Posts you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here

Misanthropy absolute dud. Recent update in the Calvin and Hobbes thread says everything that needs to be said about it

Save you a click

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBeIDqtXwAAf_3u?format=jpg&name=medium

TBC, I do not actively wish for the destruction of humanity. But, I often despair at our seemingly endless ability to destroy our own habitat, and think that the Earth as a whole would be better off without us.

Then I think of Negronis and Bryan Ferry's hair and all is well again

Call it pride, but I can’t seperate the earth and our lives on it; till the day eventually comes

Geez that is a great mop ain’t it?

love you jimboo but can’t agree

I'm glad you can't, I don't particularly like feeling this way.

Optimism vs pessimism is the easiest of binaries, right? And so capitalist. Best to go on with your day extending kindnesses where you can and being grateful that you wake up at all.

Without question, and in my little orbit, that's what I strive to do every day.

xp as a depressive I have to ask, are you ok?

that was to Jim

Yeah, and thank you for asking. I have four kids, I worry about the world they will be living in after I'm gone. I know it weighs on them too. I suppose it's an anxiety that has replaced my childhood anxiety about nuclear war.

Understandable <3

True and prognosis isn’t great but I’d argue too that it’s never been good. Many of our ancestors lived with vastly more uncertainty than us - they just weren’t aware of the exact scope and scale like we were. I was looking at some of the old census records of part of my family a few years back and fifty years after the Famine, there is a household of my ancestors where the oldest of them would have been adults during that time. They would have survived seeing people dig in the dirt for roots to eat, possibly may have been those people themselves. Unimaginable to me, their modern descendant , a period of human suffering so profound that we don’t even really talk about it even today. Yet here on paper they were, a flourishing household, and enough context clues to suggest a happy one. The human suffering of their lifetimes didn’t exist in their actions: they still wanted love and families and to continue. Nothing is guaranteed in life, not security or happiness for any of us, and it’s cliche thinking but it is so for a reason: we could all be dead tomorrow, so exist in the moment.

Otm

jimbeaux, you don't have to agree with what I'm going to post, but here are a few remarks:

A far from hirstute fella with two nieces and a godson, all of whom I adore to distraction, I try to leave a world better for them and me. I work in local politics. I try to write beautiful things. I try to translate the beautiful things to them and readers. But I think of Eliot:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

and I've realized I can't chew my nails in worry about the world I might leave them! They must make their own way. All I can do is teach them to shun complacency, do good, and revel in beautiful things. I have to have faith that they can do it.

Thank you all <3

I think what (sometimes) causes me to despair is the sheer unnecessariness of so much of the destruction we visit upon ourselves and the world. It's history's biggest own goal.

Maybe that sounds cliché, but it sometimes drives me to distraction, especially as I get older.

People are people, so why should it be?
You and I should get along so awwww-fuhlee

I think there's more misanthropy in that cartoon than in the most nihilistic music you could imagine.

My wife and children are the duct tape holding me together. Myself? Meh. I am a barely-organized pile of former groceries.

When I kissed that girl, and wed my unutterable visions to her perishable breath, I knew my mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

part of my reticence is rooted in a fear of a lack of control over how i'm being perceived, and maybe more specifically fear of the possibility that everyone else will see something obvious that i'm missing about myself, thereby exposing myself as a fraud/idiot.

i'm not sure when, or why, i stopped caring about this, or if it's for the better. but you're right about not being able to control how you're perceived. if it matters, the flipside is you're probably just as oblivious to the things people appreciate about you. ime, at least.

But, I often despair at our seemingly endless ability to destroy our own habitat, and think that the Earth as a whole would be better off without us.

this stuff weighs on me a lot too. humanocentrism bugs me a lot. watching videos about the solar system and things like that makes me feel a little better, and also worse. I mean to know that Earth is not just the place to be, it's the time and place. There's no reason to feel FOMO ever because you are at the epicenter of space time just by virtue of existing. the stars have aligned - quite literally - for all this to happen. And it's for now, not forever.

