• Existence begins before any choice or agreement can be made by the person being born. Bringing consciousness into the world without consent is an act of non-consensual burden.

• Life exposes individuals automatically to physical decay, pain, disease, emotional distress, and eventual death.

• People inherit unequal starting conditions—in terms of health, wealth, intelligence, trauma, and societal status—in the struggle of living.

• Human existence requires constant, exhausting effort just to maintain well-being (e.g., eating, working, staying healthy). Pain happens naturally, while pleasure requires deliberate effort.

• From the moment of birth, humans are subjected to a continuous process of physical and mental decay.

• We are constantly exposed to natural disasters, diseases, and the actions of others, meaning we are permanently at risk of severe suffering.

Who like Ligotti? And John Gray?

I prefer generational wealth or not being born.

Because in case of job, if you are academicaly intelligent and pursue commercial courses like management or engineering, then only you will get good job with good pay.

In small scale buissness, the rate of raw materials are increasing and most of the time the rates of your product doesnt increase in that ratio. So your profit margin decreases.

There is no place for middle class people in this world.

What are your views ?

This is my “lifelong” goal desire and mission…

Failure of such will endanger my own mental health and lead me to being my own toxic harmful enemy to myself filled and crushed with personal suffering and hatred of how I am financially “stable” from a military retirement system yet my own siblings were unable and my own dad and mom believing capitalism is good but communism and socialism is bad.. (failing to acknowledge their governmental entities they reference profusely still represents capitalism at the top of each food chain restricting who can get what in the end… except for the top of the food chain which for them anything is allowed unless everyone underneath them)

As I write this (my utopia) or what do you call it?

My manifesto or whatever?

These are my objectives desires, wants, rants, and aspirations/dreams to see come into reality. Each failure or “inability” drives me closer and closer to reality of it never happening and questions of why life js worth living.

1. Successfully trading (making millions and billions of dollars/currencies able to change the society as a whole)
   a. Not because I enjoy trading. (It literally stresses me out and put my emotions in constant flux of up or down when I am right or wrong with my pattern recognition…)
   b. Not because I want money. (If I have something and someone else does not I want to just give it away at my own demise.. but same time knowing I can’t afford to do that either.)
   c. Not because I can afford the power money provides. (Because I truly believe I will ruin everything if left to my own discretion to control myself.)

2. Start establishing a large acreage of farmland that “does no tilling the soil (if it does then minimal at best for specific only reasons minimal), no pesticides, no fungicides, no herbicides, no cides “of any similarity”, and no synthetic man made fertilizers.. and just grow this larger and larger.
   a. I do not want to own (just greatly restrict what is causing harm to the soil and waterways reservoirs and such which in turn is harming the community water system costing more to filter this out which generally does not fully happen)
   b. I do not care about the cost this creates (my objective is to have all food organic high premium food quality for the lowest cost possible for the lowest income earners period reducing inflation and leveling out wage inequality) which if I can (or can get others to help the funding also) will take place.
   c. I do not believe GMO and related type corporations and companies care about the people or the farmers.. and will refuse to be bullied, harmed, and threatened by big corporations to use “their” blackmail and coercive tactics of intimidation like sneezing their plants pollen near my plants pollen (cross contamination leading to GMO tested proprietary technology unlawfully used claims) the same way a sick person spreads diseases and sicknesses as “proprietary” ownership abilities. I want to push their “GMO” COVID-19 agenda into the trash can similar category of “owning” the air with their plant’s pollen contamination.

3. I believe everyone should be paid livable wages not survival wages. Meaning:
   a. Everyone should be paid a pension
   b. Everyone should be provided FULL 100% free healthcare (including dental and optometry) this includes family members too.
   c. Every employee should have their own free vehicle with a fuel card (no restrictions or limitations to include maintenance and parts covered)
   d. Every employee should have their place of living owned (not rented) based upon their family size (to include when they grow in family either with grandparents and parents and children or just themselves with spouse..) meaning all those “apartments” will be purchased and converted to condos and similar duplexes triplexes and etc.
   e. Every employee will have 50 days of paid time off. (To also include paid time off.. to go towards town,, city, state, congressional, and etc. meetings to protest, emphasis, and etc. for situations that matter to them and the communities they are involved.)

