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[Fenrir]

Screw inner peace; I wanna care about stuff.

Doesn't mean you become an emotionless robot.

Angry? Awesome.
Happy? Awesome.

So what does it mean? If inner peace does not preclude being angry or happy, how is it any different from the way I am now?

[kaijyuu]

Apathy is fine must be tempered with narcissism. Then you can be apathetic and unempathetic to the world at large, but care deeply about the things that directly effect you. It's your life, so that which effect you compose the most important things in your life.

All things are best ultimately as an endeavour to amuse and entertain the self. Make friends and lovers out of the people who entertain, and seek to keep them happy and occasionally attend to their needs because doing so keeps them around to continue entertaining. When they stop entertaining, you either fix that or leave and end the friendship/lovership if they require too much effort to fix back into an entertaining state.

There's nothing wrong with lying to get what you want. A good liar can lie to everybody else. A great liar can lie to themselves. If you can believe your own lies, you'll always seem honest, even if you know it's a lie.

The sarcasm is strong with this one.

So what does it mean? If inner peace does not preclude being angry or happy, how is it any different from the way I am now?

Control. Feeling emotions is great. Awesome, even. Letting them control you is not.

IMO, If you have "inner peace," you do not have cognitive dissonance stemming from a contraction between logic and emotion.

[Hubris Incalculable]

[Part of] my personal philosophy: Do stuff. Find something that you find worthwhile, and do it. Otherwise, you will end up an apathetic, worthless slug, with no respect for yourself.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Everything you or anyone ever does is ultimately pointless in the long run, you will die and in a few generations be lost to time. You, everyone know, everything you have experienced will be grounded to dust by time. A few billion years from now, when all life dies and the stars cool, nothing of you will remain besides a few atoms.

Try to have some fun before you turn into a rotting flesh sack. Take up a hobby you enjoy.

[JoshuaFH]

I suppose I'll contribute:

Be slow to judge, and slow to anger; don't place your pride so high that it clouds your judgment, there's just too many problems and situations in life that a cool head and the willingness to relate will help you solve.

[kaijyuu]

Screw existential angst. Life's an adventure.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Alright, I'll play ball.
Why help other people? Why be at all altruistic? They're all just a bunch of uncultured, ungrateful bastards who will take advantage of you and see your goodness as weakness.

Right?

Well, we all live in the world. None of us are divorced from the world. We are all in the same boat, so to speak.

Therefore, it follows that if I commit an act of good onto you; I am making the world a better place to live in by improving your life. And as I too live in the world; helping you, helping anyone is the functional equivalent as helping myself. So, by helping as many people as possible I am greatly improving the quality of my own life. Therefore, we can conclude that altruism is inherently both a selfless and a selfish act.

Everything is temporal. Everything. You, me, Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the Universe itself? Eventually it will all be gone. Nothing lasts forever. There is no such thing as forever.

So learn to enjoy existing, because it isn't going to be a thing for very long. The Universe has existed for about 13.75 Billion years. Humankind has only existed for a very small portion of that time. You have been around for a significantly shorter period of time, and very soon you will be gone. Everyone you have ever loved, hated, known, or not known will be gone too. No matter what happens to you, good or ill, it's also temporary. Nothing goes on forever, and as long as you remember that you can get through anything.

So that person you still spend time thinking about even though you haven't seen them in years, just because you hate them so much? Let it go. Your time is counting down, and you're spending it hating someone and burning up inside when it doesn't matter and more likely than not never mattered. Does that really sound worthwhile to you?

"They're just as scared of you as you are of them."

"Who?"

"Everyone."

[Domenique]

Why help other people? Why be at all altruistic? They're all just a bunch of uncultured, ungrateful bastards who will take advantage of you and see your goodness as weakness.

Right?

Well, we all live in the world. None of us are divorced from the world. We are all in the same boat, so to speak.

Therefore, it follows that if I commit an act of good onto you; I am making the world a better place to live in by improving your life. And as I too live in the world; helping you, helping anyone is the functional equivalent as helping myself. So, by helping as many people as possible I am greatly improving the quality of my own life. Therefore, we can conclude that altruism is inherently both a selfless and a selfish act.

