The Existential Dilemma: Part One

[Elizabeth (imported)]

Being an existentialist there is this dilemma. It goes like this: Liberalism ultimately leads to nihilism with existentialism there somewhere in the middle. Liberalism is born out of this idea that all men are created equal and therefore have the same right to exist. The idea that everyone has the same exact right to exist is existentialism. That means there can be no “holy men” or kings. No accumulation of wealth and power, as everyone exists equally as human beings.

Because of these reasons and countless others and the fact that the existentialist does not need to rely on deity for happiness, means there is no religion of any kind. The existentialist accepts that he dies and does not have an afterlife. He accepts that eventually all the stars everywhere will die out and at some point in time humanity will cease to exist. Everything that everyone ever did was for nothing.

This is Nihilism. Basically nothing matters because in the end, everyone is going to die and there will be no one left to remember or to read the writings of who we once were. So if in the end, nothing matters, why not just kill ourselves right now? Hence, the existentialist dilemma, or as William Shakespeare said “To be or not to be?”.

I can tell you, this can be a serious problem for the person who has reached this point in reasoning. It can make it impossible to get motivated to do the things in life that we need to just to survive. If in the end one simply dies? Why bother? If in the end there is no one left to care, than who cares about posterity? Does the right to exist make it meaningful? Is there any reason to prefer existing to not existing?

To be continued

Elizabeth

[Cainanite (imported)]

I don't know about others, but for me the answer to the dilemma is simple. The journey is its own reward.

The idea that there is no point, because we will all just die anyway, and there is no continuity to our lives, because the world and universe will end, and there is no afterlife, seems like a dead end to me. It requires of me, a sort of arrogance I am not capable of.

The arrogance I speak of, is the idea that for my life to have meaning, I have to be able to affect all of the eternity that follows me. It is absurd. To be truly nihilistic, I would have to think that my existence must shake the foundations of the universe for eternity, or, If I cannot be assured of that, then there is no point to my life.

I look at life and my existence in a much smaller way. I am given only a limited amount of time on this Earth. My choices have value to me because they cascade effect over that limited amount of time... my time. If the ripples of my actions only have a limited range, and those ripples do not extend further than my own lifetime, I cannot complain. I enjoyed the ripples while I made them. They were important to me, and it was my own journey. That they last the duration of my journey is all I can ask.

My actions, decisions, and life have meaning, because they have meaning to me. I might hope that my ripples of life extend beyond my time here on Earth, but I cannot know that after I die. Once my time is ended, those ripples can no longer affect me. They might grow in intensity, or simply fade out. There is no way for me to know, once my journey is over.

The problem people have is a fear that their own existence will end. Most people cannot fathom the idea that what they are, will one day, not be. This fear has given rise to all kinds of notions of eternal lives. I don't really understand that thinking. The idea of living forever is a horrible nightmare for me. I just cannot wrap my mind around that notion.

When people challenge me on that idea (that life ends), it is usually to ask, "Then what is the meaning of life? Why live at all? Why not just kill yourself, if nothing matters?"

My answer is, "My meaning of life is to find meaning in my life. I live because I am alive. I don't kill myself, because my life matters to me. I am enjoying my journey."

My eternity started the day I became self aware. My eternity will end on the day of my death. In between point A and point B is everything I will ever have, and everything I will ever be. It was the creation of my universe, and will be the death of my reality. Lets say the time between those two points is 80 years. For me, that 80 years is as precious as the 14 billion years of the entire cosmos. I could not trade one for the other. Because it is my life, my 80 years is equal to an infinity.

Once I realize that my 80 years is all the time I am given, then it instantly has value. Not because time goes on, but because from my perspective, time will not go on. On my last day, my time stops. The only meaning I can derive, is what meaning I have while I am living. There is no meaning after I am gone. Meaning is a concept for the here and now. It is not a concept for after I am gone.

I am not looking for a divine parent to take me aside after I die, and say, "Good boy. Well done!" The only approval that really matters is the approval I give to myself. I don't need to look back on my life after it is over, and make judgements after the fact. I can judge my own life, and my own meaning in the here and now. Trying to judge my life, beyond the scope of my life, is an arrogance I cannot accept.

I can find plenty of meaning within the scope of my own life. That is all I can honestly ask. It is all anyone really can do.

