does the pointlessness of your life bother you?

[WhoIam]

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Thats why drugs are on earth

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In all seriousness, take some mushrooms or LSD and these questions won't bother you anymore. Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" would be a good introduction from someone who isn't a drug-crazed freak.

[guids]

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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.

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ARE
YOU
SERIOUS
?

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check out maslow's heirarchy of needs

[emon87]

I don't think life is pointless at all.

[amplify]

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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
?

[/ QUOTE ]

check out maslow's heirarchy of needs

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Of course. Why did I bother spending 25 minutes writing that long ass post when I could have just said, "Check out Ken Wilber's books yo"

[OrigamiSensei]

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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.

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I wasn't all that sure anybody wanted us butting in. What I can do is state clearly my own personal experience which is that my relationship with God is the cornerstone of meaning in my life and happiness flows through that relationship. I can't put it any more simply than that.

King Solomon's book of Ecclesiastes is a powerful take on the meaningless of existence without God. He had it all:
- Sex (1000 wives and countless concubines, many of them among the most beautiful women in the world)
- Drugs (mostly alcohol is referred to, but I'm sure he had access to any known drug of the time that existed)
- Money and possessions (he was the richest man in the world at the time)
- Power (he was the most powerful king in the world at the time)
- Entertainment (musicians, jugglers, storytellers, etc.)

and whatever else the richest, most powerful man on earth could come up with as ideas to make himself happy without taking God into account. Pretty much whatever he wanted he could snap his fingers and get. He clearly states that all attempts to get rid of the gnawing void through the usual worldly methods were unsuccessful. "Vanity", he says, "all is vanity". Today vanity is often taken to mean egoism or arrogance but the meaning of the word is actually emptiness or pointlessness. In conclusion he asserts the only meaning in life comes through God. It's a powerful warning tale about the inability of the things we try so hard to get not giving the desired results. To be sure those things can bring temporary happiness or distraction but in the end they don't satisfy.

[amplify]

That's a nice post Origami.

[Zarathustra]

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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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The neocortex of the human brain has become such a large and advanced entity that it can become alienated from its older and more simplistic counterparts, namely the areas regulating sexual and other impulse drives. Early philosophers (Plato among them) were certain that the meaning of life and path to happiness could be teased out entirely using rational thought and logic. Countless miserable souls have relied entirely on rational thought in forming their perceptions on life and it often leaves them feeling empty and nihilistic. Postmodern philosophers and psychologists alike have come to realize that to be happy a human simply can not neglect their primal desire to control their environment and the stimuli around them. Try spending even a day in a dark room with water and some bland sustenance. Regardless of how much you rationalize your condition, the absence of high intensity stimulations (especially sunlight) will begin to incur physiological changes in the brain that will cause a marked drop in your "happy" chemicals and if prolonged long enough, will make you clinically depressed.

The primal reward system relies on chemical transmitters to potentially reward anything you do, making actions and stimuli seem meaningful and worthwhile. The importance is that without these activities seeming perceptively valuable via the reward system, they almost certainly can not be rationalized as valuable.

It can become a vicious cycle because as you refrain from stimulating/fueling these systems they lose their efficiency. As a poker player wins more than their accustomed to, the brain abstractly associates the wins with future positive stimuli and an influx of dopamine follows to reward the behavior. Most importantly, as the reward system gears up it rewards other activities more intensely than before and life just seems more meaningful.
It is no coincidence that as losses mount and depression intensifies, meaning and value seem to fade. The reward system still fires, but sometimes so weakly that a person feels activities simply aren't "worth it" anymore. They were only ever worth it because they produced a concomitant physiological reward that rational thought alone can not supply. Rational thinking can cue the reward system and make plans to call on it, but without the approval of this much older core, it alone has no reference point for producing potent perceptions of meaning.

[Chaostracize]

I have so much to say about this, but it's hard to put into words.

Essentially I think there is no such thing as "purpose" when it comes to such a topic as humanity, or more accurately, existence. To say there is a purpose is saying that we are here for a reason, to accomplish something, and I think that's a straw man. I think when you realize that there is no purpose to life, you begin to understand it as a game with an infinite amount of ways to play. To some this can be incredibly exciting, to others it can be horrifying.

I think we're at an age of thought where we understand how and why religion developed. Before the science we have today we could delude ourselves into believing that, yes, there was a "purpose" or raison d'etre. Now that we're beginning to understand that we can't pawn off our own mental incapabilities on supernatural forces, we are left with two choices. Embrace the fact that we will almost certainly never understand ourselves, but come as close as possible; or falter under this weight and either, and I hate to be cynical here, but [censored] it, succumb to religion or be a depressed lump.

I don't think there are too many degrees of gray here, and if there are it's because those in the "gray" section just haven't put too much though in the matter.

I would refute the OPs statement that we are incapable of caring about the pointlessness of of our existence, rather I would say that everything we do revolves around the pointlessness of our existence because we care about it so much.

I have so much more to say but I'm afraid this would become a rant.

[HedonismBot]

I think probably depression or some sort of chemical imbalance causes the thought of "my life is pointless" to seem a lot more devastating than when you are normal or balanced.

So its not that (life is pointless) -------> depression
but rather depression ------> life is pointless ------> increased depression

[SNOWBALL]

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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.



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ARE
YOU
SERIOUS
?



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check out maslow's heirarchy of needs

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Yeah I've known about that since I was like 15, and used to just simply believe it because it was such an exciting and interesting model. However, it's an unproven model, and it's been around for more than 60 years without being proven. The great great majority of psychology is awful pseudoscience, and hardly above the level of a new age bestseller. Only within the last couple of decades has psychology broken away from cultish devotions to people like Jung, Freud, etc, and moves forward into techniques rooted in statistics, and trial-and-error.

Maslow's methodology for his pyramid is based on almost no evidence at all. In fact, he utterly neglected to study poor people at all.

"Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theory contended that as humans meet 'basic needs', they seek to satisfy successively 'higher needs' that occupy a set hierarchy. Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."[1] Maslow also studied one percent of the healthiest college student population. While Maslow's theory was regarded as an improvement over previous theories of personality and motivation, it had its detractors. For example, in their extensive review of research that is dependent on Maslow's theory, Wabha and Bridwell (1976) found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described, or even for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all."


link

So, do you have a point to make, or are you just totally comfortable assuming you *know* what goes on in the head of every one of the billion people on earth who live on less than one dollar per day. Well?