4. I desire this to expand (eventually take over and convert other corporations into similar business models that offer this)
   a. I do not want to own, I want to shape and model this style of employment and production costs.
   b. I believe this will reduce healthcare costs and food costs.

5. If this is beneficial for human consumption then let’s concentrate next on livestock, cattle poultry, and etc. next same methodology.
   a. Same and similar methods and concepts.
   b. If able to push this enough “successfully” capitalism will be at the backdrop of everyone who wants more than others.

6. And “if” this is successful… then purchasing the hospital and all related health services should be provided next right?
   a. Again.. not to own, but to model and shape it properly.
   b. Because if healthy food, water, and proteins and air environment takes place.. (wouldn’t our health be affected much better?)

7. If this does not fix America (let alone the world if they follow same path and logic..)
   a. Hello?

This is my “utopia” I am in depression, anxiety, anger, suicidal thoughts over…

Because I fail to see it “becoming a reality” here and now.

And I need “other” swords to sharpen my own sword.

What am I missing?

Can this happen? (When will it happen?)

Tell me realistically how and why.

If not…

Then why should I not seek for death as the boot is placed over my neck and the hanging noose is getting wrapped tighter and tighter pushing me off that one last “final stability” grounding mechanism?

If I am alone in this “massive pursuit” feeling as if the bottom of the lowest valley seeking to attain to catch that unforeseen mountain goat up inside the mountain that I cannot even imagine seeing right now…

Why not constantly pursue in wanting a painful death..

A pile of tires soaked in fuel to start burning with me in the middle that I would start on my own? To die of suffocating heat and air impurities because of how I feel inside constantly?

One's lived experience warrants an overwhelmingly sufficient amount of evidence to conclude the disappointing nature of existence; that is, even the most accomplished and fervently fulfilled man strikes a most sorrowful sentiment of despair. This truth is abundantly clear to those who have sobered their mind to reality and grown wearisome to the excitements of youth, bearing a habitually haggard expression and discarding the trivial hallucinations of hope. Such despair can be envisioned as if each man is expressed in existence as a tattered tombstone formed tarnished out of wood, only for his introspective mind to catch aflame and strike a scorching decay upon his tethered totem pole. This image most accurately represents the true condition of all individuals, for we, as human beings existent, are as valuable as wood; that is, the significance of our very being is as dispensable as the lumber scorched before our eyes.

This valueless nature of man is fully realized in his reflective demeanor put on by the long waking moments of life, the ever-present plaguing pressure of time, and the perpetual provoking of man's ponderous mind. How ineptly does man's defense of innocence fall at the pounding prodding precipitous of nature? And with what end does this reach? For even the wisdom of experience cannot penetrate the perennially null condition present in personhood.

Furthermore, this reflective demeanor directly causes the darkened despair bequeathed into the domain of introspection, meaning that the awareness brought about through age and experience constitutes a void-full abyss of hope, only found within the realization of our futility. This can be more aptly understood through the illustration I presented before, for just as the totem pole represents the being of man, and the fire represents the realization of his nihility, so does the inevitable decay represent the inevitable loss of hope. This means that man's loss of hope is directly resultant from a realization of his vanity, for just as the widow mourns at the realization of her husband's demise, or a leader bereaves at the realized volume of fallen men, so does mankind bereave the realized invaluable nature of his being, and therefore constitutes the desolate despair of age.

By Elias Wagler

Most of the time I have heard self help gurus saying repeatedly that " life is beautiful ".

Positivity often forces people to pretend everything is perfect.

But in reality life is cold, unfair, messy, and incredibly painful.

Apparently, every thing in life that is living follows the path of conformity, the pleasure path...

Almost as if the living life is meant for the joy... the amusement... the pleasure...

Many pursue it, every day, every moment, escaping any way from idleness...

Many questions arise that what is it all about, questioning the reality of all of this...

where the answer seems to be right there, it's all about doing things that makes one contended, gratified, fulfilled and so on...

and if one being is deflected of all of it, it begins to become erratic and the all the instincts to chase the things that fulfill them... where the conflict occurs, but the conflict is other matter...

also, when being in the state of happiness or joyful, everything in life doesn't seem much complicated, even when the others sharing their miseries, they feel so simple to fix and so the happy state people deflect them off since they do not perceive it...

and vice versa, those in misery for that moment, can't fathom the happy state beings...

so all the chaos, the meanings, the abstractions, are for that one thing and only...

is it normal to be a pessimist?