When you help another person, you get a good feeling about it. I think that's the way evoliution made us at least slightly altruistic, because why otherwise would we help other people? I guess everybody should be altruistic to a degree - when your own good doing doesn't make life worse for you. It is a selfish act, because when you help people, you gain their friendship, this might help when you are at trouble yourself, or when you need his indirect support (politics etc.). Altruism shouldn't be considered selfless, it is purely selfish, since you have reasons for helping others, to advance your goals, to have a support from your surroundings, when you want to brag how altruistic you are so that people would like you. Relations with other people is a very important thing in our lives for many reasons, mostly selfish.

[Il Palazzo]

http://www.lordtonymackenzie.com/desiderata.html

I wanted to say "Oldie but goodie", but when it comes to the timeline of philosophy 60 years is but a blink of an eye.
Anyway, it sums up nicely, if in somewhat idealised and convoluted manner, my views on the subject.

[Fenrir]

Screw existential angst. Life's an adventure.

I have no idea why people think they need a cosmic being to have purposes and impart meaning to their life. This kind of nihilism is like as dining with a friend and insisting to him that the food does not really have flavor because there is not a third person around to taste it.

[DarkWolfXV]

Everyone needs a drug to survive (If you dont understand i can explain happily)

[MorleyDev]

None of us matter in the cosmic scale all actions are, ultimately, made irrelevant by a sufficiently long period of time. Now, I don't know about you but I can't perceive the cosmic scale of things nor will I exist as a conscious being for that sufficiently long period of time. Maybe one day I'll ascend to godhood and that'll change, but for now I have a lifespan that will ultimately be measured in mere decades and fixed ability to perceive the world. As such, the only things that need matter to me are what occur and what I perceive during that lifespan with that ability to perceive the world. The cosmic scale is irrelevant to the conscious individual.

And that realisation is how nihilism becomes existentialism.

[kaijyuu]

Everyone needs a drug to survive (If you dont understand i can explain happily)

Serotonin?

I have no idea why people think they need a cosmic being to have purposes and impart meaning to their life. This kind of nihilism is like as dining with a friend and insisting to him that the food does not really have flavor because there is not a third person around to taste it.

I don't think it's so much the cosmic being, but the eternal life thing.

Some people can't come to terms with the concept of transience. When people get existential, they go on about how everything will eventually crumble to dust (including them), and thus "nothing matters." Religious folk cling to it so that something will last forever, preferably themselves, and so they avoid the problem.


I don't have a problem 'cause I don't think things need to have a lasting effect to matter. Maybe I'm a tiny speck in a huge universe, existing for a small moment, and will be forgotten soon after. So what? My experiences still have value, even if they don't continue to affect the material world in a meaningful way.

[Fenrir]

So people think that, because it does not matter to everyone forever, it never mattered at all?

Then again, Kilroy and MSH seem to think something similar to the converse is true: enjoy your life, because you are going to die and be forgotten, which, I must confess, makes as little sense to me.

I feel we need no existential nonsense. I say “Enjoy your life if at all possible, by any means possible, because having a miserable life is most unpleasant.” What more reason do we need?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Because that doesn't really address the nature of existence, that being that existence is inherently temporary. Most people can't seem to deal with that. They wish to think in terms of permanence. The truth is that permanence only exists as a concept because some things are less temporary than the life of a person, or even humanity itself. We exist in the now and cannot truly see beyond it, and so if we know something to be long-lasting enough that we will be gone before it fades away as well we will generally see it as permanent.

The sun, for example, will eventually run out of nuclear fuel and change back to being gas from the plasma that it is currently, and then it will disperse back out into the universe to eventually become something else. Most people actually know about that, but because that event is a couple billion years away they see the sun as permanent even though it's temporary and they know that to be fact.

And so statements like mine are meant to dissuade the existential crisis sometimes suffered at finally coming to realize the temporary nature of everything by discarding the concept of permanence entirely. Other people just live with the cognitive dissonance and try not to think about it. Some put belief in a non-temporary concept of some kind and believe it will preserve their existence in some way. All different ways of dealing with the same problem, but I'd be lying if I said I thought that the others were very healthy.