Tag: existential boredom
Ennui, taedium vitae, “spleen”.
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
I don’t want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesn’t really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
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
When you have money, but you don’t know what to do with it, then the gravity of your being becomes immediately apparent.
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
As if through the mist Fading slow From this moment From this life
Of no fulfillment Of no discovery
Only the passing Only the flow…
Leaving from all That once had a meaning
To reach deep For the inner desolation
To awaken the emptiness That was always there Here, in the stillness A yearning For an ending
Shape of Despair – The Inner Desolation
There is no magical third act
I just… I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I won’t suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. That’s all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.
Popular chans’ meme/copypasta
Anonymous 06/09/15 (Tue) 22:18:58 No.2771, hikkichan.com (dead)
Another aspect of escapism is that it is an addiction.
Like junkies, we need ever higher doses and at one point there simply isn’t enough left, so we end up looking at the same shit over and over again desperately trying to remember how it was like when we first saw it, but by then it no longer satisfies.
[…]
Boredom is the real problem of men; humans can bear next to anything when they are distracted, and most of our activities are steered towards that goal.
As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, I’m sure it is for those who aren’t too depressed to still enjoy it. But music can’t compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect one’s emotional state as opposed to music’s indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesn’t always work as well as we’d like.
Thomas Ligotti – The Damned Interviews, Tina Hall
And the radiation tells you things that are true and at the same time absurd, cold, and above all rough. Read the full page
It would be quite interesting to inhale rainbows.
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
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
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
Old people, they look back at the good old days, and it was good because they were young. But they act like it was “the day”. No, it was ’cause youth is good: that’s gone, you’re fucked; it’s not the day. And then they reject anything that’s new, it’s like we do with fucking hip-hop, if you’re in your 30s: «Oh, fuck that, that ain’t music, we had music back when 38 Special was around…» What? No. Let’s all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?
Doug Stanhope – Deadbeat Hero
The worst thing that can happen to a man who spends a lot of time alone, is to lack imagination. Life, already dull and repetitive in itself, becomes, without fantasy, a morbid spectacle.
The Consequences of Love, Paolo Sorrentino
Anyway, I can try anything, it’s the same circle leading to nowhere, and I’m tired now. Anyway, I’ve lost my face, my dignity, my look, everything is gone and I’m tired now. Don’t be scared: I’ve found a good job and I go to work every day on my old bicycle you loved.
I am piling up some unread books under my bed and I really think I’ll never read again. No concentration, just a white disorder everywhere around me, you know… I’m so tired now. Don’t worry: I often go to dinners and parties with some old friends who care for me, take me back home, and stay.
Monochrome floors, monochrome walls; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me. Monochrome flat, monochrome life; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me.
Sometimes I search an event or something to remind me, but I’ve really got nothing in mind. Sometimes I open the windows, I listen people walking in the down street; there is life out there.
Yann Tiersen – Monochrome (ft. Dominique A)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page
Satiety—I have just now uttered this word, and already I no longer know apropos of what, so readily does it apply to everything I feel and think, to everything I love and loathe, to satiety itself.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page
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”
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.
Life as a repetition of the same dull, insipid routine of insignificant actions of buttoning and unbuttoning, of sleeping and waking, of eating, and hunger returning, and these ditto, ditto repeated…
“On Life” by G. S. – “The Public Advertiser” of London