We know we will die, we know all life will go extinct sooner or later, we know suffering is undesirable, we know that there is no observable objective value, we know that there exists no being before existing who benefits from being born and we know that none of these things can be 'solved' due to the nature of existence on this planet. These observations are staring us down since the day we are born, and they are extremely simple to conclude.

Maybe people don't know or live with active awareness, but ignorance doesn't change the consequences, and often such ignorance is an intentionally maintained effort because people are afraid to confront themselves and the world.

In face of all of this, people decide to behave with immense cruelty and narcissism, they continue reproducing without thought, they live without consideration for the consequences others face and they give out justifications for their behaviour they would never accept if they had to be the victim of their own treatment. And after that, they have the audacity to complain about any perceived injustice they face while they themselves perpertuate the oppression of those they have deemed morally lesser than them in a hierachal structure of exploitation.

This society is just absolutely insane. People wonder why things are so shit and complain about why they can't have nice things, but who will actually reflect and fucking do something when it comes at their expense?

The camera may be humanity’s greatest technological instrument of deception, not because the camera itself lies, but because it allows us to perform a version of ourselves for the world to see.

In a world where cameras are everywhere, and nearly every moment can be captured, shared, and consumed, there is seemingly always someone performing and someone watching. We have created a world in which the performance is constant and the audience never leaves.

And perhaps most unsettling is how readily we accept these performances as reality. We watch other people’s lives unfold through screens, rarely questioning how much of what we’re witnessing is genuine and how much has been carefully constructed for an audience.

But if everyone is performing and everyone is watching, how do we distinguish reality from performance?

On one side, a view on people on how they live so freely, so unaware of everything happening around them.

The attrocities, the broken system, corrupt leaders, the conflicts within themselves and others, people struggling with health, finances, unemployment, homelessness, loneliness, harsh climate, food contamination and so on and on...

All the struggle every...single...day for centuries and ages, and yet, most spend their lives as if none of it matters...

People spend their usual days, where each day is mostly the same, nothing unique, they apparently seem to be completely fine, chase their wants, and rarely look beyond their own centered way of thinking or their world.

Fascinating blissfully spending minds are at work every single day...

Absurdity...

There is other side:

Maybe it is what it is...

People... they are just trying to live their way of lives that has been learnt or passed on from their ancestors, chase happiness, and get through each day like it's what it is...

Maybe not thinking or questioning much about anything is how people stay happy and live their "human experiences" which is probably why most people are on this planet...

Maybe this is just how life works, and always has, and the mind, doing whatever its doing sometimes being rationale, maybe it's just futile...

All that glorious chatter that may feel like it making sense, pointing at how blatantly ignorant everyone are... all maybe nothing but noise, which better to be ignored

is there any other side?

From last 6 yrs it's like I am in every way possible and I feel that it happened due to a incident that developed PTSD and from that I became so naive ! Just want to know anyone can relate to this ?

It all comes down to luck. For example: I was born in a first world country as a white male. I have a home with a comfortable bed and air conditioning. I have videogames, movies, books, and the internet to distract myself with. I have parents who care about me and friends to spend time with. None of this is guaranteed.

The fact the so much of the world is suffering much greater than I is of no comfort to me. I am constantly aware that all the things that bring me comfort are not inherently good things, but rather that they are preventing or protecting me from further suffering. My home protects me from the weather and from potentially dangerous non-human animals. Games and movies prevent boredom. Friends and family prevent loneliness.

And most of these things take effort to obtain and to maintain. Suffering is easy, just sit and do nothing. You will soon feel the blistering heat or the sharp cold, intense hunger, loneliness, and unbearable pain as hungry animals and insects rip apart your flesh. I am extremely lucky that my suffering in these areas is relatively small.

Though I might have a life where, for now, my most urgent needs are easy to meet, there are ways in which I suffer more intensely. The boredom and monotony of daily life, the dread of going to work, the frustration of being around and interacting with other people, the lack of meaning, the sadness of loss, the fear of death, the melancholy of looking at the world.

