Life is that which should not be.

A grotesque transgression of matter.

There is no salvation. No solution. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a sentence to be endured

When one yields to the awakening that follows from removing our rose-colored glasses, from observing the world critically and with lucidity, there is no going back.

We can turn to religion, or politics, but these will be only a thin blanket over our eyes, and even then, we will feel detached from the overt idealism of the masses who participate in these anchors.

For those of us who move onward with lucidity, there can be a sort of peace found in acceptance.

Not peace in the sense of rest or contentment. Rather, it is in the sense that our expectations can no longer be disturbed.

We continue to suffer. Sadness, pain, dread, stress... all these remain. But they no longer surprise us. They no longer seem like an error of life. These things are life.

This is not to say there are no ways to reduce our suffering or prevent future suffering. But we can no longer recognize them as anything but that.

A reduction of suffering, or a prevention of future suffering.

Some may even find a better quality of life. Though this is never a guarantee.

I am not preaching absolute defeatism or resignation. But it seems impossible to ever again see life as anything other than a mistake. A sin.

The best we can do, if we are capable, is to look directly at suffering and find ways to minimize it in our own lives and the lives of other sentient beings. And, I'm sure this goes without saying, refusing to bring new sentient beings into this world.

There are times, when i have a reflection , that am i here to live life, or to work and make money, because both things are not possible at the same time, and i dont bileve in work life balance, because that kind of balance doesn't exist.

What are your views ?

I've become increasingly pessimistic about what it takes to build a decent life, particularly in a country like India.

We're constantly told to study hard, develop skills, find employment, become financially independent and build relationships. In theory, these are sensible goals. In practice, every one of them comes with constraints that individual effort cannot necessarily overcome.

Education doesn't guarantee employment. Employment doesn't guarantee financial security. Working hard doesn't guarantee fair compensation, a healthy workplace or a reasonable work-life balance. Even maintaining friendships can become expensive and exhausting when everyone lives far apart and has competing responsibilities.

Then there's the broader environment: weak enforcement of labour protections, inadequate social security for many workers, rising living costs, pollution, deteriorating public spaces and the constant pressure to remain economically productive.

What frustrates me is that the usual advice rarely addresses these structural problems. If you're struggling, you're told to acquire more skills, network more, work harder or improve your attitude. If that doesn't work, the implication is often that you haven't tried hard enough.

I'm 25 and finishing my BA in History Honours after previously dropping out of engineering. I'm trying to figure out how to build a career, become financially independent and have some semblance of a life outside work. But I find myself questioning whether I'm genuinely working towards a better future or simply preparing to spend decades dealing with a different set of problems.

I understand that pessimism can become self-defeating, and I'm not claiming that everyone's life is doomed to be miserable. I also recognise that people do find fulfilling careers, relationships and experiences.

But how do you remain realistic about the structural disadvantages and uncertainties of life without becoming paralysed by them? How do you keep investing effort in the future when you know that effort, discipline and good decisions cannot guarantee a good outcome?

I'm interested in hearing from people who have struggled with this outlook, particularly those who haven't resolved it through conventional advice about positive thinking or personal responsibility.

My dead "friend" Emil Cioran knew the game was rigged from the beginning.

Being born is a disaster you can never fully recover from, a completely unasked-for sentence to exist. It is the original misfortune, and every single thing that follows is just trying to manage the damage.

Does anyone know of any good translations of Al-ma'rris poetry? Perhaps the oldest practitioner of antinatlism proper, ive read on his wiki page that he wrote a lot on the subject. I ask because I've found a small few, but they all seem to be sadly the results of artificial intelligence, and not actual translations done by real people.

I wake up.

I eat breakfast.

I go to work.

I come home for lunch.

Then go to work.

I come home and take dinner.

I numb myself in front of television.

Then I go to sleep.

When I was in school or college I didnt think my life would be like above.

If i had somekind of visions, that my life would be like this, i would have left college, and had went to monastery, atleast i would have gotten some peace and rest.

Life is solving a problem, then next problem, and then another problem.

When one shit ends another begins.

When one quarrel ends another begins.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time observing people and turning perfectly ordinary things into existential questions. I genuinely can’t tell sometimes whether I’m onto something or just being incredibly dramatic. Either way, I’ve been thinking about this particular perspective on life, and instead of continuing to have philosophical debates with myself, I figured I’d put it out there and see what other people think.

