I had these thought in my head and wanted to discuss them.
Although I’m a negative person, I believe hope is more productive.
Why? People hope to hit the lottery. Often this just means they flushed two bucks away.
If you believe, even for justified reasons, that progress is impossible, people are unchangeable, and the only certainty in the future is that conflict will continue, then you’re less likely to try to make a positive change.
Progress has been happening for 12,000 years now. Why would it be impossible?
Entropy affects everyone. Everyone changes, just usually for the worse.
Of course conflict will continue. Why is conflict bad? Calm seas never a skilled sailor make.
I don't see how any of this will have an effect of the likelihood of change. Furthermore, what is positive and negative change?
Why is one preferred over the other?
You are more likely to continue to live unhappily, knowing that small efforts are pointless, all they do is make you more tired, and more hopeless. Complacent to your misery, and hating yourself for it.
I find great glee in the face of overwhelming odds. Speak for yourself.
If you hope on the other hand, you can see a change happening, despite the unlikely-hood of it. You can see that there’s still time to do something. That, even if small, like saying thank you, could make one person feel that tiniest bit better for a little while. You are more willing to take a risk to make a change if you believe there’s a chance it will work. You can see that despite our history of misery, in the end we are alive. That even if you fall, it isn’t the end of the world, you can try again.
I can see change happening regardless of the amount of hope I have, if I have eyes that see. As for improving someone else's life, true, but the fact is, things usually only change at threshholds. 99.9% of the time, your thank you will have no effect. If won't move the needle, as they say.
And... History of misery? What misery? You mean life? yeah, living is pain. What's your point? If you felt no pain, you wouldn't do anything. You'd be a mushroom.
And yes, I'll try and do something if I think it will work. In this case just "hoping" it will work is nonsense. I prefer to "know" it will work.
If I fail and die, it's the end of my world.
However, there’s a danger to hope. One much greater than a scam. Hope doesn’t have to be good. You could hope those you deem as other die. Where complacency could lead you to detest others, but be unwilling to do anything. With hope, you could do something about it. You can share your beliefs with other people, so enough of you could overpower the other. You could take action thinking yourself a martyr die for a honorable purpose. Hope is a furnace powering conflict across the world. A flame unquenchable.
No.
You are describing, caring. If you care, you will take action and sometimes people care too much. You need to care to love and you need to care to hate. What you describe isn't hope, or a result of hope. You are describing wanting something so much to the point of delusion.
Though nihilism isn’t safe from this type of danger either. If there’s no hope of victory, then what? Change your priorities. If you can’t eliminate those you hate, then make them feel fear, make them miserable, hurt them. If you can’t make the world better, why not be remembered as making it that little bit worse. If you can’t win the game of life, change your goal, change the rules, make your mark memorable.
Because it sucks. It's not fun, and a waste of time. First-hand experience here. You can read my posts elsewhere for details. I have no desire to repeat myself.
The conclusion I come to is the obvious, boring, but one of the most frustrating ones. Think critically, be mature. Try to do good, even though it feels pointless, and makes you tired. Listen to others before you share your thoughts, consider them carefully, make yourself aware of the pitfalls of them. Be respectful even when others aren’t; take the high road over the satisfying one. Make an effort to admit your faults, but don’t excuse them. Don’t assume your better, even if you are trying harder to listen. Give others room to make mistakes, even if they’re egregious, as long as they were unintentional. If it’s ignorance, let them speak then explain why what they said can hurt. Don’t beat yourself up too much, but don’t ignore your own actions.
Stuff like this is hard to do, but I think it’s best to try even a little bit. If you’d be willing, please discuss your thoughts.
AHHHHUUUGGGGHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!
"Nothing I do matters!"
Okay. So, let's see. If nothing matters, then what you do doesn't matter and what I do doesn't matter. So both have a value of ZERO. So, if what you do is JUST AS IMPORTANT as what the president of the US does? THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN VALUE?
If you say no, you are LYING.
So, since one is more important than the other, one has MORE VALUE. If it has MORE VALUE, then it has VALUE NOT EQUAL TO ZERO. If that is the care it MATTERS.
Just not enough.
The human mind suffers from how it self-motivates. You do something, you succeed, you get dopamine. Then, over time, doing the same thing gets less dopamine. You have to DO BETTER or do something new to get dopamine. This is called LEARNING. Unfortunately, it leads to a situation where people come to the conclusion as the dopamine wears off that "NOTHING MATTERS BECAUSE I'M NOT GETTING MY FIX."
"Doing good because it feels pointless."
That's the problem. It's not pointless. it FEELS pointless. Because you get caught in the trap of trying to find meaning.
I'll let you in on something. The reason for life. Ya ready?
Life makes order.
That's it. That's life's purpose. To make order. Life is order, death is not. Life fights entropy creating ever more complex order out of chaos. THAT'S IT. In a nutshell.
"That sucks."
No. That's the answer, you just don't LIKE IT. In short, this is, "Make the world better than you found it." Because life that doesn't do this winds up dead. Now, life disagrees with what is order. This disagreement is usually solved through the process called DIGESTION. Anyone who thinks life is supposed to be peaceful and little hearts shooting out of you as you contemplate your navel is an idiot. Life is about creating order and fighting with other forms of life to make your form of order the SUPERIOR form of order.
