Marcus Flavius is the person who won’t eat an apple because it will eventually be a core.
These kidneys don’t grow themselves.
Agony and irony
live together in perfect harmony,
side by side on my computer keypad
Oh, Lord, ain’t that sad?
[sub]apologies to Stevie Wonder[/sub]
Yet.
There’s no meaning or honor or justice or good or evil or mercy or faith in the universe.
So let’s make our own! And making babies is a really, REALLY fun way to give meaningless things meaning.
…for the world, which seems
**To lie before us like a land of dreams,
*
*So various, so beautiful, so new,
*
*Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
*
*Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
*
*And we are here as on a darkling plain
*
*Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
*
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
If parents have children mainly, because they want to be parents, isn 't there a selfishness issue there? Something like giving a puppy to a child who just wants a cute little puppy, which will some day become a neglected or abused dog?
If I thought like the OP, I think I would’ve stuck the barrel of a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger by now.
Pretty much. I much prefer existence to non-existence, and almost everyone, including most people who attempt suicide feel the same way.
What the hell are you ever talking about?
Many people who want to become parents want that with the full understanding that it’s a lifetime commitment. I know from experience that some don’t think it through, but most grown adults are well aware that having children is not just something fun to do for now. The difference between children and adults is often a greater understanding of long term consequences and better insight into the associated responsibilities involved with any decision.
It’s selfish insofar as anything anyone does ever is selfish. Which is to say, not a very meaningful paradigm for selfishness.
The only good reason to have children is to get grandchildren. Children are your only source, so they’ve kind of got you over a barrel there. That’s how they get you.
I’m in no rush for grandchildren, but I’ve heard that grandparents and grandchildren are natural allies against parents. I plan on exploiting that advantage to it’s fullest if and when I find myself in a position to do so. Revenge at last!
Being a parent doesn’t end when the kid grows up. I know several older folks (50s/60s) who have great relationships with their adult children, seem to take a lot of pleasure in both their adult children’s accomplishment and in playing with their grandkids. My own kid is still just a toddler, but I definitely will want to be part of his life still when he is a grown man. You never can be sure how life will turn out, but I know enough adults who seem reasonably satisfied with their lives that I don’t feel like I am condemning my kid to a miserable existence.
Oh, and I am a psychiatrist, so it’s not like I am oblivious to all the misery and suffering that goes on. Life doesn’t have to be that way.
I actually have thought about the kind of issues that OP brings up. Ultimately, though, even if life is meaningless, it’s over fairly quickly for all of us, so I don’t see any reason to let neuroticism over the point of existence determine my life choices.
When we exasperated him, my Dad would raise his eyes to Heaven and sigh “now I understand why my mother would say ‘my grandchildren shall avenge me!’ Vengeance indeed…”
You don’t even need to be explicit allies, it just happens. Marcus’ dad probably angsted more than a whole squad of Professor Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters alumni, now baby boy is trying to up-angst Daddy.
[RIGHT]“What is my purpose?” — Butter Robot
“You pass the butter” — Rick
“Oh my God.” — Butter Robot
“Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.” — Rick[/RIGHT]
I think you agree with me more than you don’t, but I do want to provide a different slant on this just the same.
Imagine a teleological Universe, where there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, the center damned well does hold, and if anarchy were “mere” it wouldn’t exist. Imagine that your purpose in that Universe was to be something you hated. Your fitness as a being is entirely dependent on how well you fulfill that task. That is existential terror.
To me, the fundamental tenet of existentialism is that we live in a Universe where that can never happen. All authority is derived from ultimately temporal sources, there is no unchallengeable philosophical truth, only physical fact, and nobody will be coming around to mark your papers. If you can find happiness being something your society disapproves of, well, it’s possible, in our Universe, for society to be wrong and an individual to be right. There’s no metaphysical basis for society, it’s just something humans do. (Well, I suppose a number of species could be said to have society, but we don’t usually stay up nights wondering what chimpanzee troops think of us.) Therefore, society can be questioned, and changed, and made better for everyone. Progress is possible, and desirable, and never-ending. Things can always improve, and no external force can say otherwise.
In short, I find existentialism joyful, and all of my future philosophy will have elements of it.
Further, I refuse to give philosophical legitimacy to bad neurochemistry. The ideas your brain comes up with when depressed are just you trolling yourself. They’re bullshit, by which I mean they’re statements made regardless of truth value simply to engender an emotional state. When you look at them with a clearer head, they’re boring, like all trolls: They’re utterly repetitive in spirit, because they’re all bent to the same end. It’s a constant blatting noise, devoid of real content, endlessly circling, never making progress. There’s no philosophical core to its arguments because they’re all based on a physical flaw in the system. Looking back on my own episodes, the ideas were spooks, affecting at the time but insubstantial in the light of my modern ability to reason and feel emotions.
I mostly agree. There’s no point to any of this, but that’s not depressing. It means we gotta step up if we want a point.
There’s a Shel Silverstein poem that I love. Okay, there aren’t many Shel Silverstein poems I DON’T love (short of his regrettable posthumous collection, but I’m already hijacking my own point so let it go), but there’s one that nicely sums up my existentialism.