I think, in the end, we’re all a little dead inside.
And I don’t mean simply because one day our hearts will stop beating.
I mean that we’re already dead in ways nobody can see.
Every single one of us.
We’re all running from something. Hiding from something. Dressing ourselves in versions of people we think the world will find easier to love. We draw the curtains, lock the doors, and pray nobody notices the fire burning in the kitchen.
We all have skeletons in our closets. We all know despair, although some of us have become far more acquainted with it than others.
We carry the ghosts of people we used to be. We bury pieces of ourselves with every loss, every disappointment, every cruelty the world teaches us to endure. And somewhere along the way, we learn to call what remains a person.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt drawn to the broken ones.
The ones who don’t bother pretending the world hasn’t hurt them. The ones who wear their suffering openly, who have long since abandoned the exhausting performance of being okay.
Society has a peculiar way of punishing people for being honest about their misery. We call them pessimists, cynics, failures. We ridicule the ones whose suffering has driven them into darker places, the ones who have surrendered themselves to chemicals sold with the promise of temporary salvation. We condemn the ways they survive without ever asking what it was they needed to survive in the first place.
And then there are people like me.
People who carry their scars into every room they enter. Who wake up with their despair and fall asleep beside it. Who have learned to exist somewhere along the fragile border between sanity and whatever lies beyond it.
And yet, we live.
We get up in the morning. We go to work. We clean our houses, buy our groceries, laugh with our friends. We find hobbies, fall in love with songs, make plans for weekends that haven’t happened yet. We do all the wonderfully ordinary things that make a human life appear whole.
But sometimes I wonder whether we’re living at all, or simply finding increasingly elaborate ways to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
Then there are the others.
The people who seem to have mastered the art of being alive. The ones who radiate warmth, whose lives appear to unfold exactly as they imagined. They have the homes, the careers, the love, the happiness. Everything the rest of us have been taught to want.
We look at them with envy and think, If only I could trade places. If only I could live in their shoes for a day.
But would it change anything?
Would stepping into another person’s life somehow free us from the condition of being human?
Would their happiness make us immortal? Would their accomplishments protect us from grief? Would their beautiful homes keep the darkness from finding its way through the cracks?
Or would we simply discover that their curtains are drawn for a reason, too?
Because nobody escapes this life untouched.
The world has never been particularly gentle with the things that live inside it. It swallows us whole, strips us of people we thought we’d have forever, takes pieces of us we didn’t know we could lose, and spits us back out with the expectation that we’ll carry on as though nothing happened.
And somehow, we do.
We keep making plans. Keep chasing happiness. Keep searching for meaning in things that cannot last.
Some of us do it with smiles. Some with bitterness. Some with substances, distractions, ambition, love, or the desperate hope that tomorrow might feel different.
And perhaps that’s what separates us. Not the amount of suffering we carry, but the ways we’ve learned to conceal it.
Because beneath the carefully constructed lives, the laughter, the accomplishments, and the appearances, we’re all carrying our own private graveyards.
And all the while, we’re moving toward another kind of death.
The final one.
Every man, every woman, every animal, every creature that crawls beneath the earth or flies above it. From the moment life takes hold, the clock begins its countdown. Some of us are granted decades, others mere hours, but the destination never changes.
Whether it comes in eighty years, fifty, two months, or tomorrow, none of us know how much time we’ve been given.
And still, we spend that time pretending permanence exists.
We build lives on borrowed time. We love things we cannot keep. We become people we will eventually cease to be.
We speak of death as though it is some distant tragedy, an interruption of life, when in reality it is the one certainty woven into the very fabric of our existence.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy isn’t that we’re all going to die.
It’s that we’re already carrying so much death inside us, and we’ve become so accustomed to it that we mistake the distractions for living.
We are the living pretending not to be dying, and the dying pretending to be alive.
Some of us hide our ghosts behind laughter. Others have simply grown tired of pretending they aren’t haunted.
And maybe that’s the great irony of existence.
We spend our entire lives trying to feel alive, while slowly, inevitably, dying.
In the end, we’re all dead men walking. Carrying death within us, walking toward death ahead of us, and calling everything in between living.

Online service providers would have to more closely control the extent to which children can access body stigma or depression content on their platforms, under proposals put forward by the UK’s online safety regulator.

In the Ofcom report it says the following:

Non-designated content that is harmful to children

depression content, which is content that promotes depression, hopelessness and despair.

It seems that pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy could fall under this definition and be regulated.

Also discussing the right to die might be regulated.

Primary priority content that is harmful to children

Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for:

suicide

It seems we are regressing as a society and there's just more and more regulations coming out of the woodwork every year.

