@Solifuge
If you want my advice, and you might not:
Human experience is real. It's the most real thing there is. To paraphrase a surprisingly insightful space-horse-man, if there's nothing in the universe but what we make, let us make Good. I don't buy that hedonism is the way to do it, though. Pleasure only makes sense as the Prime Motivator when you define it so broadly as to be useless - it forces you to invent convoluted definitions of
true pleasure when you need to explain folks being altruistic, or devoted to a cause, or just plain honest. It's as if you're drawing ever-more-complicated circles of orbits to explain how the Earth is still at the center of the Universe.
Find stronger foundations. Find your pleasure in living a just life. Don't find justice in living a pleasant life. I don't know about you, but I've found that honesty, compassion, humility and genuine willingness to be vulnerable and to sacrifice for others have been worthwhile ideals. They may hurt to go through with, but I've found that when I stopped looking for profit in my relationships, most of what I'd struggled for years to engineer came to me without coercion. How much fear of pain can you take before it starts being worse than the pain itself? Maybe you have to leave behind some friend groups who make it impossible to be what you need to be, whether it's because they just can't see your value or because you've settled into an unhealthy dynamic with them that you just can't break out of. I know I left some folks behind like that as I tried to be better, and not all of them deserved it. But you do what you have to do.
I don't know how much of that applies directly to you, and at some point I noticed you snipped out your post, so I don't want to dig any deeper than I already have. If you want this deleted, too, just say so.
Author
Topic: Things that made you mildly upset today thread (Read 1224014 times)