does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

when some people get depressed, they comment on how random and pointless the world is and cite it as a reason for their unhappiness, however I feel that this is never the case. I think that in reality it is something else that is bothering them, and that they project this out by calling the world meaningless.

Lets say they are a poker player and they go on a downswing. Now the world sucks and is pointless.

If they go on an upswing, the world is just as pointless, yet now they are happy.

I honestly believe that our wiring makes us incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that life is largely pointless, but it doesn't affect me at all. Regardless of whether i am happy--almost all of the time-- or depressed i still feel that the world is pointless. It doesn't really make sense in evolutionary terms to care about the pointlessness of our existence as then we might question our existence and start killing ourselves at a pretty fast rate, thus it makes sense that we are relatively incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

As i side note something i was thinking today actually was that i actually go as far as to derive meaning from the pointlessness of life. It's kind of funny how seriously we take our lives when we are basically pointless blips that mean nothing, and one can only laugh at the absurdity of it.

ps. i think i stole that or atleast derived that from Camus, but i don't remember.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

If this topic interests you, read some Nietzsche, he has a lot to say about this.

Through the reasoning of a depressed person, happy people are too distracted to realize what's really going on, and only when happiness is taken away can they see "reality."

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

I sometimes used to feel the same way, and then I got married and had a kid, and now it makes a little more sense.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

sam, honest question. the thought of our sole purpose in life being to procreate often depresses me. is this what you are talking about, or something different?

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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sam, honest question. the thought of our sole purpose in life being to procreate often depresses me. is this what you are talking about, or something different?

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That's it.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

I believe the feelings of "hopelessness" and "pointlessness" are more a symptom of depression rather than the cause. The first question a shrink or psychologist will often ask to try to determine if a patient is depressed is if he or she feels this way. I have been depressed at times, sometimes for a reason like death or for no reason at all, and I always come back to this notion. I can imagine that having kids is the #1 biggest cure for these feelings.

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I honestly believe that our wiring makes us incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

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I think this is an easy conclusion to come to for a normal person, but I think this is exactly the sort of assumption that drives depressed people crazy. They don't see this "hope floats" attitude as being obvious at all.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

the pointlessness of life is the GOOD thing about it

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

To me, life is not about making money and 'getting ahead' in life. Sure that makes things easier, but it's not what I live for.

I live for the interactions between myself and my family and close friends. Those moments that happen every day that a lot of people take for granted are why I enjoy life so much. I don't think I could continue living if my family was gone.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

I have come to terms with the pointlessness of my life. It does not bother me a bit.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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I honestly believe that our wiring makes us incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

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I think this is an easy conclusion to come to for a normal person, but I think this is exactly the sort of assumption that drives depressed people crazy. They don't see this "hope floats" attitude as being obvious at all.

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Can you expand on this FFK? I dont really get what you are saying.

edit: If you are saying that it is hard for depressed people to realize that the 'pointlessness' of life is not what is really making them unhappy, then I agree with you.

Poker has actually made this clear to me because I have had so much variance and Ive noticed that my personality changes depending on how well I am doing.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

For those seeking the "meaning of life", just look around in nature. What is the point of any animal's existence? The obvious answer is survival of oneself and one's species.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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I honestly believe that our wiring makes us incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is an easy conclusion to come to for a normal person, but I think this is exactly the sort of assumption that drives depressed people crazy. They don't see this "hope floats" attitude as being obvious at all.

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Can you expand on this FFK? I dont really get what you are saying.

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Sorry, that wasn't clear. I interpreted your comment to mean that our wiring to survive, thrive, and procreate keeps us from dwelling on and fully comprehending the finite qualities of life. I was trying to say that I think that's true of most people, but depressed people lack these traits and instead feel that they perceive life and impending death much more realistically than "happy" people. They don't get how the rest of us march on with such a chipper attitude despite how pointless it all really is... to them that "wiring" makes no sense.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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For those seeking the "meaning of life", just look around in nature. What is the point of any animal's existence? The obvious answer is survival of oneself and one's species.

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This kind of thinking leads to the belief that evolution has a purpose, such as improving species or something. I contend that animals don't have a point, but they just happen to exist because they can.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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For those seeking the "meaning of life", just look around in nature. What is the point of any animal's existence? The obvious answer is survival of oneself and one's species.