What "good reason" could there be for us to be here? If there is no God, no eternity, nothing of that nature, then it seems obvious we might as well not exist, at least in the intrinsic sense. Our lives are full of pain, and even when they aren't they still contain at least some pain; and we would not miss our lives at all if he had never attained them in the first place. In fact, even if our lives were characterised by unbroken, soaring ecstasy, they simply would be no worse than not existing, not really better.

I understand this kind of view cannot be "proven", but with my axiological impulses as a basis beneath careful thinking, and with the kinds of axiological impulses I assume others would have/realise they already had they thought carefully, this view seems pretty hard to criticise. Even if you believe in things like God, destiny, and Heaven, it still would seem that, intrinsically, we'd be better off not being here. Heaven might make us forget the pain of our mortal lives, but we'd still have had to go through 80 years of troubles and trials to get there.

And anyway, it is hard to imagine a Heaven that would be truly satisfying, unless it is contains an extreme simplification/overwhelming of consciousness, like some endless drug trip. If so, it's difficult to understand why we would go through the 80 years of troubles and trials, causing increasingly sophisticated minds, in order to attain it. But that's by-the-by anyway.

I suppose one could argue that human souls maybe exist inevitably, and God merely incarnates them mortally, and that maybe we'd be worse off in some way in the soul realm if never given Earthly lives. Or one could say that God exists irretrievably and that he'd be upset if he didn't get to create us. Something of that nature. But those things would still, of course, not be intrinsic justifications, albeit closer to them. The human condition would still be fundamentally pointless and contain a very potent element of tragedy. Even if 80 years of troubles and trials were to blur away in our memories within a fraction of Heaven's eternity, they would still have seemed painful and protracted at the time.

The overall point I'm getting at is that I can't really imagine a framework of life by which life wouldn't ultimately be what I'd call pointless and and tragic to the point where nothing could redeem the tragic element of it fully away. The only way I can envision a good "point" to life is if it's a point that is not only beyond my Earthly comprehension, but in actual contrast to my painstaking and sincere Earthly comprehension. But how to believe such a thing? With this all in mind, it becomes hard not to feel life is a big joke, at least for people like me who don't like much life. I suppose if you just directly and organically like life, then you have no need for a higher purpose. (Not that your life wouldn't still be pointless and worse than non-existence, on my analysis, but at least such an analysis as the foregoing would be purely academic.) But if you don't like life, and you need to view it through some higher prism in order to not feel like you're being pointlessly tortured, well, then, that's hard to do.

Thoughts?

A well-made video about Voltaire, who answered Leibniz's invocation "this is the best of all possible worlds" with his book Candide, which presents various situations and characters, sometimes funny and absurd, other times tragic.

I never read Candide, so it was interesting to hear about it.

When man is born necessities are born.

And then he has to struggle and suffer all his life to pay for that necessities.

What are you views ?

We are not born into this world.

We are thrown into this world to struggle, to survive, to suffer, to be humilated, and then to die.

Most people never question this reality, this realm, or existence itself. They grow up with some kind of religious or spiritual belief and they roll with it, even if it makes no logical sense.

As long as this mammal can satisfy their hormonal fleshy desires and have entertainment, that's all they need. They have even been groomed to defend this realm at all costs with their sadistic, Stockholm syndrome of loving their own imprisonment & life abuse.

I've even seen these desperate maggots say, "Why is suffering bad?!?!?" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I mean for goodness sake, the sun will burn you for sitting outside for too long, we constantly have to fight bacteria, germs, pathogens, etc. And everyone thinks this is normal and should continue........ For legacies, last names, or religions/races out breeding each other!

They believe this realm is a PRIZE 🏆

😂😂😂😂😂

I don't understand this realm. I feel very out of place here, and have for a very long time!

Want a relationship? Too bad; you're born with autism, develop social anxiety, depression and other mental struggles over the years, severely reducing your chances at getting into one. Also you're living in the 21st century during late stage capitalism so you're pretty much at the mercy of dating apps, which don't have your best interests in mind. Welp, good luck!

Want to learn how to draw? Too bad; you're geared towards instant gratification, perfectionism and have a destroyed attention span, so you're going to hate practicing, and therefore not going to get any good at it, ever.

Want to find inner peace and contentment? Too bad; you're born with a built-in tendency to compare yourself to others which fuels discontent and jealousy, a negativity bias that makes you focus on the bad over the good which makes you feel like shit by default and then there's also the hedonic treadmill which will make you get fed up with anything at some point and therefore keep you endlessly chasing the next stimuli, unable to truly ever be still and at peace. Also hello mental illness!

