# Philosophical rumination/existentialism



## Mlags45 (Apr 30, 2010)

I think this is an interesting/helpful video.


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

I like it, but I feel my existential ruminations have sent me well too far into the rabbit hole so to speak.

I understand the importance of Myth, Man needs myth--its simple. And even if you think your an atheist you still worship something. Be it money, power, fame, music, art, gardening, family, morality--something gives you a reason to wake up everyday and feel happy.

I, on the other hand, am beyond help in terms of God. I wish I had opened myself up to the idea of Myth when I was younger--but I never really liked religious people, and neither did I like atheists.

I think the DP let my already cluttered mind, with its superfluous facts and knowledge about everything turn on me and the so called real world. I've destroyed just about everything in my mind--all that I am now is a biological machine who has access to the outside world, and every moment is a constant horror. I'm fucking terrified that I have organs under my skin, which are bloody and disgusting, that there is a complicated computer behind my skull, and that everything occurs somewhere in there. goodness gracious me.


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## rightwrong99 (Apr 17, 2011)

brianjones said:


> I like it, but I feel my existential ruminations have sent me well too far into the rabbit hole so to speak.
> 
> I understand the importance of Myth, Man needs myth--its simple. And even if you think your an atheist you still worship something. Be it money, power, fame, music, art, gardening, family, morality--something gives you a reason to wake up everyday and feel happy.
> 
> ...


Dude u need to get in touch with your emotions.


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

mate sometimes i feel way further gone than you guys are


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## Quifouett (Sep 13, 2011)

brianjones said:


> mate sometimes i feel way further gone than you guys are


Then we are probably on the same level.


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

then you are of the opinion that this is not just going to go away without some sort of spiritual / philosophical epiphany?


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## Quifouett (Sep 13, 2011)

.


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## Quifouett (Sep 13, 2011)

I think I'm just screwed. Hopeless. I saw life in a way I can't forget.


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

yep. . . . i agree. i'm fucked. im drunk tonight, like every other night. but tonight i feel normal. i just want to feel normal all the time. is that too much to ask. i'd rather a terminal cancer than this.


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## Devon (Oct 28, 2011)

I like this video. It summarises well what goes on through my head at times. But ultimately, I think it's over-rational. Humans are in part rational, but also emotional. We have to stop asking why and simply live sometimes. Yes, it doesn't make sense, as the video repeatedly shows (I watched all 3 parts), and perhaps it is very selfish. But when you lie dying some years from now, would you prefer having spent your life lost in existential thoughts (mostly mental agony of an inconsistent system) or living each day in emotion and "illusory" purpose feeling accomplished? I might be promoting ignorance is bliss, but I think it is somewhat foolish to believe that we can rationalize this problem of purpose within the course of our lives when for many millenia no one has been able to do so. In fact, the very first pages of the bible illustrates this problem. Epiphany is a dream. That being said, choosing that path is particularly hard with DP...


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## baking_pineapple (Apr 27, 2011)

brianjones said:


> I like it, but I feel my existential ruminations have sent me well too far into the rabbit hole so to speak.
> 
> I understand the importance of Myth, Man needs myth--its simple. And even if you think your an atheist you still worship something. Be it money, power, fame, music, art, gardening, family, morality--something gives you a reason to wake up everyday and feel happy.
> 
> ...


Uhhh... ya, I feel the same way when I'm left to my own devices; I highly value the philosophcial, thinking side of my person.... I think its important and I don't want to lose it. But (and this is an important but) when I come into contact (by force or voluntarily) with people who are more connected with life, who are firmly situated within social reality, I realize how absurd, and more than anything, depleting, this state of detached rationality and observation is. Being connected, feeling like your experience of life is shared by everyone around you, that you can trust people, play with them, and enter into their emotional life at will; is such a better way to live than dominating it with rationality.

Trying to understand what life is like from such a position is like trying to tell what a flower is without seeing it, smelling its fragrance, feeling its petals... all we have is a guess, something a book told us, or if we're lucky, a memory, some distant representation of what a flower feels, smells, and looks like. Its absurdity. Its absurdity and its pride I tell you. More than anything else thats what it is. Its like a part of us refuses to be a part of life unless we're on top of it... submitting ourselves to others feels like death... an evolutionary vestige of living in a social hierarchy where the drive for status overpowered the drive to belong. We are living as emotional dinosaurs... the need for belonging and connection is now far more essential to our psychological and physical survival than achieving status. Only once we are firmly situated in a group can we then try to rise through its ranks... if we try to do otherwise, a system that is meant to be diffused across a multitude will become internalized and magnified in our psyche, splitting us against ourselves, an inner battle ground where all that is weak is systematically and ruthlessly destroyed... and our humanity along with it.


