Tag: identity
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
Pantheon (2022) – On the uploading process
Discussing the uploading process as portrayed in the anime. Read the full page
SMBC – This life is a prison
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
Andrew McIntosh – On Leaving Scenes (Ineffectual Whinging)
But that’s the thing: with scenes, it’s the ideals first, not the people. People become mere faculties for the ideals, which is bizarre because all ideals only come from people. But scenes thus tend to act as if the ideals they live by and promote are like divine commandments handed down from on high. Read the full page
On responsibility as the solution
It were the old family men of the pre-nihilistic-era, that believed in a future, and that told their children their morals, their hopes, their beliefs. Read the full page
When you have money, but you don’t know what to do with it, then the gravity of your being becomes immediately apparent.
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
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
These are the kind of people who live on the edge of life, so to speak, who are thrown into uncharted waters by their melancholy, and somehow manage to find the surface right before they are lost to the high tides. Anyone who has gone through debilitating bouts of depression knows what the feeling is like: you stand at the cliff of a mountain and gaze right into the abyss, whose gravitas is irresistible. During those times, it really helps to have something; anything at all to grab onto – your job, your spouse, a family member, a promise made to someone, even a pet. As the years pass, however, you start to lose those things, everything feels old, repetitive, and it is not the case for melancholics to be friendly or even easy to be around to keep relationships. This results in the loss of personal meaning, and the fundamental truth of life hits the hardest when personal meaning is non-existent, for there is no cosmic one. The abyss pulls you in; you wade into the cold, uncharted waters, lost in its deep oblivion. This, to me, is suicide par excellence, and only a very contemplative few get to carry it out.
Selim Güre – The Occult of the Unborn
[young people] went out there to stop discrimination – not all discrimination, just some of it… Which is a weird form of discrimination, but…
Louis C.K. – “Sorry” special
Anonymous 04/23/18 (Mon) 13:55:38 No.174245, obscure imageboard
[…]
>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide. It’s when your entire being itself is a secret, that’s when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.
I’ve noticed that so much of genuine social interaction rests on sharing experiences. Technical discussion is a kin to small talk and fails to bridge a gap between people and form a connection. It’s about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, that’s what truly quenches loneliness.
The usual normalfag advice of “just be yourself” seems so appropriate now. It’s possibly all they’ve ever known.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luciano had become so used to being alone and living cocooned in his hermitage that seeing a psychologist would have been unthinkable: you cannot conceive of solving a problem if the problem is all you have. It’s easier to lie down inside your own noise and sing something stupid over it when possible. And so, some days, for Luciano it could almost feel like happiness, even with a hint of pride, in the awareness that no one was trying to make him feel better except himself.
Le vite potenziali (“Potential Lives”) – Francesco Targhetta
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.” Read the full page
The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
Let’s Talk About Music – Stefano Bollani
Ever since I was a child, I struggled with the idea that at some point you had to choose a specific path, in music as in life. Read the full page
2000 – Dialogue with The Dreamer
We have been in a mental crisis since 2000. Read the full page
We live in a decadent civilisation which robs us of our ability to shape and define our destiny and hence robs us of our spirit and identity. Western man has been gradually separated from his natural environment, his spirituality, his fellow man and finally from himself. Life has been reduced to an animalistic base as we drift from one empty satisfaction of technological convenience to another.
Art and culture no longer carry any grand or heroic ideals but rather seek to stimulate base emotions through ugly and abstract forms. Art and culture rarely serve as little more than distractions from the torment of perception – no longer seeking to order, interpret or explain the world around us but preferring instead to excuse it, replace it or deny it with an increasingly less interactive and more atomised and abstract alternative.
We were promised technological salvation but have been led to an air-conditioned hell by the false idols of progress who sought to remove the struggle from existence, not stopping to think what would be left. For life in essence is struggle and the will to participate in that struggle and make it one’s own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[🡕] is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.
“A View From Nihil” in “Triumph of the Broken Will”
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
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
No to the solution when you are the problem
Cripple Bastards – Morte da tossico (“Death of the Addict”)
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– What?
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.
– No, I want to know.
– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»
– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?
– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?
– How dare you insult my sister like that…
– I wasn’t insulting her.
– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.
Hilary and Jackie, the movie about Jacqueline du Pré
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job And heaven knows I’m miserable now
The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
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
Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. 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
The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it, she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federn’s language, cathects his ego-as-object with mortido (ed. the death drive).
A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it.
R. D. Laing – The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
Short Stories for a Year – The Wheelbarrow – Luigi Pirandello
When there’s someone around, I never look at her, but I feel that she’s looking at me, she’s looking at me without taking her eyes off me for a moment. I’d like to make her understand in private that it’s nothing, that she should relax, that I couldn’t allow myself to perform this brief act in front of others, that for her it’s of no importance, but for me it’s everything. I perform it every day at the right moment in utmost secrecy and with frightful joy because, trembling, I experience the delight of a divine, conscious madness that for an instant frees me and allows me to get even with everything. Read the full page
The World as Will and Representation
[…]But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives (ed. cause-effect chain). But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the Esse, not in the Operari[…]
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, as found in “generic_gnostic_01_shard” in the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” (2020)