[transward (imported)]

Existentialism? That's absurd.

Transward

(w/ thanks to Albert [Camus that is])

[butterflyjack (imported)]

This is probably the greatest, most profound subject I can think of.. I keep harkening back to my own experiences...My grandfather and father's deaths, and their living on in my mind, (and, I presume, in my brother's and , I assume a few other's minds).. After we're gone, they will probably be completely forgotten...and such will likely be the case for me, and the vast majority of people...I like Cainanite's outlook...,

(because the hard and cold facts are glum, at best)...living in the moment..in our moments (our lives)..

Right now, I'm shooting for 85...Only 18 years to closing time..and I try not to dwell on these finite facts. Sometimes it feels as though I am burying my head in the sand, hoping these facts will go away...It sure would be nice to delude myself into believing in an afterlife, but I cannot waste this precious time on fairy tales.. Thanks

Jackie

[janekane (imported)]

For myself, I take my awareness of my existence as an act of the ignorance of blind faith, and therefore have no place in my life for any religious dogma or doctrine.

Nonetheless:

At whatever peril may arise from my being as truthful with words as my being autistic may permit:

I am also an existentialist, being so for the simple reason that I find that existence, whatever it is, has always been what I have observed as though it, including its apparently being observable, is, ultimately, all that I have ever yet observed.

As I am able to observe, my life agglomeration of observations includes some personally/subjectively-irrefutable observations that contravene reality as apparently defined by some subcultural forms of social consensus.

My understanding of the existence of existence is grounded in the limit of my grasp of applied theoretical biology, as of the work of Walter M. Elsasser, Robert Rosen, Francisco Varela, A. H. Louie, and many more people whose life effort has been directed toward making some sort of usefully functional model of "ultimate reality."

I have intended to persuade anyone to believe or understand as I do; I have indefatigably endeavored to deny to other people any way of defining me in terms of their lives to a comparable extent as I decline to define other people in terms of my life.

In do doing, I have found it necessary unriddle what I find may most usefully be deemed "child abuse" in terms of traumatic neurological injury to persons as a function of social/cultural socialization traditions. The approach I have taken is based upon biological pattern recognition methodologies (my doctoral advisor's area of special expertise) as applied to forms of brain scan observations indicative of physical brain damage in response to traumatic experiences. This work is, as I learned during the Fall Conference of the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, MA, last weekend, is apparently at the "cutting edge" of trauma research.

The existential philosophy upon which I have based and developed my research into the biology of trauma is an aspect of process philosophy (Whitehead, Hartshorne, and others).

http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/

Put as simply as I have yet been able to state my sense of understanding of ultimate process reality in English-language words, the Process of Ultimate Reality is, "Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient."

In my process-philosophy view, for a reasonably accurate observation to occur, there must be an interaction between an observer and an observed, and the observer, as well as the observed, as well as the process of observation, all need to be reasonably accurate. However, I find that the notion of reasonable accuracy is itself vulnerable to inaccuracy of reason, as may be understood in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This notion has consistently invited me into the realm of the philosophical issue of self-reference regarding nested sets that are inextricably, mutually, self-referential.

During the night of March 13-14, 1960, I stayed up to help time lunar occultations at the Goodsell Observatory at Carleton College, during the March, 1960 lunar total eclipse. Came the next morning, somewhat short on sleep, I went to my classes, went to lunch with my fellow scullions at the Margaret Evans Hall dining room, and, after lunch, went to my physical education swimming class in the swimming pool in the basement of Sayles-Hill Gymnasium. I had been practicing underwater swimming, with a buddy system well in place and under the supervision of a Red Cross Water Safety Instructor. Perhaps I took one breath too many to avoid what happened, however, shortly after I pushed off from the shallow end of the pool, I blacked out, and my body settled, unconscious, to the bottom of the pool. No one noticed my having "gone missing" for the duration of the class, which lasted about half an hour after I blacked out. At the end of the class, the other students and Instructor left the pool area, and the last person to leave, a person who was not actually blind, but who was "legally blind," later told me that, after he turned of the lights and walked through the door to the pool, he was turned around without conscious will, and observed that something about the pool did not "look right." He called out in alarm, and others came, and pulled my body out of the pool and notified the college physician, whose offices were in the Sayles-Hill building. One student ran to my room and notified one of my roommates of my "drowning." That student was a biology major who had worked the prior summer in a hospital, and who had become acquainted with the color of the cyanosis of death. He hurried to the pool area, and, when he got there, he noticed that I was of the color of the cyanosis of death. I had not been breathing for more than 35 minutes, and had been in warm enough water that the near-freezing-water death-avoiding reflex ought not to have been available to me. The college physician, all else having failed, finally decided to inject a large bolus of epinephrine directly into my heart muscles. The effect, according to my roommate, was my starting to stir, cough up a little water and lunch from my stomach, and resume breathing.

