Tag: angst
Free-floating anxiety. About transience and death. Wahnstimmung.
Links about the concept of Wahnstimmung. Here, too, beyond the context of schizophrenia, in the sense of a state of dissociation and free-floating anxiety. Continue reading
Jetta – An autistic kid talks about the universe and the end of time
Chris: If you could share one message with the whole entire world, what would you say?
Jetta: The universe is about the end.
Chris: Why do you want people to know that?
Jetta: Because someday it will end in our face. Read the full page
Why do we want to create an ASI
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Fernando Olszewski, https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/01/the-mistake-of-rokos-basilisk.html[🡕]
Can a pessimist have hope?
r/Pessimism, u/ajaxinsanity
Hope is expectation coupled with fear that something will not work out. As such it is almost the opposite of pessimism. Pessimism is about abandoning hope and expecting the worst, which is often closer to the truth.
Hopium is very bad for you in general because it’s unstable, depends on imagination and ambition, therefore making you anxious. Be realistic and apply reason, not hope.
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, it’s obvious that most real lives don’t even come close to that. Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
At the end of the day, 99% of the activity is data hoarding, 1% is making use. Music years ago, other things later. Because then, when you use it, you’ll be fed up with it. Of course people like to work, because otherwise their brains explode; it’s the same mechanism. Endless search for mechanical and repetitive distractions. Tergiversations around the core of desperation.
And this is… when things are going well.
And then they say to the hoarder: «You don’t need to accumulate everything. This thing X, you don’t need to hoard it, resist it.» But if there is no need for me to save X, it means that there is no need for me to save Y, it means that there is no need for me to save anything, by simple syllogism.
And indeed, that is correct. But it only confirms the nihilism and the absolute meaninglessness of everything.
Andrew McIntosh – On Conspiracy Theories (Ineffectual Whinging)
One of the main reason for getting into conspiracy theories is to get the illusion that by doing so, you’re exercising some kind of agency in the world. Read the full page
They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Read the full page
William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with “overwhelming sadness”
William Shatner (Captain Kirk in Star Trek), after his trip in Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Continue reading
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-can’t-see-the-stars, it’s weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on… Continue reading
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.
Vsauce in the video “Illusions of Time”, inspired by “Social acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa
Massimo Recalcati – Perversion
The Clinical Lesson of Jacques Lacan: Madness, Neurosis and Perversion (third session). IRPA, Associazione Accademia Pons, Jonas Onlus, Order of Psychologists of Lombardy, Enap Continue reading
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
Never play by the stairs, you’re bound to fall down, Never play by the hillside, might slip and break your crown Never play by the fire, it’s a danger to your health Never play by the wall, might fall and break yourself.
Never play by the river, you might tumble in and drown, Never play by the field, get filthy, dirty and brown, Never play by yourself, it’s a danger to be alone, Never stray too far away, it’s not safe outside of home.
I didn’t ask to be born, And I don’t think I’ll ask to die. I didn’t ask for the ground beneath my feet, I didn’t ask for the sky.
Emily & the Woods – Never Play
The famous geologist said, on television, that our heads are too big, and it is difficult for us to get out of the pussy; the ribcage protects only a few organs; the veins in the legs struggle to hold up the whole body; the back, for it to keep the erect position, it needs to arch, and therefore back pain, etc.; vision also has several problems, etc. In short, we are shit. We are not as wonderful of a machine as they say, we have a thousand flaws. And therefore we are not the result of a divine plan, blah blah. Obvious stuff, it was a speech against religions, but I was more interested in the fact that evolution is still ongoing and we are currently far from perfect; his words: «we adapted as best as we could». Here you are. Difficult evolutionary natural adaptation. Interesting parallelism with social adaptation, which is ultimately strongly linked to it. And someone makes fun making memes that show how, in a certain sense, we are now living an involution. Very in tune with the cyberpunk world, which sees the end of man coinciding with the maximum technological development. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
There were only two or three of us in Rome who considered climbing not just a hobby, but a job: to set off, to become obsessed with a wall of rock, to feel, before every attempt, the Route looming above you in an oppressive way, to feel anxiety rising uncontrollably, to fall asleep with the Route in your head, to alternate periods of nervous insomnia with periods of morbid drowsiness, to wake up with the Route still in your head, to deprive yourself of something, and to suffer, even if that something, or that suffering, is not necessarily connected to performance. It’s just that it’s written in the laws of the universe that to obtain, you must suffer, even if suffering does not necessarily mean you will obtain anything. So, you seek suffering, because it pricks you, awakens you, activates you, and at times breaks that opaque glass that almost always stands between you and reality; it makes you feel, at least sometimes, that you’re alive, and sometimes feeling alive is more important than feeling good. Serenity can be sacrificed in honor of life itself, if only to avoid falling back into that horrible nirvanic anesthesia.