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This kind of thinking leads to the belief that evolution has a purpose, such as improving species or something. I contend that animals don't have a point, but they just happen to exist because they can.

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What compels wild animals to have sex?

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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For those seeking the "meaning of life", just look around in nature. What is the point of any animal's existence? The obvious answer is survival of oneself and one's species.

[/ QUOTE ]

This kind of thinking leads to the belief that evolution has a purpose, such as improving species or something. I contend that animals don't have a point, but they just happen to exist because they can.

[/ QUOTE ]

What compels wild animals to have sex?

[/ QUOTE ]

when they have sex, little animals get made. then we can see the little animals bone each other and ask questions about it. there are plenty of animals that never have sex, we don't talk or think about them very often.

our world is made up of things that procreate.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

I can't make sense of little kids who with cancer. There's nothing fair or meaningful about it and the idea itself that there is no higher/bigger purpose of it, that it's just a random/pointless occurrence, depresses me.

But, I'm pretty sure that there isn't "something else" that is bothering me. It's pretty much exactly that pointlessness.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

[ QUOTE ]
For those seeking the "meaning of life", just look around in nature. What is the point of any animal's existence? The obvious answer is survival of oneself and one's species.

[/ QUOTE ]

I actually don't think this is true. I think it's the product of the 20th century paradigm. In the last 100 years we discovered a lot about genetics and evolution and stuff and now we think it's the meaning of everything? Who says?

Yes, for millions of years the average entity has become more and more optimized to survive and procreate. But who says this is the meaning of life for you in particular? The paradigm we're all born in says that if you don't prioritize survival and procreation, you're a defective entity. But this is like me saying that the world revolves around baseball, and mathematicians are nothing but defective baseball players. Or a better analogy is how big guys view everyone in terms of whether they can be taken in a fight. If you have different priorities, you have different priorities. They can have meaning the same as anything else.

(Note that I'm not trying to make an argument about having children. I actually want to have children. But all I'm saying is that having children is as meaningful/unmeaningful as anything else, don't let what they told you in some biology classes make it seem any more or less meaningful. Biology has not explained consciousness and since it can't do that, it doesn't have much to say on meaning of life.)

Anywho, in absence of evidence one way or the other, I don't believe in pointlessness. I choose to believe that everything has meaning.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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I honestly believe that our wiring makes us incapable of caring about the pointlessness of our existance.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is an easy conclusion to come to for a normal person, but I think this is exactly the sort of assumption that drives depressed people crazy. They don't see this "hope floats" attitude as being obvious at all.

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Can you expand on this FFK? I dont really get what you are saying.

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Sorry, that wasn't clear. I interpreted your comment to mean that our wiring to survive, thrive, and procreate keeps us from dwelling on and fully comprehending the finite qualities of life. I was trying to say that I think that's true of most people, but depressed people lack these traits and instead feel that they perceive life and impending death much more realistically than "happy" people. They don't get how the rest of us march on with such a chipper attitude despite how pointless it all really is... to them that "wiring" makes no sense.

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Good point - one thing I can not stand (this is probably in large part because my father is a psychiatrist who treats very unstable patients, and I heard alot about this growing up) is when people blithely assume that those who struggle, or are depressed, or whatever, are just "not trying" or something. They are just wired differently.

But KKF's basically correct, imo, in that for most people, our genetic hardwiring, and our base motivations, tend to preclude the view that life is pointless.

-Al

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Like anyone else who is reading this, I am well off compared to the rest of the world's standards. I have the luxury of having all I need to live healthy, which allows me to dwell on my pointlessness. People who struggle to eat and have shelter don't think about it.

Maybe our bodies aren't wired to have things this easy, so we have trouble dealing with it and it results in things like depression.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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What compels wild animals to have sex?

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when they have sex, little animals get made. then we can see the little animals bone each other and ask questions about it. there are plenty of animals that never have sex, we don't talk or think about them very often.

our world is made up of things that procreate.

[/ QUOTE ]

Try "procreating" without eating.

There are plenty of animals that never eat. They die and we don't talk or think about them very often. Our world is made up of things that eat. Therefore the meaning of life is eating.