It's called evolution.
This works for DNA, this works for Memes, this works for you, this works for ideas. Anything that reproduces and creates order in defiance of entropy is a form of life and its purpose is to make more order. THAT'S IT.
and let me jump ahead to the arguments I know you are going to use.
"We're just chemical reactions and nothing matters."
Why does the operating system matter? If you were a computer simulation, would you be any less "real"? Anything can be used to store data and as long as that data has feedback and output, it can be a form of life. You could be a series of rocks on a beach. If you are close to the water, that's zero. If you are further away, that's one. The entire universe is a series of rocks on a beach and God walks along the beach, running a program in his mind to decide if a rock gets moved closer to the water, or away, or stays where it is.
Thus all of reality is binary code and represented by pebbles on an infinitely long beach.
It wouldn't change anything.
To us, inside the Pebble code, we wouldn't notice, or care, as long as it runs properly. You could be chemicals in your brain, neurons firing, a computer simulation, whatever. That is just bitching about your OPERATING SYSTEM. If you want to say nothing matters, you had better come up with a better excuse than, "I PREFER UNIX."
I'm sorry you don't LIKE the answers, but the answers are there. They are rather simple. The universe isn't that complex. I think the problem is, you think the universe should be massive and amazing and wonderous when... in reality... it's rather simple.
Knowing how the sausage is made, as they say, ruins the experience of sausage.
Maybe, what doesn't matter, is trying to figure out what matters.
Instead, just make the world a better place you found it, not because of GOD, or because of some higher calling, or because of philosophy, but because ever since blue-green algae started shitting oxygen everywhere, it's what life has been doing, and it's worked out just fine so far.
Why rock the boat?
Let us address worldviews.
If you are convinced deep down in your heart that there is no God, then everything you work for is in vain.
If God, by his own word, said he would not interfere in our lives, then that means that God does not affect outcomes, so it is perfectly fine to exclude him from any calculations.
Progress. Purpose. Meaning. Selflessness. WHY?
Because since life began, life has made increasingly more complex forms of order. It is what life DOES. Why? Because the opposite doesn't work. We have lots of examples of that. If you don't want to make more order, there is someone else who will.
Destruction. Conquest. Selfishness. WHY NOT?
Sometimes you need to do this. Why do you assume it's a bad thing? OH, you think the Nazis should have won? We didn't like their idea of order and corrected the mistake. Sometimes Life gets into arguments about how order should manifest, but we work it out in the end. Sometimes it's by being "negative", whatever that means.
In one million years will it matter? how about a trillion?
Yes and yes. If you didn't exist, the universe would be different. That matters. Even if just a little bit.
There is a God who made everything with meaning and purpose.
Maybe. Again, doesn't matter. The answer to the question doesn't change the outcome.
Now there is justification, reason, and hope.
It existed before, you just don't like the answer, so you pick a new one. That's fine.
Does he? I define love as loving someone, which usually means INTERACTING with what I love, but that's just me.
Build your foundation on THE truth.
I love Objective truth. Do you? Even when it hurts?
The truth never changes, if it does then it was only a deception you believed. And there are a great many deceptions in the world.
WTF? Truth changes, because LIFE CHANGES. Truth never changes. what is this nonsense? Truth changes all the time because the universe changes. Dude, I know you LIKe the idea of absolute permanence, but the idea of Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence...
That's on you guys.
Infinity doesn't exist. There are no infinities. The universe cannot exist with Infinity. Mathematically you can show THERORETICAL infinity, but there are no examples of it in this world. If there are no infinities, then I'm sorry, god doesn't exist as you think he does. He has to be finite, or there is no room for you.
THAT IS WHAT INFINITY MEANS.
is there a god, Maybe. Possible. But as you imagine him? No. So tell me, what will you do if you find youself before him and he isn't perfect? What if he is flawed, because he has to be or there is no place in the universe for you? What if, the only way God and you could both exist is if he limited himself to make room for you and was now less than perfect?
My god, what pressure to put on someone. YOU HAVE TO BE PERFECT OR EVERYTHING MUST BURN BECAUSE WITHOUT YOUR PERFECTION I HAVE NO REASON TO EXIST.
Dude.... chill out. Take it down a notch. I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up so high. Isn't he called "The father"? Maybe... just maybe... he's like your dad. And dads try very hard, but dads aren't perfect. What you gonna do if the past 2,000 years was just God going out for a pack of smokes?
I'm just saying that maybe it's fine if everything isn't perfect, that things end, that maybe, in the end, entropy might win. Maybe, it was never about the destination, but the journey.
Right now, you are on your journey. Maybe you will die and your journey will continue, or maybe it will end and come to naught.
The answer to the end of your journey doesn't change anything because right now, you are STILL MOVING ALONG. Maybe just do that. Leave the world better than you found it and keep moving forward because humanity has been doing that shit for 12,000 years and it's worked out fairly well so far.
I mean, just look at this internet thing you guys came up with. That's just NEET!