Tag: desire
The torment, the curse that is the human desire. The Wille zum Leben that causes the endless insatiable striving. The hedonic treadmill.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕] Continue reading
u/defectivedisabled, r/Pessimism
Suffering when seen as a metaphysical force is just like a perpetual machine. It runs on the fuel that is suffering and generates suffering as the byproduct, which it then uses to fuel itself further and continue the cycle. There maybe some peak and trough in the amount of suffering but suffering can never be fully eradicated. Suffering is self sustaining and is basically like a pantheist “God”. We are all part of it and it and it only exists through our suffering. Suffering is the essence of life, it is the reason for everything we do what we do. Suffering makes us perform actions to relief itself but would then create new forms of suffering as a result. A lion kills and eat a zebra so it may stay alive and procreate to further perpetuate this cycle in an ever increasing scale until the zebra population collapses and the lion population collapses as well. This cycle would then start afresh, it is an endless cycle with no end in sight.
We are all parts that made up of this “God” and it is our suffering that gives “life” to it. What this means for we is that we are created to suffer and perpetuate suffering. All for the manifestation of this “God” into the world. You can only do what is allowed within the limits of being a cog in this ungodly machine and any attempts to fight against the will of this “God” is futile. An end to this metaphysical force is nothing to grieve for indeed.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
Treading water
u/Critical-Sense-1539, r/Pessimism
I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular “self-improvement” content. I’ve never bought any promises that I could ever better my life or progress in any real sense, for no matter what I achieve, I will always be striving. I don’t get inspired whenever I see someone struggle really hard for wealth, influence, a big muscly body, a romantic relationship, or some other insipid marker of success.
I see a futility in these attmepts to attain “fulfilment” or the “good life”, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so you’re able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get out of the water. You’re always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until you’ve got none left to expend.
I see all pursuits for fulfilment in this sort of image; we are always lacking something. Living to try and satisfy all your desires is a game that you can only ever lose because for every desire that one satisfies, another shall show up in its place. Now, realizing this probably won’t fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a “bad life”. After all, there’s no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.
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
We are daily slaves to the mitigation of suffering
What can even be done? Happy or sad, you still need to eat, you’re still aging, and you’re still going to die. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/HumanAfterAll777
I think striving for happiness is like chasing the dragon
[…] When I was truly happy was when I was a child. When I was ignorant of the world and what horrors it contained. Something you can never go back to. […]
r/Pessimism, u/GloomInstance
There’s a moment when the intelligent empath, perhaps born with a melancholic bent, realises they are stuck in a kind of mortal reality show of endless suffering.
They look out at the sunset over a peaceful lake, only to see a pelican swoop down and grab up a fish, swallowing the fish whole as it visibly flaps around, trying to resist its awful fate.
Then the thinking empath reflects on how cruel and unfair the natural state of things is, and that they themselves are stuck inside the cruelty fishbowl and will most likely suffer their own grizzly decline.
I remember as a child of eight or nine years old, sitting in the bathtub weeping at how much suffering the world contains, and how little protection against it we have. It must have been when my first grasp on death and the nature of things occurred.
r/Pessimism, u/scorqio
One must know that things also become dull. Stale.
What i think will make me happy today, may not have that same impact next week.
One day is the time it takes to get bored of your new shiny toy.
So you then go back to either your life as a slave or your basic organic distractions.
Also see Fichte
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
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
Emptiness → Distraction → Dream → Desire… Read the full page
You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your mommy, your daddy, your nature pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things that you love might not seem so special anymore, you know? Like your jack-in-the-box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal… And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.
The Hurt Locker – James speaking to his son
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Thomas Ligotti – “Fantastic Metropolis” interview
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
And did you know desire’s a terrible thing The worst that I can find
[…]
Did you know desire’s a terrible thing It makes the world go blind
The Sundays – Can’t Be Sure
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
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
Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces of mundane existence—on having placed a great distance between himself and the horizon where there may be seen flashing the lightning-bolts of keen pleasure, and whence come the thunder-peals of sudden affliction, and where flicker the false hopes and the splendid visions of average happiness, and where independence of thought gradually engulfs and devours a man, and where passion slays him outright, and where the intellect fails or triumphs, and where humanity engages in constant warfare, and leaves the field of battle in a state of exhaustion and of ever-unsatisfied, ever-insatiable desire.
Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer – Parerga and Paralipomena; also in “Essays and Aphorisms”
[The human life] swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Full excerpt:
We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, howÂever, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, “Am I happy?” and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, “No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.”
Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first… Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there.
In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment on the French Revolution”)
If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Oratio de hominis dignitate (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”)
CHORUS (Str.) Who craves excess of days, Scorning the common span Of life, I judge that man A giddy wight who walks in folly’s ways. For the long years heap up a grievous load, Scant pleasures, heavier pains, Till not one joy remains For him who lingers on life’s weary road And come it slow or fast, One doom of fate Doth all await, For dance and marriage bell, The dirge and funeral knell. Death the deliverer freeth all at last. (Ant.) Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life’s coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe.
Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus (transl. by F. Storr)