The people who had pulled my body from the pool had, as I understand, at the physician's direction, placed me on a metal table from a room near the pool, and, when I began to breathe, I also began to stir, and I understand that the college physician directed people present to hold me so my body would not fall off the table. Yet unconscious, and evidently in a partial coma, as I stirred, and people held me so my body would not fall off the table, my body went into a form of hypnotic-strength reaction to being held down. The campus policeman had arrived, he weighed about 300 pounds, and was asked to hold my ankles. According to my roommate, I lifted the campus policeman off the floor by raising my legs while being held down elsewhere by other people. After something like fifteen minutes of such hypnotic-strength reaction to being held, someone decided to get some wrestling mats from an adjacent room and the people holding me put me there, where I thrashed around like a cat dying from having been run over by a car for about ten minutes, and then became physically calm, and was taken by ambulance to a medical facility where an electroencephalogram did not reveal any trace of anoxia-caused brain damage. No evidence of any trace of anoxya-caused brain damage has ever appeared following my not breathing for over 35 minutes, most of which time was spent in warm water. I was in a coma until early in the morning of March 15, 1960. When I finally woke up, around mid-morning of March 15, 1960, my muscles had been so "worn out" that I could not initially even raise my arms at the elbows off the mattress of the hospital bed upon which my body was lying.

As I woke up, I had a sense of a memory of having been through an event somewhat of the sort that has been named "a near-death experience." However what I remember of what I remember is not like the reports of "other near-death" experiences of which I had read. There was no "tunnel." And there was no encounter with "God" or "Saints" or supposedly dead people. What there was, for I wrote about it soon thereafter, is what remains with me now, a memory of being in the immediate presence of "all the power there will ever be." By, "all the power there will ever be, " I mean whatever made existence itself, including whatever made any and every "gods" or "God" that may exist, and that may have created tangible existence.

As I remember, not in words, but only in pure meaning, I described the whole of my life as an autistic person in terms of the abuse I had experienced while surrounded by human society, and inquired, not in words, of "all the power there will ever be," as to whether it was a time when I might be free of a life of such difficulty. The reply from "all the power there will ever be," was, not in words, "There is more that you may do." To which my reply, not in words, was, "All right." It was then that, so I understand, the legally-blind person was turned around without his willing to so turn, and he noticed something not right about the appearance of the swimming pool, even though the pool was dark because he had turned off the lights in the pool area.

In 1972, my dad died from cancer. By 1984, my bioengineering studies had resolutely informed me that I was a member of a "cancer family" in which treatment of cancer had never been able to stop death from terminal cancer soon after the presence of cancer had been detected. So, based on my grasp of bioengineering, cancer risk, and effective cancer-prevention, I arranged for my bilateral orchiectomy early in the summer of 1986. Came the next week, and my brother, who had been asymptomatic as I was arranging to get my orchiectomy, was found to have the form of terminal cancer I sought to prevent.

With my brother's imminent cancer death as more evidence of risk, I finally got the effective attention of a proper gastroenterologist, who found that I did have a form of polyposis cancer gene, and who, soon thereafter, did my colectomy. Morphine, given for post-surgical pain not only helped with that pain, but also reduced the remembered pain of my being repeatedly paddled until I shattered into agitated catatonic states while I was in second grade at Marshall School, in Eureka, California.

Because I understood very well by then that such remembered pain reduction may lead to violently destructive psychotic breaks, I successfully acquired voluntary psychiatric inpatient status because I could not imagine any better way to keep my body and the bodies of other people adequately safe while I worked through the meaning of what led me to ask of "all the power there will ever be" whether March 13, 1960 was a time when I might be free of a life of such difficulty as mine.