Going to message that to my mates next they post on social media doing anything without me

probably because ILE more or less operates squarely in that ballpark nowadays

And it's for now, not forever.

And "now" is already "then."

not even past

once you get stuck with a reputation it's hard to shake it off

I wonder what was on his iPod

"What an old bag..."

lightweight

“These once-esteemed talents formerly dedicated to puncturing racial tensions or hollow pieties now argue only for the unfairness of their own persecution, and their bravery in resisting it. “

I dont know how to tell you it’s been that first thing all along. It is the implied jest of all comedy since hominids became self aware.

The thing that keeps me from misanthropy is knowing that all the ppl I think most epitomize what's wrong with humanity would also think Agent Smith's speech is otm.

― Daniel_Rf

the thing that keeps me from misanthropy is estrogen

i, too, was heavily philosophically influenced by _the matrix_

that's not a joke btw. i mean it's a joke but i also sincerely mean it. pre-transition i was very into antinatalism, very into cioran. i still think cioran is fucking hilarious. my life has taken me in a path diametrically opposite to his, though. these books of his - "The Temptation to Exist", "The Trouble With Being Born". i gave into that temptation. if there's trouble with being born, i choose to make it.

my philosophical belief in the value of human existence was ultimately solipsistic, a stand-in for my own feelings about the value of my own existence. i understood my existence as meaningless, painful, and stupid and this life as a sort of hell.

my life was, in fact, hell, at least by the definition of andre malraux:

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

i no longer despise myself. i love myself. i'm proud of myself. i don't think of myself as a "good person" or a "bad person" or any kind of person at all, but my existence has meaning, and if my existence has meaning, human existence cannot truly be said to be meaningless.

that meaning is, in the larger scale of things, ephemeral. i am going to die. i've had a hell of a time while i've been here, though. a hell of a time. transition hasn't "fixed" me, but i can say this: never once since i accepted myself as trans have i wished i'd never been born.

Meaninglessness by definition is value-neutral, though. A meaningless life is neither heaven nor hell; it's just life. I am alive; so is the grass. I absolutely believe in the meaninglessness of existence, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying any aspect of my life.

Isn’t enjoyment then the meaning?

In my experience, fear of death becomes more pressing the older you get, making questions of meaning more relevant and enjoyment more difficult.

I do think enjoyment is a facile meaning of life. Last year was my year of rest/relaxation/enjoyment. I worked the least, I did what I wanted the most, but it left me feeling emptier than some much more difficult years

In my experience, fear of death becomes more pressing the older you get

huh, in mine, the opposite!

xp Yeah, fulfillment and engagement tend to bring the deepest satisfaction, but those things are enjoyable, but maybe that's a shallow (or, to use your word) facile word for the feeling.

i mean it's one of those things i don't know how to describe... i went from not existing to existing. apparently this is not just a thing i can actually do but a thing everybody else does and takes for granted. i don't. i didn't get this for free. it cost me a lot, and i'm fucking lucky because some people, it costs more than they have. fear of death, enjoyment, all of this stuff, i don't know, meaning for me is to just _exist_ for its own sake. whatever else i'm doing, easy, hard, i exist. i'm human. i should be a misanthrope? i should hate humans because of the awful shit a lot of us do? no, no, seriously, this is fucking amazing and i can't imagine _ever_ taking that for granted.

Amen

Good post Kate

This man is so committed to his truth that it makes him frantic with frustration that even though he builds a yellow brick road to all-encompassing wisdom the world fails to follow it.

(nb: ^ not in reference to any posts itt)

I was at a Taco Bell today and was parked next to one of those assholes with a "Choose Life" license plate, and worse, it was a vanity tag with custom plate number "UNBRN".

thought for a moment that UNBRN was something to do with IRN-BRU and that "Choose Life" was a reference to Trainspotting before I realised

IRN-BRU smells to me like a barnyard

it's just orange sugar water ffs sito

maybe I'm sensitive to whatever the hell this is: As of 1999, it contained 0.002% of ammonium ferric citrate

everyone should have a little ammonium ferric citrate, as a treat

Now with more Retsyn

isn't retsyn just vegetable oil?