Alessandro “Jolly” Lamberti – Jollypower
You know, Kyon… have you ever realized just how insignificant your existence on this planet really is? […] It happened to me. And I’ll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn’t really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there.
So I turned to my dad and asked him, “Do you know how many people are here right now”? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I’d learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population.
Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don’t know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn’t true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there’s really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn’t ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn’t I that person? So, that’s how I felt till I finished elementary school.
And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn’t come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I’d let the world know I wasn’t a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I’ve done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.
Haruhi in “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Gavazzeni: “Music worsens the man”
Alberto Sinigaglia (“ttL”, La Stampa, insert) Continue reading
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is – to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio… You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.
For me drugs aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – they are one god, who creates in three different ways.
I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, to…
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in “Invisible”
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
What’s the point of life And what’s the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica – The Phantom Agony
Chance doesn’t exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[🡕] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Time destroys all things.
Irréversible
Final Fantasy X – Auron talks about “the spiral of death”
Tidus: Why is it… everything in Spira seems to revolve around people dying?
Auron: Ahh, the spiral of death.
Tidus: Huh?
Auron: Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then, only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly.
Final Fantasy X – Tidus and Auron during the imprisonment in Bevelle
[…] every living creature on Earth dies alone.
Donnie Darko
We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.
Amélie – Hipolito (the writer)
I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress, all existence denied…
Reflect on your childhood: your sensation, your words, your emotions…
Time… It will not wait.
No matter how hard you hold on. It escapes you.
And… [And you’re going to die. / And everything will be destroyed.]
Ultimecia (Artemisia), Final Fantasy VIII
On the Highwind, near the ending
Cloud: I’ve… been thinking too. About the universe… planet… ocean. How wide and big… No matter where I go and what I do it won’t change a thing.
Cid: Maybe you’re right. But I came up with something different. I always thought this planet was so huge. But lookin’ at it from space, I realized it’s so small. We’re just floatin’ in the dark. Kind of makes you feel powerless. […] That’s why I say this planet’s still a kid. A little kid sick and trembling in the middle of this huge universe. […]
Vincent: City of the Ancients… The Ancients… after a long time that is probably what others will come to call us… Hmm…hwa ha ha ha… It’s only a matter of time for us.
Final Fantasy VII
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle Ă©poque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.
Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
And time will destroy all those as well. Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? …Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
[…]
Bleh! You people make me sick! You sound like lines from a self-help book! If that’s how it’s going to be… I’ll snuff them all out! Every last one of your sickening, little happy reasons for living!
Kefka, Final Fantasy VI, in its GBA translation by Tom Slattery
Terminator 2 – Apocalypse scene
Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
[…]
There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object’s visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.
It’s as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[…]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.
Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century… These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.
There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
…to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
Our Lady of the Turks – Carmelo Bene
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary.
Carmelo Bene – Our Lady of the Turks
(Giuliana and her son, in front of the factories)
– Why is that smoke yellow?
– Because it’s poison.
– But then, if a little bird flies through it, it dies.
– Well, by now the little birds know, and they don’t fly through it anymore.
Red Desert (“Il deserto rosso”) – Final scene
– I haven’t recovered. I never will. Never…
[…]
– Don’t say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?
– The streets, the factories, the colors, the people… everything!
[…]
– There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you don’t help me, Corrado.
Giuliana in “Red Desert” (“Il deserto rosso”)
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres – Saint Tantalus, chapter “Disenchantment: Behind the arras”
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, Journey to the End of the Night
I remembered then that once in England a sentence to forced labor was administered by suspending the condemned convict over a wheel turned by water, thus forcing the victim to move his legs at a certain rhythm to avoid their being crushed. When you are working, you always have the sensation of a similar constriction.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page