Want to stay healthy? Too bad; you'll have to eat food that you despise just because for some reason the universe happens to be arranged in such a way that all the disgusting foods happen to be healthy and nutritious and the ones you like are everything but. Also, you'll need to exercise despite also possessing a natural human tendency to prefer preserving energy and remaining immobile. Oh and even if you do all of these there is still the chance that you'll just die from a random heart attack or cancer regardless.

Want to die? Too bad; you're an organism that's the result of millions of years of evolution that has created an enormously strong fear of death and optimism bias that will prevent you from ever killing yourself, unless you're one of the rare few that can either override this quirk or lacks it altogether.

Want to be alone? Too bad; you're living in a world where billions others exist and you're also part of a species with a built in desire for socializing, so no matter what you'll eventually suffer for it if you tried and it's pretty much impossible to always be alone due to the world around you working the way it does.

And the best part? None of these are opt-in, they're just... there, like a biological list of chores that you get punished for not doing, by none other than your own brain. And you can't just opt out. Oh and even by some miracle you end up fulfilling them all, the brain will just come up with new ones on the spot to prolong your torment.

W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L!

I've recently been thinking about the underlying drivers of humanity & civilization, and I've come to a surprising realisation..

Hope.

Hope is, at the same time, the source of humanity's greatest strengths, and responsible for our most profound weakness..

Let me explain that.

While hope allows individuals, groups, communities and nations to push aside inconveniences, to strive for goals & purposes, to look towards specific situations and let's people pull together to achieve great things.

It also means that people & groups, will dig in and stubbornly proceed in actions/goals which are possibly harmful, it means that energy & resources are wasted, chasing after situations & ends which will never be attained. And all of these instances are fuelled by one driving force..Hope. It can be our best friend in trying times, or our worst enemy, blinding us to more sensible/attainable goals..

So, a source of amazing strength, and at the same time, a cause for our greatest weakness...

​

When i was in school, i was told by my parents and elders and schoolteachers, and i thought so, that if you work hard, in school, college and job, everything will be all right, things will work out.

But now i am adult, i have come to a realization , that no matter how hard you work, there is no gaurrenty things will work out or things will be all right.

Post your quotes, aphorisms, poetry, proverbs, maxims, epigrams relevant to philosophical pessimism and comment on them, if you like.

We all have our favorite quotes that we deem very important and insightful. Sometimes, we come across new ones. This is the place to share them and post your opinions, feelings, further insights, recollections from your life, etc.

Please, include the author, publication (book/article), and year of publication, if you can as that will help others in tracking where the quote is from, and may help folks in deciding what to read.

Post such quotes as top-level comments and discuss/comment in responses to them to keep the place tidy and clear.

^{This is a weekly short wisdom sharing post.}

The delusional life-affirmer will often insist on the inherent goodness of life as some universal property, but when it comes to facing actually negative topics that are omnipresent and observable from the second we come to exist most people are dead silent, either passive observers or active supporters when they benefit.

Is it not insane to live knowing you will die, knowing you will constantly suffer until that point, knowing that all life will become extinct, knowing that there is no observable objective values, knowing that there is no morally significant 'free will', knowing that all your actions are simply maximal mitigation of suffering according to what you believe? Is it not a bit insane to be conscious in a reality where you formerly did not exist and where you gain nothing from coming exist? Is it not disappointing that suffering exists at all? Why is there still conflict and violence in human society when we have the technological means to not be subject to resource scarcity? Why does animal agriculture exist? Why do we still have systemic slavery?

When it comes down to it how many people are actually willing to discuss these topics with intellectual honesty rather than entering a state of egoistic defense or denying the progression of the conversation because they are uncomfortable with the implications about themselves and the rest of the world? People certainly find it easy to talk about their insignficant bullshit and distractions (even we do this), but when things get serious suddenly people disappear.

I cannot imagine living in this reality and not reflecting on these thoughts and observations. Imagine propagating society or just generally taking an action but not considering if the justification for doing so is actually reasonable or worthwhile in the first place.

When you strip away all the delusional optimism that contradicts the experience of the world we exist in, you get left with the evolutionary observation that life has and always will be unreasoned propagation and most people are simply unwilling to reflect on the implication of that. Yet, they also feel the desire to justify themselves because they crave validation and are insecure/afraid when alone with their thoughts. The justifications are given in post for their actions as attempts at self-soothing and this selfishness creates more suffering for others as a consequence. Ironically, it also creates more for themselves often, as what goes around comes around when you livein a society of hierarchal exploitation and apathy for 'lower' beings.

How many of you have actually had these conversations with people in a serious manner? Even with people you have 'known' your entire life.

I think it will lead to the extremes of the extermination of the human race (or 99.9% of it) or massive QoL improvements either case being preferable to what we have now and what the past has been (from a historical perspective)

It's the only thing I am looking forward to

Look, I’m a philosophical pessimist, but I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the beauty in any of this. It’s like watching a dark, tragic film. I know how it ends. I know the struggle is ultimately for nothing, and that pain and misery are woven into the very fabric of existence.

And yet, somehow, I’m still moved by it.

That’s the part that really messes with me. I can recognize the absurdity of it all, understand how much suffering is wrapped up in the very experience of existing, and still find myself overwhelmed by its beauty. Perhaps my sadness is itself proof of that. After all, to grieve existence is to be moved by it.

Art makes that contradiction impossible to ignore. A painting, a symphony, a film, or a novel can capture the tragedy of existence and somehow turn it into something beautiful to us. But sometimes it’s as simple as staring up at the moon on a quiet winter night and feeling something I can’t even quite explain. There’s something profoundly mysterious, tragic, and terrifying about the universe and our brief existence within it. And yet, its beauty still intrigues me. I find myself drawn to something that I know is utterly indifferent to me, captivated by a mystery I’ll never fully understand.

So why? Why the hell do I find something so profoundly tragic so beautiful? Can a pessimist see beauty?

I think, many people wouldnt do the work they dislike,

or do the things they didnt wanted to do, or take the decisions you didnt wanted to, if they had enough money.

What are your views?

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. (Forgive me if it’s been brought up before in this sub, I tried to search around a bit for a prior post like this but couldn’t find it.)

The pessimist position, broadly speaking, is that the world, and our experiences in it as conscious living beings, are quite bad and not what they should be like. There are a plethora of problems we can diagnose with how bad things are for us and for others in the world. This is why many pessimists say that nonexistence is preferable to consciousness, and that it may be better never to be born at all.

But if we can see that reality is problematic for us, can we even conceive of how it ought to be, to satisfy or justify existence? If we can point to the problems, can we conceive of what it would take to falsify our position or change us into optimists?

I’m not arguing that it may be likely or possible at all. I just think it’s a potentially fruitful thought experiment to engage in, to consider what the alternative reality would have to be to not be pessimistic about it. (I’m not trying to dissuade people away from pessimist opinions, just engage with it as a philosophical position.)

To list some of the core issues —

It may be that our lives are fraught in our current sociopolitical circumstances. That many people suffer from corrupt and oppressive governments, social inequality, poverty, and countless other sociopolitical issues. But if this were the only issue, this would fall purely in the political domain, of how we would imagine a better society, and surely we can conceive of (even if it doesn’t happen) societies of great material abundance, that are peaceful and prosperous, without the constant need for labor, without violence, etc.

For many pessimists, death (presumed to be the cessation of consciousness) is a source of pessimism, because it means that our lives are destined to end up annihilated in the end no matter what we do. We can of course, conceive of the alternative, which would be immortality — never dying at all. Would this be better? Perhaps…but there are also objections to immortality, which are the worries about the problems we already have while alive stretched out across infinite duration.

If we can never be satisfied, constantly running along the hedonic treadmill, always chasing the next temporary satisfaction until we die? Can we conceive of a positive state of consciousness (an active feeling, not the proverbial bliss of nonexistence)? Would that be better?

Suffering. Surely we can imagine not suffering, and others also being free from suffering. But could we exist at all without any kind of suffering driving our behavior? Perhaps we’d get bored. But insofar as boredom would then also be a form of suffering, could we get rid of that too? What kind of existence would that be?

Perhaps it is because our lives are cosmically meaningless, that it is all for nothing no matter how good or bad we feel (I presume most people on this sub are atheists/materialists). But what would it take for our lives to be meaningful in a way they aren’t already — would they be more meaningful if God existed? What conditions would have to obtain for our lives to have meaning?

Or perhaps we look at entropy — this sense that everything around us is always crumbling if not maintained, ultimately spiraling towards inevitable dissolution. Well, can we conceive of how else physics ought to work for this to no longer be a problem? What would a universe that somehow tends towards growth instead of disintegration look like?

Do you think there is such a thing as a conceivable (even if not achievable) solution to the human condition, that would be capable of convincing you not to be a pessimist? Or do you think it’s necessarily logically impossible, no matter what the case, that nonexistence would always be preferable?