In 1973, as a member of AAAS, I received my copy of Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places."

http://www.walnet.org/llf/ROSENHAN-BEINGSANE.PDF

When morphine took me into a morphine-induced iatrogenic psychosis, in 1986, I recognized that my iatrogenic psychosis might allow my doing a variation of Rosenhan's pseudopatient study as a real patient. And that is what I did.

By Thanksgiving, 1987, I had been taking prescribed psychotropic medications for most of a year, and they had notably increased my iatrogenic psychosis. On Thanksgiving eve, November 16, 1987, I had progressed from "one-on one" to "fifteens" in the fifth floor unit of Charter-Barclay Hospital, in Chicago. "One-on-one"? A private-duty nurse was assigned to be within three feet of me at all times, no matter what. And "fifteens" was a "step up" from being "QRed in full leathers." "QRed in full leathers"? In a psychiatric hospital "Quiet Room," secured with restraints (usually made by the Humane Restraint Company, then of Madison, Wisconsin) from ankles and wrists to the corners of the bed in the Quiet Room.

The simple truth, as best I can tell it, is that I apparently did the full iatrogenic psychotropic trip about as far as it can be taken without its killing the person taking it.

About 10:00 PM, on Thanksgiving eve, 1987, I went to bed in the corridor of the fifth floor unit of Charter-Barclay Hospital, as was necessary when on fifteens. In a few minutes, I fell asleep, only to waken about five minutes later, having experienced a fragment of a dream. It came to me that I would wisely remember the dream fragment, so I parked it in "permanent memory," and again fell asleep for about five minutes, and awoke with another dream fragment which I also parked in permanent memory, This pattern of falling asleep, having a dream fragment, parking it in permanent memory, and falling asleep again lasted until about 4:00 AM on Thanksgiving morning. With each dream fragment, I found myself experiencing vastly deeper and more profound depression. When, for the last time I fell asleep that way, I had never imagined the experience of such utterly infinite terror of depression being at all possible. However, the next time I woke up, after another five minutes or so, I was neither depressed nor at all manic; I was rather flawlessly euthymic, as the dream was complete and I understood it.

What can I put in words about that November 26-27, 1987 dream, as I remember it? It was as though I as able to "see" the whole universe of universes from the outside, from before "the beginning" until "after the end," and, in that dream, there is no possible path from now to any actual end; the totality of all universes is a creatively evolving singularity within which time does not actually exist other than as an aspect of the observability of the process(es) of existence itself. Within that dream were the "original" ideas that became the core of my doctoral bioengineering thesis and dissertation.

Within that Thanksgiving, 1987, dream was that, were I willing to test the reality of the content of that dream without any faltering of personal effort, it would lead to my properly earning a doctorate in bioengineering with an existential model of neurological injury and its healing that would clearly and verifiably show humanity the way to the forever-after end of the epoch of human destructiveness within which humanity is presently effectively embedded.

How do I understand my life? Perhaps I may be a "Strong Thief."

From the Olga Marx translation of Martin Buber, "Tales of the Hasidim," Schocken Books, New York, 1947, 1975, 1991, page 104, used with written permission:

The Strong Thief

The maggid of Mezritch said:

"Every lock has its key which is fitted to it and opens it. But there are strong thieves who know how to open without keys. They break the lock. So every mystery in the world can be unriddled by the particular kind of meditation fitted to it. But God loves the strong thief who breaks the lock open: I mean the man who breaks his heart for God."

To me, as an aspect of human biology, "God" is a name for, and perhaps merely a name for, the existential "Reason Why," such that, if there is no Reason Why, then the Reason Why is the reason why there is no Reason Why.

Unriddle that, and, for all I can yet understand, you may find the key to understanding the remedy for human destructiveness within your grasp.

For the Reason Way, all things possible are possible in their appropriately necessary and sufficient way.

I recall a story, one I remember as of the Baha'i Faith, wherein, on the dawn of a new day, among people living on a mountain, there will be one person who sees the first ray of light seen on that new day; neither that person nor ray of light is more nor less special than any other person or ray of light. Consider that the mountain may be nearly spherical and named, in English, "Earth," and the light in question is the practicable existential understanding of the neurological injury of the trauma of traditional shame-based child socialization; that is, the infant-child transition that is so traumatic and so brain-damaging as to apparently render a plausible majority of adults incapable of accurately remembering their life prior to said transition.