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## rightwrong99 (Apr 17, 2011)

All this talk of rationality. Rationalizing what's rational. Rationalizing irrationality. How do you feel about that?

See: Alexithymia


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## PhoenixDown (Mar 3, 2011)

DP does not stem from philosophical rumination. If it did, the existentialism department of every major university would be royally fucked.

DP is a neurological condition. God will not save you. Neither will Eckhart Tolle. Or a new belief system. If you actually have the condition, you have more to worry about that the human condition. You have to worry about the depersonalized condition.


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

PhoenixDown I love you! Your hilarious.

You know Sartre recanted on everything he said.


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## SaBo (Dec 5, 2011)

@PhoenixDown who says they aren't?









but anyway, I don't agree with the video.
So without god, everyone suddenly becomes an asshole?
Without god, you stop judging your experiences as painful or happy, for example? 
Ultimately, what hes saying is that it only makes sense to make anyone, including yourself, happy in this short time we have, if it has a "universal purpose" that goes beyond what you can simply feel: that you made someone happy...
He also doesn't seem able to imagine that making others happy can be part of your own happiness, as such, a self-fulfilling act.
Without religion, we simply have more possibilities to see the world and define it for ourselves - our feelings and their consequences don't change. 
Or is everyone just waiting to start killing off everyone else and the only thing that stops them is the thought the universe might judge? I don't think so....


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## Mlags45 (Apr 30, 2010)

PhoenixDown said:


> DP does not stem from philosophical rumination. If it did, the existentialism department of every major university would be royally fucked.
> 
> DP is a neurological condition. God will not save you. Neither will Eckhart Tolle. Or a new belief system. If you actually have the condition, you have more to worry about that the human condition. You have to worry about the depersonalized condition.


I'm not saying DP stems from philosophical rumination. I'm saying that a lot of people who have DP seem to philosophically ruminate compared to people who don't have it. That it's a neurological condition doesn't mean your way of thinking won't change. The fact that it is a neurological condition proves that your thinking will be altered as expressed by a large majority of people who have DP. Maybe you don't philosophically ruminate but I think a lot of people do.

"What you don't know at the moment is that this troubling experience is distinctly human, experienced briefly at some time or another by as much as 70 percent of the population. In its chronic form, popular culture once saw it as part of a nervous breakdown. Some have called it "Alice in Wonderland" disease. Jean Paul Sartre called it "the filth" , William James dubbed it "the sick soul". It's been linked philosophically to existentialism, even Buddhism. Yet to its victims, it's anything but an enlightened state of mind. Welcome to the world of Depersonalization Disorder."


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## Mlags45 (Apr 30, 2010)

SaBo said:


> @PhoenixDown who says they aren't?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


No, he's not saying without God everyone becomes an asshole. He's saying without God there is no moral basis to judge right and wrong; there are only our subjective opinions. So if there is no moral basis then what Hitler did was not really wrong if according to his subjective opinion, Jews should be exterminated. It becomes a "who sez" deal. That without God "all things are permitted".


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## brianjones (Sep 14, 2011)

Mlags45 said:


> No, he's not saying without God everyone becomes an asshole. He's saying without God there is no moral basis to judge right and wrong; there are only our subjective opinions. So if there is no moral basis then what Hitler did was not really wrong if according to his subjective opinion, Jews should be exterminated. It becomes a "who sez" deal. That without God "all things are permitted".


Exactly. Without God, there's the troubling fact that we do not have the RIGHT to say whats right or wrong.

There is nothing objectively wrong with Genocide. 
There is nothing objectively wrong with killing the entire human species.
There is nothing objectively wrong with cutting down forests.
There is nothing objectively wrong about killing babies and raping them (order can be reversed).

This is why we cannot take the spanish flu to court or put it in jail or execute it. It killed more people than Hitler and Stalin and Zedong (probably). The spanish flu is indifferent to the human. The outside world is indifferent, essentially nihilistic. A tidal wave doesn't care about the amount of children it drowns, the same way a cancer in your body doesn't care if you live or die.

Nihilism is fucking terrifying. Nietzsche knew this. He was terrified about the future world without God.


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## katiej (Jan 21, 2012)

i think that the philosophical thoughts we ruminate over protect us from whats really wrong in our lives.... it makes sense but it doesnt feel that way... to me it also feels like i have come to some sort of realization about the world. when really i am just emotionally burnt out and dunno what to do with the horrible anxiety... i find the calmer i am the more i dont obsess over existential issues.


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