People often scoff at someone complaining about something like a flat tire or a store being out of stock of our favorite snacks because they are first world problems. But is it not tragic that even when our urgent needs are met, the universe still finds ways to remind us of its indifference? In the abstract a flat tire seems like nothing compared to a starving child. But when we look at the felt experience, both cause suffering. One is certainly leagues more intense than the other. But is that not the problem? That no matter how "good" we have it, we still experience pain?

And such lives are extremely fragile. It can all fall apart very easily and very quickly.

The country I live in is crumbling and I and everyone around me can already feel the effects. And it will only get worse over the coming years through climate change and growing political tensions around the world.

Beyond all that, good things in life also cause suffering in others. Eating meat brings joy to most people, yet it causes suffering, exploitation, and death of non-human animals. Having a child creates meaning, yet now someone has been ripped out of the peaceful void to suffer in order to make someone happy. Landing a job prevents someone else from getting that job. Purchasing things we like creates demand and can cause inflation. Staying home to watch a movie can disappoint our friends. Now obviously we shouldn't feel guilty about such things (aside from eating meat or having a child) but the point remains that no matter how good something is, suffering comes along with it, whether directly or indirectly.

People say to appreciate what you have because you could always have it worse. I always see this sentiment as a lack of empathy or a massive cope.

years and years as an autistic outsider and a failed artist have lead me to view the world as an inescapable trap, a convoluted fantasy, constructed by the accretion of thousands of years of bizarre, compulsive behaviour. i hate cell phones; i hate AI; i hate cars; i hate industry; i hate concrete; i hate rent; i hate war; i hate disease; i hate jobs; i hate money; i hate that everywhere i look, wherever i go, there are fucking humans, and none of us know one another.

all we do is consume. there are too many of us by about a factor of a thousand, and the future - the completely artificial, fabricated human future, that appears nowhere else in nature, is bearing down on us, always, because some cunt owns everything. in fact, no, because we AGREE he owns everything! well enough. farming was the beginning of all this exorbitant living beyond our means. agriculture was the worst fucking mistake this species ever made.

i don’t want artistic success anymore. i don’t want to prosper by the standards of this indescribably unfair system of endless torture and punishment. i don’t want to elevate myself above the 210,000 homeless people in my city alone. i watch nature documentaries and i am jealous. i see creatures living the way they were designed for: no jobs; no financial obligation…just food, sleep, sex, rest - purpose. i don’t care how hard it is. it’s not hard like this is. it’s not fucking fantastical, illusory, meaningless, make believe, made-up hard.

none of this is real. i’m sick of all of it.

"I've read, heard, and invented a thousand solutions to my state of misery. They all failed and then I realized the misery is just fine." -Martin Butler

Does anyone here feel, that we are living a life, neither we asked for, and neither we are interested in living.

If you had to explain pessimism to someone without scaring them off and without using the word 'pessimism', how would you do it?

The concept of freedom exists only for subjects capable of conceptualising it. It does not exist for non-human animals, microbes, and so on and so forth.

For humanity, ego is what conceives freedom, but also makes absolute freedom universally, implacably unattainable.

Before you are born, freedom doesn't exist for you, not even as a concept. But as soon as you're old enough for introduction to the ego, your ego invents freedom, determines what it looks like, and says, 'Go get it'.

But your ego does something underneath that, too: it moves freedom's goalposts when you aren't looking.

And this is why humans die wanting – wanting more time, more money, more chances, more whatever.

And death is not freedom.

In death, all things are not and nothing is deficient; there is no freedom to have or lack of it to be felt.

What freedom means to me is to live with consciousness but without ego.

I could say, 'None of my problems are mine; nothing affects me; I want nothing and experience no lack of anything; and I am neither here nor there about whether this existence is a good thing'.

Suffice it to say, my definition and wanting of freedom are exactly why I can't ever have it.

I also stop myself short of being certain that egoless consciousness exists. In fact, I'm more certain that consciousness and ego are inseparable, maybe even one and the same. That consciousness can exist without ego is more wishful thinking on my part.

Moreover, without my ego, I would not be able to experience the preferability of not having it. But that would be fine by me. But then again, who's 'me'? The ego-founded person writing this post?

You can see how self-replicating this problem is.

Because we cannot escape our egos, we are prisoners.