I have included the following in prior Internet postings, and include it here for completeness:

From Robert C. Scaer, M.D., P.C., “The Trauma Spectrum,” W.W. Norton, New York - London, 2005, page 58, used with written permission from W.W. Norton:

Trauma As Imprisonment of the Mind

In Chapter 1, I defined the mind as “a perceptual experience, generated by a complex set of synapses, neurons, and neurochemical states, determined by genes, instincts, and experience, that is capable of developing and directing novel behavior.” In the brain of the trauma victim, the synapses, neurons, and neurochemicals have been substantially altered by the effects of a unique life experience. Not surprisingly, the perceptual experience that constitutes the mind has been equally altered. This alteration more than anything else is a corruption of procedural memory, that part of our intrinsic memory that is most involved in acquisition of survival skills. We depend on learned cues in our environment to distinguish positive versus negative survival-based information. If we have not learned to distinguish between these types of cues, we lose our edge in the survival game. In trauma, cues to an event that is over and done with are stored in procedural memory as if the event had never been completed.

Trauma thus represents a time-based corruption of learning. The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future. This confusion of time further immobilizes the trauma victim, who still remains immobilized by a thwarted freeze discharge. Procedural memory is bombarded by environmental and internal cues that represent old, unresolved threat. Declarative memory is assaulted by intrusive thoughts, memories, and dreams that repetitively warn the person of potential danger. Furthermore, the constant activation of brain circuitry related to threat alters and suppresses structure and function in the verbal and thinking brain. Trauma indeed is a state of imprisonment.

The above two paragraphs from "The Trauma Spectrum" as about as concise a description of the lock I broke, and I broke it because I find that the maggid of Mezritch was mistaken; one lock was made before the first key was invented. The lock of trauma as a state of imprisonment of the mind was made without the making of any key fitted to it that could ever open it.

The only way I was able to find to make a key fitted to the lock of the mind of trauma was to break the lock in myself, for myself and others, so as to understand the lock mechanism well enough to make a key not only fitted to it, but that opens it, and that anyone can safely use when ready to use it.

The key is:

Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient.

And I made that key through carefully exploring the realm of existential religious process thought no less than through exploring the realm of applied theoretical biology.

People have successfully used that key. One such person, a mental health professional, is described in my bioengineering dissertation. This person had been under cost-unlimited psychiatric care for about twenty years, when the person came to me, having heard of my work "through the grapevine." The person asked me to explain my work, and told me of being married to another mental health professional. The couple and I agreed to meet the next day for about 90 minutes. We met, and, at the end of the 90 minutes, they asked to meet with me for another 90 minutes the next day. We so met. At the end of the second 90 minutes the mental health professional who had been working one month out of three for about 20 years (one month of work, one month sliding into a depression that only electro-convulsive therapy had ever seemed to resolve, electro-convulsive therapy, a month of recovery from said therapy, and a month of working, and the next slide into depression), said to me that the method was understood and would work.

That mental health professional had a scheduled psychiatrist session the next day, at which it had been planned to make the arrangements for the next electro-convulsive therapy event. At that session, the mental health professional told the psychiatrist that further electro-convulsive therapy would not be necessary, because the problem that had required it had been solved. That mental health professional has never again needed electro-convulsive therapy and has never since taken a day off from work because of mental illness.

That mental health professional is not the only person who has successfully used the key to unlock traumatic imprisonment of the mind.

Until after I had about a week to process the events of the Fall Conference of the Erikson Instutute of the Austen Riggs Center to my satisfaction, I was not ready to give the key out to the whole world for everyone to learn of its fitness to the traumatic imprisonment of their minds. Now, I am satisfied that the key is ready, and that people are becoming ready to use it as each person deems appropriate.

How do I know that the key works? It is as though it was given to me to test well before I was born, I have tested it in every way I have been able to imagine for more than 73 years; I have observed that it has safely unlocked every trauma-locked-imprisoned mind that has ever actually put it to use for real.