QED, bitches!

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

The void of purpose gives us a hell of a lot of room to create whatever purpose we want. They have a word for people who can't handle that: communists.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

There's nothing about evolution that gives life meaning.

It's a process that favors certain ways of organizing matter over others, but ultimately it's as doomed to failure as any other process that opposes entropy.

However, we are animals and our brains are wired so that we experience things that enhance our survival or reproductive prospects as pleasurable. So having kids provides us with some measure of pleasure - we satisfy our biological imperative.

There's no meaning in any of that though. And yeah, the pointlessness of it all does bother me, irrespective of whether I'm happy or sad.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Life does not have a reason, save for what you give it

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Evolution is an explanation for life, not necessarily a meaning. Survival and procreation have been the driving forces of people for most of our species' existence, but over the last thousands of years this has become trivial.

The vast majority of people believe whatever is most convenient to them. For most people, this is religion. Whenever I read a conversion story, like Barak Obama's, I am always somewhat appalled at how blatant this is. The thing is, this applies to many agnostic atheists too at least to some extent, and I think this is perfectly fine and ok. By far the largest example of this in my opinion is how most people who view life as meaningless (in an absolute sense) view morals, but this is a different debate.

I bring this up because if life really is meaningless, than the fact that it is meaningless is somewhat irrelevant. If there is nothing greater to live for, we should just do whatever we want. But this IS what people do. People add meaning because it make their lives more enjoyable and tolerable, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I think a lot of the opinions in this thread are correct, in that ideally meaningless shouldn't bother people. But it bothers me, and it always has, and it has contributed to my depression whether people like KKF believe me or not. I often wish I could just believe in some religion, or that I enjoyed life in and of itself enough not to worry about meaning at all (which I think is the case for most of the people in this thread, and the true heart of the "people just say this because they are depressed" comment, which is a half-truth). But this is not the case for me, and I will continue to struggle with meaninglessness, probably until I overcome depression and/or have kids.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Thats why drugs are on earth

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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the pointlessness of life is the GOOD thing about it

[/ QUOTE ]


I agree. life is fairly pointless so there is no use in being reserved or timid etc, because what are the consequences? not much imo.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

also remember that a human life span was prob around 30 years before modern medicine. im pretty sure i wouldn't have time to be depressed if i had to grow up, have kids and take care of them until adulthood in a truncated timeline.

we are "wired" to be dead before this becomes an issue.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

The fact that I essentially believe life to be "pointless" (e.g. I just want to feel good while I'm waiting to die) does not bother me at all; it is part of my world-view.

The actual pointlessness of my current surroundings bothers me, however, and I'm going to do something about it (e.g. find a new dayjob, take a shot at my ebiz).

On a tangent related to the OP: I think it's interesting how humans tend to project their current feelings (even fleeting ones) onto a much larger scale of their whole life ("why do I ALWAYS feel like this???"), when actually, it's just a small emotional downswing on a graph that probably looks like a poker graph.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

If anything, it's the pointlessness of my life that makes me happy.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

[ QUOTE ]
also remember that a human life span was prob around 30 years before modern medicine. im pretty sure i wouldn't have time to be depressed if i had to grow up, have kids and take care of them until adulthood in a truncated timeline.

we are "wired" to be dead before this becomes an issue.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is not the case. The increase in life expectancy is primarily due to reduction in infant and child mortality, not expanding the life span of adults.

A 15-year old in the Upper Paleolithic Era is estimated to have had a life expectancy of 54.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_life_span

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Sure am glad there is no nonprimal 'goal' in life. 50 years isn't a whole lot of time to accomplish anything monumental, especially with 6.6billion other people aiming to do the same.

Hedonism and kindness.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Hey "Dire",

Lame.

The competition doesn't limit you. Look at [censored] 2+2: we learn from each other for mutual benefit.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

"I think a lot of the opinions in this thread are correct, in that ideally meaningless shouldn't bother people. But it bothers me, and it always has, and it has contributed to my depression whether people like KKF believe me or not."

ive felt this way in the past, but i have come to believe that it is really my mortality that bothers me. If I knew that I would live forever, I think much of this anxiety would be resolved.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

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ive felt this way in the past, but i have come to believe that it is really my mortality that bothers me. If I knew that I would live forever, I think much of this anxiety would be resolved.

