Sure, but the thread is about arguments against pessimism.
Nice user name/post combo though.
Oedipus, have you looked into Stoicism? Have you read Marcus Aurelius?
Yes, I actually have as well as reading Epictetus and then Eastern forms of the same thoughts in the way of Buddhism.
I agree that the rationalist in me sees beauty in the world and furthermore thinks it’s a bad decision to, say, decide the world is all phooey and end your life before seeing the Sistine Chapel or watching a bull fight in Spain, that kind of stuff. I don’t know how much it’s related to pessimism or my original post, per se, but I think my hugest sticking point is realizing that once you’re dead, you’re dead. You can’t feel pain or regret or feel the pain of your loved ones because, well, it’s over for you. Then I think it became a hard question for me of whether the known “nothing” I’d feel is better than the possibility of bliss in life mixed with the possibility of life totally sucking as well.
This was when I was in a very very rough time in my life and I just knew too many guys that’d been divorced and had their lives ruined or are stuck in some job that they absolutely hate or any multitude of things. Then you start mixing that with the knowledge that we have no inherent meaning on earth, that nothing I do actually matters in the very end, that I’ll eventually be forgotten by time, and you have a very bummed out and very confused OP that’s still standing here somehow trying to find the logical and philosophical conclusion at the end of the line
You didn’t exist for 13.5 billion years. Now you are going to spend what brief time you have with subjective experience bemoaning its duration and meaning or lack thereof? Maybe try something else.
Besides that, recognize that you are acting on beliefs even if they aren’t religious beliefs. Are you sure life has no inherent meaning? How do you know that? And your egoist views- are you sure you are what you think you are? Why does life have no meaning but death means all these horrible and depressing things?
Existentialists would admit this while still holding out the possibility that we are free to invent meaning in our lives.
Life isn’t a thing that can have a strict meaning or “point,” even if it was made by God.
Undue deference to authorial intent in art criticism went out of fashion a long time ago. You can take the artist’s statements about his work into consideration, but you’re free to come to your own conclusions about what it all means. When applied to life that’s existentialism, or absurdism.
That there’s not an objective point to existence is rather liberating, I think. For religions, “the point” is to worship a God or fulfill sacraments. That’s limiting to the range of human experience, though maybe preferable to our egos when compared to alternatives, like if we’re genetically modified cattle for space wasps to lay their eggs in.