Every single human being is a prisoner.

Which means that our prison is not so much a courtyard and four walls as it is our entire waking worlds.

The best we can do is paint as precise a picture of what freedom looks like to each of us, but even then, those pictures would fall short of being substantive.

Our ability to describe and attempt to manifest freedom only goes as far as our restrictive, ego-founded subjectivity lets us. In other words, even the wildest, most attractive conceptions of freedom are necessarily and knowably, yet non-experientially, insufficient.

Not sure how common this kind of story is, but I'm curious. I was raised to believe in the God of Abraham. Then I studied the Bible and Quran, and especially the internal inconsistencies in those scriptures combined with the total lack of any acceptable explanation for them from friends, family, and experts caused me to doubt and finally to basically lose my faith.

However, for the longest time, I was resistant to actually taking that step in my mind. For years, even decades, I thought to myself that I'd rather believe in a lie than face a meaningless universe. Yet those religious inconsistencies weren't going away, and when I sought out secular alternatives to the meaning given by religion (or attempted to be given at least) I felt I was just having optimism constantly shoved down my throat ("you can make your own meaning, it's liberating!" etc. etc.) Completely brushing aside all the suffering in the world, it seemed to me like these people were in some sense just as mistaken as the religious believers they sometimes denigrated.

Having just recently discovered pessimism as a cohesive philosophy, finally, I understand how I was lied to both by religious and by many secular "authorities." I won't even accuse them of maliciously lying to me -- it seems more like they were and are lying to themselves, keeping up a facade. I'd never mock anyone for taking refuge in religion or whatever secular philosophy makes them feel better about the painful reality of being alive, but I can't find any refuge in them anymore if I ever really could. I also can't fear a Hell that I can no longer believe in, so at least that's a plus, but I still find the prospect of a meaningless universe extremely depressing.

I guess I'm wondering whether anyone here can relate to the path I've taken. I'm partly pissed off that I wasted so much of my life grappling with these issues when it seems like pessimism was "hidden" from me as an option, though it's obviously understandable why it's not a popular one. Reading Zapffe and Ligotti felt like finally being told "no, you're not alone in feeling this way," which is maybe the only other comfort I can take anymore.

P.S.: if it sounds strange that I recognized lies for so long but still tried to believe in them despite knowing better, it's strange to me too. Having heard the accounts of others who fell out of faith, I think it might just be that a religious upbringing does some weird things to your thought processes. No shock there, I guess.

"Life is sacred", that has been earnestly implied by many philosophers and sages.

If life is living, living is life...

Is it the mind, that forms/grasps/scrutinizes the source of patterns,

which forms as "meanings", adding conformity to it,

and thus, when there is another pattern, that acts as an adversary to any of these manufactured patterns/meanings, that go against,

is what triggers the anguish?

Is it the meaning(s), that is antagonistic to the meaning(s), certainly the cause of suffering?

Based on this rationale, the mind is like an extension that is added to a life form, that is capable of inducing perpetuating conflict to itself and others.

Or can this vulnerable mind, that is bereft of comprehending the actuality of reality, of what is, and what is not, contemplate on what or how the life is sacred?

Link to other invasion take on the same post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1x6ewnn/a_malevolent_invasion_theory/

Human species has the curse of consciousness, deep down everyone knows how absurd life is, and in particular everyone knows that death is inevitable.

So how a self-conscious organism that by design wants to live, can face the fact that his condition will inevitably decline until he will no longer exist anymore?

He can use two psychological tools, one is repression. You know that you have to die but it is not an imminent event, it is located somewhere in a distant future and there's no reason to be anxious about it right now. The other is hope. In the past it was hope in a religious afterlife, now it is hope in progress or in yourself. Something that can make you say to yourself "Yeah it is bad right now but if i nail that job opportunity, meet this boy/girl, win the lottery, move to another town etc... i will be happy and i won't be worried anymore about the future".

If you remove these two things from the equation you have the worst emotion a person can feel: despair. That is why terminal illness or a death sentence are probably the worst events that can happen to a person. The punishment in a death sentence is not death per se, because a dead person can't feel anything (after death there will be no one that can experience the regret of not having lived more years), but the fact that your death is presented right in front of your face, imminent and inevitable. Terminal illness is even worse, you know you have limited time to live, your health gets worse day by day and that's nothing you can do about it.

