Feeling pretty doomy right now, lemme hear some positives! Generally positive, specific to your life, whatever you got. What’s something good going on that makes the future seem a bit brighter for you?
Feeling pretty doomy right now, lemme hear some positives! Generally positive, specific to your life, whatever you got. What’s something good going on that makes the future seem a bit brighter for you?
Absent philosophical training, your enjoyment of life greatly depends on your personal circumstance.
Existential philosophy is largely (though not exclusively) the domain of comfortable people for whom the material and judicial rewards of the afterlife are unnecessary.
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While “are things better now / what will the future bring” are ultimately matters of opinion, I find the majority of people tend to believe whatever brings them the most comfort, even when those beliefs are logically nonsensical. From that emotional center, several fallacies are generated.
The Just World Fallacy, for instance, grants people living in an oppressive system the peace to believe they in a just world, where Good People get richer and Bad People get poorer, but at the cost of acknowledging the system; this emotional need is so intense that people who suffer the most from oppressive systems are the most invested in ignoring the problems it generates.
In the past, the Just World answered the obvious inequities of reality with Messiahinism and then with personal salvation (or punishment) in the afterlife. Today, we’ve replaced that with the The Myth of Progress, letting people believe they are on a boat of social evolution that leads to first technological, then social, then finally moral perfection of the human species (perhaps ending in Rodenberry’s vision of luxury space communism). Honestly, what is the difference between the early Christian belief that the Messiah will return and create a Heaven on Earth and the belief that eventually replicators will create a post-scarcity society?
Agency is another determinative emotional need. People need to feel in control of their lives. It’s a relative of the Just World fallacy, but it is its own motor. Manifestation is ultimate expression of this–a bedrock belief that everything that happens to us, happens to us because we are THINKING about it. Lost your job? You must have been worried about getting fired. Win the lottery? You must have believed you could win! Can’t find romance? It’s because you doubt yourself. Everything in life is ultimately your fault, including not being a billionaire, which is possible for everyone if they just believe in themselves.
This absolutely ridiculous idea, and several like it, catapulted Oprah Winfrey to super-billionaire status, sold 20 million copies of the secret, is the animus behind vision boards, etc.
I’m not really trying to convince you of anything, because there is no reasoning about this. My two going theories are: we see what we see (or believe what we believe) when we’re ready to see it (or ready to believe it). For instance, people don’t become atheist the first time they hear an argument against the extistence of God, but when they’re emotionally ready to live without God.
The other theory is that I’m just following the same programming as everyone else, looking for reason to emotionally comfort me. Maybe it suits me better to think the world is a miserable place only because the alternative is to think that there is something deeply BROKEN and WRONG with me given where I am in life right now. Maybe I don’t want to believe in my own agency to control my future because I’m so tired of trying and failing and I just don’t have any strength left for the struggle.
But regardless of what the truth is or is not, regardless of what is opinion and reality, we’re currently stuck on the ball of dirt for however long, and it is up to us to make the best of it, however we see it. I agree with you there.
I think we are on 2 sides of the same coin. Although we have very different views and outlooks, I feel a lot of what you said has truth to it, albeit we are both giving our views and opinions and I honestly don’t believe either of us is correct, just different.
Nice chatting to you 👍 and wish you the best.