[Slammr (imported)]

As I've often stated, I don't believe in a personal god or in an afterlife. I think that ultimately nothing I do for good or bad matters. I've italicized those words because I think good and bad are strictly man made concepts. How, for instance, can the murder of an individual be bad when the Universe (Nature) kills millions at will? Also, good and bad changes over time and with cultures. Obviously, they are man made concepts.

What do I believe, and why do I go on, if I believe nothing I do matters?

I think we are inseparable from the Universe. We are not part of it. We are IT. On a quantum level, going back to the Big Bang, we are the Universe and can't be separated from it. We're living a dream, an illusion, inside our heads. We each make our own reality inside our heads. We don't see things, the world, anything, as they are. We perceive a narrow spectrum of available stimuli, filter it, and interpret it with our brains influenced by what we've been taught all our lives. We can't call what we see and experience as reality, because it isn't. It's a filtered, distorted, narrow, projection on the back wall of a cave.

So, how do I live believing nothing I do matters? Why not just commit suicide?

I look at life as if it were one of those old video games, the ones, that no matter how good you were, you were going to lose, because the better you got, the harder they got. We still played them, not to win, because we couldn't, but to see how far we could get and for the fun of playing the game. For me, life is that kind game. I play it for as long as it's fun. If it were no longer fun, if I were in constant pain and dreaded each day, I would toss down the controller and unplug the game. I play it as long as I want, and knowing that gives me unbelievable freedom.

I, this body, is going to die, naturally, tomorrow, ten or twenty years from now, or whenever. It doesn't matter when. The certainty is that it will happen. I can only live this very moment, this instant. Don't live your life as if you're going to live 10,000 years. You only live it one instant at a time. It makes no difference to me whether I live another year or live to be 100. It doesn't mean I want to die. I'm still having fun playing the game.

I had a granddaughter struck and killed by a hit and run driver earlier this year. She even lived with me for a time, and of course, the family was devastated because of the circumstances of her death and because of how young she was - 25 - but from my perspective, she just checked out of the game early. How can something - death - which is inevitable, be something to fear, something to dread, or something to feel sorrow about? It's going to happen to us all. We all lose the game eventually. Why feel sad about it?

So, how can I live a moral life believing as I do? Remember, I'm playing the game, and to do well in any game, one must play by the rules. Society has set the rules of this game - life. If I violate them and get caught, the game will punish me. Just as in the video game, if one is trying to do well, one doesn't break the rules. In life, if one expects to do well, one doesn't break the rules, although, in life, as in the video game, one can sometimes use cheats and get away with it. I've definitely got away with breaking some of the rules, but in a way, that's part of the game, too.

Life is a game. Play it. Have fun with it. Don't worry about it. Nothing you do matters, anyway. You're going to lose in the end. Eventually, the game will move too fast for you, or become too hard for you, and Game Over!!! will flash on the screen.

Just remember: it's only a dream. You are the Universe. You are Everything, and nothing can ever separate you from it. Believing anything different is an illusion.

[cheetaking243 (imported)]

Who says that the belief that all people are equal necessarily leads to the belief that there is nothing beyond death?

It could absolutely lead to the belief that there is no divine judge, and that there is no punishment or rewards for anything that is done in life, but I don't believe that necessarily means there is nothing. There are several people in the medical and psychological community who have dealt with people who had near-death experiences or experienced "past life" memories who pretty much all say that the point of life is not whether you do good or bad, but the point is to learn, grow, and love. That there is no judging God in the afterlife, only a God who loves and guides... that He helps you review what you learned in your life, and then you yourself choose what you want to learn in your next life, rinse and repeat until you as a soul are satisfied with what you have learned and are ready to stay in the divine realm to help guide others.

In this, there is no judgment whatsoever, and nobody putting themselves above you. There are only guides who help you to learn. It's completely up to personal freedom and personal choice, with the goal of spiritual betterment completely aside from any divine laws where someone is putting themselves above you and telling you that you have to do this and believe this way or else.

So I'm not saying that you have to believe anything, as that is completely your choice. All I'm saying is that I really don't agree with the view that liberalism, and even existentialism, necessarily have to lead to a belief in nihilism or an angst about the point of life.