Human species (or at least human society as we know it) is in the death row right now. Humanity can't live forever of course, all things are meant to decline and die but while in the past you could place this event in a very distant future and not worry about it and you could be reasonably hopeful that things would stay the same or improve, now the collapse of our society has become imminent and inevitable.

1 Climate change. The most underrated one and yet the most dangerous and impactful for the survival of our species. There are countless articles and scientific researches on how the temperature of the planet has raised year by year. Global warming causes extreme climate events that can and will destroy entire cities and threat the foundation of what has allowed us to survive and thrive on this planet until now: agriculture. These things are imminent because you can experience them in your own life. By the need to install an air conditioner when in the previous years there were no need, by the fact that extreme climate events now are more frequent and intense and happen everywhere even where they were not suppose to happen, by the rising cost of food (fruits and vegetables in particular). And inevitable because countries not only do not know how to solve this problem but don't want to since it would mean going against our capitalistic economy which is based on the cycle destroy-consume-pollute

2 Fascism. Extreme right wing movement already are in power or will rule in most of the world countries. This will impact society on a personal and collective level. On the personal level freedom, one of the most important needs of a human being will be restricted for everyone except the ruling class in exchange for a false sense of security from a fabricated enemy. On the collective level right authoritarianism will impact negatively on the point above because fascism denies climate change, it is anti-ecologism, often anti scientific and an allied to elites and corporations that exploit natural resources. And will impact negatively on the points below as we will see. I don't need to actually prove the rise of fascism or the inevitability of it, just follow the president of United States (which is not a random African "republic" but the most powerful country in the world) policies and see how they influence EU governments and the rest of the world. Even here on reddit you can notice the rise of fascism, they ask you your personal information to visit some subreddits under the excuse of protecting children

3 War. After the end of the cold war no one could think a western country would be bombed and invaded by another country, and yet we have the Ukraine-Russia war going on. If you were born in the 80s or in the 90s in a western country you could be sure that you would never be called to fight a war for your country. Today's kids or boys can't be, especially because fascism and nationalism go hand in hand and US already started another war and threatened a "supposed" ally (Denmark for the control of Greenland) and some neighbours.

4 Economic collapse. People are becoming poorer and will continue to do so at a rapid pace in the future. Society is becoming extremely unequal; wealth is already concentrated in the hands of elites who control national governments in order to maintain their power. The development of AI could replace a lot of jobs leaving people unemployed, and even if it did not, it would cause the collapse of banks and investors who fueled the financial bubble, leading to a crisis worse than that of 2008. The most likely scenario is a techno feudal society in which a very few control the means of production and the enslaved masses work for scraps. Right now you can feel how the cost of living has raised, how the salaries don't and we have to work more to get less and i don't see how things could not go worse.

5 Cultural decline. People are more stupid and selfish than ever. I live in an apartment, and I've noticed that people are becoming more and more selfish and disrespectful of others' rights. My apartment building has always been fairly quiet, but now I hear noise at all hours, people keep their TVs turned up loud, or let their dog bark alone for hours. Social medias have destroyed our attention span and boost our narcissistic tendencies. The level of public debate is abysmal, and most people engage in dialogue solely to impose their own views on others. When people do not compete with one another, they form tribes whose members are bound together more by their hatred of other groups than by shared values or interests

Personally and in general i feel like we are living in desperate times, i don't think it is because of my pessimist inclination but the reality of things. In the last years, especially since 2020, everything is getting worse and there is not a single sign that things can get better or even stay the same and not decline rapidly.

For a human being living in a good situation that is declining day by day is worse than living in a mediocre but stable situation with the possibility to hope for an improvement.

It's as if we're in a car speeding toward a wall and there's nothing we can do to stop it; we're just sitting there, frozen in place, waiting for the worst to happen.

Accepting certain truths about how life is fundamentally flawed is one thing. But can you ever be happy? Do you even get to be happy? Or will Emil Cioran himself descend to remind you that you shouldn’t be?

I’ve been working on a new podcast all about philosophical pessimism. Some of you might be interested. The first episode is out now.

Episode 1: https://youtu.be/AUVKpnKliLk?si=q9qYbTIGiuhj0234