i wonder what y'all have to say about this
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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me_irl
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When I was 6, I told my mother I hated her and she threw away my entire Pokémon card collection. I think my hatred was probably justified. (I had a holo Charizard, bitch could have sold it for grocery money.)
My parents treated me mostly fine, though I'm fairly certain with my father it was fairly conditional, I was just careful to not get on his bad side. Now not so much.
Even with acceptable or even good parents, I still find everything to be fairly existentially unpleasant. I resent being born.
That said, despite that I still love my mom. Shes a good person despite having given birth to me.
Have you read Emil Cioran? He’s got a lot of interesting thoughts along that existential pessimism.
I've not read any of his work but I am aware of him. I suspect that I'd likely agree with him on a lot. But I've also read that reading his work would probably make me even more depressed about being born.
I tried Camus’s “nothing matters so make up a meaning you like and run with it” for a while, which I think works for one’s first few existential crises.
The clumsy solution I’ve stumbled on is viewing this all as a war against entropy and evil. Anger is a feeling that has escape velocity, that even if one feels crushed by the despair inherent to being human, you can at least pick up your “weapons” and keep tumbling on.
There’s some positives in the experiences and small pleasures, like art and discussion and philosophy, but it’s mostly a fight.
I think Planescape: Torment explores a lot of these ideas in a way that’s a bit less “despairingly” nihilistic. The “best” ending means the Nameless One spending eternity in hell fighting in a pointless brutal war - but it feels correct, it has meaning.