainty of the worth of your actions that, IMO, is just not realistic to expect. You can't get off the merry-go-round of uncertainty as to your role in the chaos of being, but rather than "resign" yourself to this, I would say a preferable option is to find a way to accept it. Acceptance is the primary, most fundamental tool that humans have to deal with reality, and uncertainty and doubt is a part of that reality. If you can't learn to accept it, you'll forever be struggling against it.

 

[Gormur]

I guess there wasn't a question in your starting post, so I'll just tell you what I feel like

Being disappointed in others doesn't happen because I always pay attention. No doubt I have moments of clarity where I know exactly what's going on and even sometimes things that are about to happen. You could call it wisdom. I call it not caring

That might sound negative but if it is, then it works because I'm not a negative person. The world can be like that and I just adapt to it

My problem is waking up, because I enjoy sleep more than life. Even though I sleep 5 or 6 hours, I like being alone asleep more than interacting with a bunch of strangers. I don't mind talking here as I know what it's for but live interactions for me get tedious really fast. I'm the most patient person in real life but I just get physically tired after a while

Hopefully that makes sense