And in regards to "to be or not to be," why would I want to not be? Even if there is no afterlife, there's so much joy in life that I still want to experience, so many things that I want to learn, so many things that I want to try out, why would I cut my own life short and not do these things? If I am but a breath, here and then gone in a blink, I'm going to enjoy the short time I have here, and dedicate my life to making others happy so that they too can enjoy their short pointless lives. And even if the afterlife is one where there is no judgment whatsoever, killing yourself solves absolutely nothing because it means you probably didn't learn the lesson that you wanted to learn in the first place, and thus your divine self is probably just going to decide that you need to come back and try to learn that lesson all over again in "Earth school."

(Side note: this system of belief is what my girlfriend believes. She was a full-on atheist and a huge skeptic on everything until she herself randomly had a past-life memory and started reading up on the subject, only to see that there was actual verifiable scientifically fact-checkable evidence for this system of belief, that it fit her liberal views perfectly, and that it covered up all the holes in logic that had isolated her from every major world religion in the first place. So I'm just bringing this up as a witness to what I see as an all-encompassing system of belief that does not conflict with liberalism or existentialism in any way.)

(Side note #2: I myself have really nihilistic moments where I feel like throwing up my hands and screaming "what's the point?" Especially in regards to work, because I feel like I'm selling the best moments of my short life for something that ultimately does no good for the world. And I suspect that this is the reason why mainstream Christianity has (wrongly) made work into a virtue, to keep people working hard so that they'll believe they'll be rewarded for it. Where I tend to see it more as what the Bible called it at the end of the Eden story... a curse... something that makes us fight for our very survival when we could be doing so much more, so much better things. So yeah, I do know the feeling where I just wonder what I'm doing with my life and wonder what the point of it all is, and feel like throwing up my hands and saying "I give up.")

[devi (imported)]

In the end I think that curiousity supercedes nihilism. Unfortunately everyone is ultimately expendable. In life and love there's always somebody to take your place. If you don't think of whatever invention that the world needs then somebody else ultimately will. Anyone who's ever given life and death a lot of thought must reach to the concept of nihilism and so therefore should do themselves the favor of exiting from this life... But then again I guess you might as well just stick around and see what happens next. Curiousity trumps nihilism.

[bobover3 (imported)]

A common mistake is to ascribe meaning to things because of their relation to something else, e.g., "the meaning of human life is to serve God." The problem is that the something else has no meaning either. Finding meaning in external things is only a trick to avoid confronting the issue. We substitute God's (or some cause or our family, etc.) lack of meaning for our own.

But suppose we liberate ourselves from the search for greater things external to ourselves. Suppose we're content to be a thing-in-itself. The meaning of being a stone is to be a stone; the meaning of being a human being is to be a human being. We have no choice, after all. We must be human just as a can of tuna fish must be a can of tuna fish. Yet we don't trouble ourselves with tuna's apparent "lack of meaning." (Perhaps it's to be eaten by us.) It's only for ourselves that we crave participation in something great. Perhaps the path to meaning is to play out our humanity to the maximum, without equivocation or evasion. Not to be angelic or demonic, not to be the vessel of some inhuman immensity, but to be fully what we are.

This is, in fact, the core of existentialism as expounded by Sartre. Sartre wrote extensively about the distinction between "authentic and inauthentic" life. The essence of authenticity is to be what you are without apology. Suicide is the ultimate denial of identity, the ultimate inauthentic. It's always an error except for release from unendurable suffering.

One last thing - ask yourself what your life would be like if you had the meaning that you lack today. How would it differ from your life now? The answer is not at all. The one possible difference is that you might become a boring monomaniac too sure of himself to be of any interest to himself or others. Just as Sartre wrote, coping with the knife-edge of doubt which is the human condition is what defines our lives and gives us meaning.

[moi621 (imported)]

Just look above. Wordy. Wordy. Wordy.

Existentialism does NOT exist.

If Existentialism existed, it could be expressed concisely,

like "The Force" of Star Wars resonates in us all. Ala Carl Jung.

You might say Existentialism exist because YOU Think Existentialism exists.

Like a Higgs Boson, fans create the universe in which its' existence is proven

but amongst words upon words upon words. Or confounding mathematics.

Fire. Water. Air. Earth. It's good enough for me.

Moi

BTW in Junior High School I was assigned to write a paper on Existentialism and Emile Zola

who was NOT. My parents and other parents of that French class rebelled. I did venture into Existentialism

Obviously, they do NOT believe in The Force.