[/ QUOTE ]

I figured that you were going to arrive here. You're gonna die, dude. Live with it.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Like anyone else who is reading this, I am well off compared to the rest of the world's standards. I have the luxury of having all I need to live healthy, which allows me to dwell on my pointlessness. People who struggle to eat and have shelter don't think about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

ARE
YOU
SERIOUS
?

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

what? Yeah i was being serious.

If you are hungry, you are thinking where is food. Once finding food is not a problem, then you can start thinking what is my purpose here.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

man, this is what all the cool kids think about isn't it.

i've spent plenty of time mediating on this, and i've come to this conclusion.

do what you want that makes you happy; life really is too short. so, the ultimate goal is family, obviously. but for now, i'm young, i'll have a good time. i really enjoy sitting there and doing nothing and watching movies. i enjoy talking to my friends and laughing and waking up at weird times and not sleeping for days and drinking milk shakes, etc. i enjoy all kinds of [censored], and that is what i do.

i don't really care to make a difference. i've gotten very good at poker and i've written some strat and some people probably think "man, aejones knows what he's talkin about he's made me a better poker player" and that allows me to sleep at night. and some people think "man that aejones sure is a tool, i hope i'm never like him" and that allows me to sleep even deeper at night.

do what you like and like what you do, you can only do this [censored] once.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

Is nobody on 2+2 religious? I'm not at all, but it seems like someone should be having a field day with this thread.

Re: does the pointlessness of your life bother you?
 

One way of expressing the framework of reality is to first see that all things can immediately be reduced to the Big Three, consisting of I, We and It. There are obviously things in this world, atoms, molecules, cells, planets, etc. which are made up of some stuff and have at least some substance to them which we can see, hear, feel, smell and so forth. The nature of things is hierarchical, that is, some things are more basic than others, a tree is made of cells, cells are made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, and so on. One crucial feature of things is that higher order constructions always transcend and include their constituent parts. Trees have attributes that no cell has, cells have attributes that no molecule has, yet each higher thing includes the lower, and could not exist without is parts. This is the It.

The I is the self, the interior reality which can never truly be shared. Often consciousness is reduced to the workings of the brain, the neurons, synapses, brain wave function, but no matter how sophisticated an instrument may be devised to measure the activity of the brain, no one can ever measure it in such a way as to tell you what I am thinking. To participate in that reality, you have to ask me, and I have to tell you truthfully. Consciousness includes the brain, but it also transcends it and has attributes that its constituent parts could never have. Consciousness also has hierarchical (or holarchical) reality, as some levels of consciousness transcend and include others. One can easily see an evolution of self-awareness that is virtually non-existent in, say, a shrimp (though some researchers posit that even cells have some level of consciousness!) through mammals, primates, and human beings. Human beings themselves have an ontogeny of consciousness, from the sucking and grasping instincts of an infant through the entirely egotistical early childhood years, when the mind cannot yet take the place of the other, where the world is not yet disassociated from the self, through that early differentiation, concrete operational thought, and rationality. Researchers in this field such as Piaget tend to stop with rational thought, but if we continue to higher levels of consciousness we can see that even higher states are possible, which include rationality but also make use of higher mystical or spiritual states typified by the Four Jnanas of Buddhism, the spiritual ecstasies of Meister Eckhart and St. Theresa of Avila, and so on, right up to the non-dual states related by Ramana Maharshi, Dzogchen, and Plotinus. This is the I.

The We is the interior collective, or the parts of ourselves that we share as human beings, culture, society, relationships. As we grow and experience higher internal states, we are able to communicate and commune with others in deeper ways. Societies emerge from mythic-arcaic tribes through nation-states, democratic republics, and so forth. We all see the shortcomings of our societies today, many people have not developed their consciousness to the point where a shared vision of how to interact with each other in loving, respectful, supportive ways is possible. The only solution is to increase our perception of these deficiencies, and work to improve our own level of consciousness and that of those with whom we interact. This is the We, and from our perspective, this is the purpose of life.


Recommended Reading
A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber