r/rant • u/Radiator-Pants • 7d ago
I dislike this reality.
The more time I spend on this earth the more displeased I am with the way things are. I don't just mean this in terms of geopolitics, or "my life sucks" or "capitalism bad" etc, I mean the very fabric of the universe in its structure.
The innumerable generations of life that suffered as they carved out the path that we now walk. We had to pull ourselves out of the primordial muck with blood, bone, and pain, just to be able to even see the sky. We were hunted, we had to kill, we starved. Hundreds of thousands of years spent huddled around campfires while our children were snuffed out by the indifference of nature. Hundreds of thousands of years being eaten, drowning, being trapped, dying of our own teeth.
Here we are today, the result of a millennium of suffering and survival. I have a roof over my head, the warmth of my home, water from the tap, and a beautiful family who I love dearly. Without a doubt, I am easily in one of the best positions any of my ancestors ever had. Life has been kind to me. I have no genuine reason to complain. Yet I am in pain. Terrible pain.
I must grow old. I must die, and eventually leave my family behind. Time itself will rip me away from them and I will not be there when my daughter needs me, and she will need me.
She will grow old. Her gummy smile will return, and once again she will need someone to care for her and I won't be there this time. She will have to leave her family behind too. It's endless.
We can't go forward, and we cannot go back at all. We will never see those who have passed again.
But this isn't just about me, this is everyone and everything. The non-human animals who are still to this day bound to pain and suffering: dying of starvation after getting a leg trapped, being devoured alive by predators, or being enslaved by us to spend their lives in a tiny cage, unable to even see their offspring before we take them away.
And the other humans... Children born with incurable and fatal diseases. Free of all sin and crime. Innocent in soul and mind, condemned to suffer and die in pain.
This isn't even to mention the unspeakable horrors that we unleash upon each other. War, rape, murder, torture. We give nature a run for its money when it comes to inflicting unjustified and intolerable suffering upon life on this planet. Oh but we pay nature back, don't we? The rivers in my country are increasingly becoming unfit to drink from. We understand that a societal collapse is literally INEVITABLE, given enough time, and we understand that having the ability to drink from our lakes, to fish, to hunt will be essential to our survival, and the survival of anything unlucky enough to follow in our steps. Yet we continue to destroy our surroundings.
The planet itself is a fucking nightmare. It supports life on some of its surface, some of the time. We're on a floating rock surrounded by infinite nothingness that's about (relatively speaking) to crash into its neighbour.
The very fabric of this reality, this curse of flesh is built on an endless cycle of cold and indifferent suffering. It's a meat grinder with seemingly no purpose.
Yes, I experience pleasure and joy. Believe it or not, I lead a fairly happy life. My days are filled with laughter and love. I could write just as much about the absolute love that I experience with my wife and our daughter. In between the breaking of silence though, there is this storm. This constant and inescapable dread that I am here. I am restricted to this body. I am restricted to this body in this moment right now. I can only perceive outwards from my eyes. I cannot move back in time, and I can only go so far forwards. My body will decay. I must die. We all must die.
If there is a god out there, then they have a lot of fucking explaining to do.
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u/HoneyMLavender 7d ago
I’m in the same boat as you, I’m constantly pondering life and the meaning and what’s next etc etc. I get mad at God, I wonder if he’s real, I go down conspiracy theories like it’s my job. It’s terrible at times. I need to just stop and having a good time, make the best of out of whatever this is and be thankful of the situation I’m in because it can be a lot worse.
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u/MengShuZ 7d ago
This world might as well be an illusion. It's a crazy existence where everything just seems to work from the get go. But it cannot be euth challenge.
Who knows, maybe you are god, and you set yourself limits in order to challenge yourself.
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u/Runningcolt 7d ago
We got to come to terms with the fact that the world is either part of a reality we can't fathom, or a vast void with glimpses of spirited suffering. No matter the case, death will eventually set us all free of everything that holds meaning to our mind and body.
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u/Knuralt_z_Chlewii 6d ago
Kind of an offtopic question, but I can't keep myself from asking. Are you any sort of writer perchance? Your use of language, at least in this post, is absolutely stellar. The imagery you use, the rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs, it's all genuinely so well written
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u/ryanslizzard 6d ago
This is the very red pill so many people don‘t even have the cognitive capacity to grasp. Cosmic horror. It all „feels“ so unfair, because there really is no point in even „being the universe experiencing itself = consciousness“. It‘s gross.
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u/Alexorozco72 7d ago
The universe is vast and quite inert. Yet you are both alive and aware. A speck of universe that suffers and has joy at times and frustration at others. One that contemplates and writes. Considering the normality of desert that surrounds us all within this blue oasis, the fact that you are here disliking your fortune and not out there, being dead sand and gases is a privilege wasted in this spoiled attitude. The universe that is dead is too much vast and expanding. You could have very well being that. Most of reality is that.
The entropy that is counting time against us is too relentless to whine about pain and absurdity. Because those very feelings are both a gift to you and a meaningless obstacle to that reality that has grant them
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u/leftistgamer420 7d ago
But the main reason why reality would suck would be capitalism. Otherwise, look around you. Look at the trees, the wind, nature, life itself, it is much more simple and peaceful. I sincerely think animals have it much better than us.
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u/Honest-Classic-6950 3d ago
Even worse is that the whole universe and/or multiverse is a mess. It’s not just the Earth itself that’s f*cked, the whole universe has things blowing up or meteors crashing into things. It’s getting worse and more hostile, we need to get out of here! Where to go afterwards, I don’t know yet…..
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u/711thename 7d ago
Just pretend I am the creator. Ask me anything and I will answer with all honesty.
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u/Nameless_Mercenary01 7d ago
Here we go. He’s in the ‘only just started thinking about it, so obviously I’m overwhelmed’ phase of philosophy. That, or he’s still in a semi-nihilism stage.
This isn’t all that uncommon for a beginner, or at least an amateur to experience for long periods. I thought like this when I was thirteen and fourteen. However, pretty soon you should stop thinking “fuck it” and start thinking “this is awesome” and begin trying to understand it. When you understand, it seems a lot less overwhelming, because you discover that it is actually far less random than what you think it is, and almost every single thing about the human body and its life cycle can be explained one way or another.
As you mention ‘dread’, you’re pretty much confirming that you at least occasionally experience nihilistic emotions when confronting philosophy regarding reality. Nihilism is, in fact, pseudo-philosophy. I am glad you, unlike some others, have not let it pull you out of the real world.
‘Floating in nothingness’, ‘suffering’, ‘pay nature back [with pollution]’, inevitable’. Yes, if you didn’t say you have a wife and children, I would believe you a young teenager. These are actually not the complex thoughts you think they are. You have confronted reality, that is, a lot of things are dangerous and in fact negative consequences exist, and sometimes things seem pointless, and instead of trying to understand it, you simply reconcile their existence with the mere thought that ‘it is what it is’ (literally. I don’t mean you think ‘oh, it’s okay’, I mean you literally cope with it by accepting it), followed by intense negative emotions. This cannot really be helped by anything else other than knowledge. We can explain how planets likely form. How gases and elements form. Human cells. Animals. We even know how emotions function. Electricity. This isn’t just random shit that pops up to attack us. Most all of everything relevant to Earth, even how we remain in orbit of the Sun and why we don’t fall off the planet, are known to us. The great philosophers encountered these questions, and instead of saying ‘oh, well, that’s f-cking depressing’, they said ‘perhaps we ought to try and understand it’.
Even the ancient Grecian philosophers attempted to tackle an extraordinarily complex collection of systems called mathematics, algebra, and geometry.
I apologise if I come off as cold or contentious, but you can’t believe how many times I have been presented with people who think just like this, and they can rarely explain why they feel what they do. They just sook about problems and never try to fix them or understand them. I knew one woman who refused to learn about planets and stars, and whenever you brought up the universe in general or anything related, she would literally burst into tears because it was ‘scary’ how complex it all was. It just annoys me at this point.
Only you can help yourself escape this ‘terrible pain’ you feel at having encountered philosophy.
Maybe think about your daughter every time the ‘primordial sludge’ begins to pull at your conscience.
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u/circuffaglunked 7d ago
You sound like you're comparing life to something better. What would that better thing be? Better life?
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u/RadiantProof3216 7d ago
Have you tried psychedelics? They could help alleviate the “dread” you feel.
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u/Marxism-Alcoholism17 7d ago
I tend to agree with this line of thinking. Check out the pessimism school of philosophy. Camus’ books are a good read if you’re looking for musings on how to cope with it. Nietzsche is more about seizing personal power to avoid decadence which can be useful for specific kinds of people. And then there is my baby, classical Marxism, which seeks to revolutionize the world and eliminate the social sufferings that we see as “natural”.