Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Life does not have to have any meaning to it. It just has to be lived.
-Dexter

The Chippewa kept dogs as pets, but also ate them cooked in maple syrup.

halfmoon wrote:Loving something will involve dealing with shit at some point.

True.

Reminds me of a story I heard while taking a wilderness medicine course recently. A group of corpsmen attending the military version of the program found a pig living on the rural compound where the course was being held. They adopted it, named it, fed it the scraps from their mess and turned it into the group mascot. Toward the end of the course, after everyone fell in love with the thing, the training office gathered them into a group and - BLAM - shot it in the gut with a shotgun, then screamed, "SAVE PRIVATE RYAN!"

Fortunately, I am not in the military so I can get my slobbery love, shit, and whatnot from human beings when the need arises.

Augustus wrote:This is not depressing, just observant. The universe dying out along with all of us is not depressing either, just a constraint we live with, like not being born rich or beautiful, we are what we are.

well said.

fiby41 wrote:Life [..] has to be lived.

citation needed

BRUTE wrote:brute's not super into the whole God-thing, so he finds it hard to entertain that train of thought.

Fair enough. Pragmatically, however, notice that being able to do just that—entertain a thought without accepting it—could give you a competitive advantage in many areas; incidentally, although the attribution is disputed, Aristotle is said to have named that ability as the mark of an educated mind.

brute actually dislikes that quote about being able to entertain two conflicting thoughts. it's probably just imprecise.

holding conflicting thoughts at the same time is cognitive dissonance, and brute hardly thinks it speaks of a mind's education, but rather ignorance.

what could be said is that holding two seemingly conflicting thoughts, both of which seem on the surface correct, but allowing for the idea that at least one of them is imprecisely formulated or otherwise wrong, or the relation between them is unclear, is the mark of an educated mind. basically, skepticism.

Holding them simultaneously is cognitive dissonance. With practice cognitive dissonance becomes double-think.

Being able to entertain disagreeable [trains of] thoughts is entirely different and has to do with the capacity for empathy or theory of mind.

Ego wrote:

halfmoon wrote:Loving something will involve dealing with shit at some point.

True.

Reminds me of a story I heard while taking a wilderness medicine course recently. A group of corpsmen attending the military version of the program found a pig living on the rural compound where the course was being held. They adopted it, named it, fed it the scraps from their mess and turned it into the group mascot. Toward the end of the course, after everyone fell in love with the thing, the training office gathered them into a group and - BLAM - shot it in the gut with a shotgun, then screamed, "SAVE PRIVATE RYAN!"

Those trainers knew their shit.

@Kriegsspiel, have you done live tissue training? From what they said, the emotional connection and the squealing of the injured animal is as close to a real world scenarios as possible. Of course, there are a few issues....
http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/270346 ... e-training

As I walk through my apartment building and hear the animals of these young professions squealing for attention and scratching at the doors, I wonder how far apart the two are.

@Ego,

What an opportunity to do something good and add to your income! Why not have a pet-walking or visiting service?

Sorry for the detour, Brute. I'm trying to think of some self-justifying way that this relates to nihilism.

@halfmoon, actually, this is nihilism 101. The animals would not exist if not for people perpetuating the belief that they somehow inject an attenuated semblance of meaning into the lives of yearning young professionals who find themselves suddenly facing their first existential crisis of, "Is this all there is to life?" Better to face it than drug it. I could not make a profession of enabling.

that's exactly why brute doesn't have a dog.

Ego wrote:The animals would not exist if not for people perpetuating the belief that they somehow inject an attenuated semblance of meaning into the lives of yearning young professionals who find themselves suddenly facing their first existential crisis of, "Is this all there is to life?" Better to face it than drug it.

That's exactly how I feel about having children. To each his own drug.

halfmoon wrote:To each his own drug.

This morning I rode in a beautifully efficient, synchronized rotating paceline with two friends. The three of us had been dropped off the back of a faster group so we worked together in a silent harmony that later induced in me several lingering hours of the feeling this man describes so well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn87-mcnoVc

Certainly a drug. A harm-free drug. Is there meaning in it? Perhaps the meaning is in the absence of harm to self and other. Who knows?

Ego wrote:@Kriegsspiel, have you done live tissue training? From what they said, the emotional connection and the squealing of the injured animal is as close to a real world scenarios as possible. Of course, there are a few issues....
http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/270346 ... e-training

As I walk through my apartment building and hear the animals of these young professions squealing for attention and scratching at the doors, I wonder how far apart the two are.

No, just real world experience. I think that kind of training would have been useful. Not in a fun sense (though for the instructors gallows humor may be inevitable), but in preparing soldiers for war.

Life does not have to have any meaning to it. It just has to be lived.
-Dexter

BRUTE wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 16, 2017 9:09 pm

fiby41 wrote:Life [..] has to be lived.

citation needed

Play along and you might get good at it

that's more or less what brute is doing. he's sure improving at some things, just not sure they're the right things.

BRUTE wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 27, 2017 12:40 pm

that's more or less what brute is doing. he's sure improving at some things, just not sure they're the right things.

That implies you feel there is a test coming to see how well you did, how much you measure up to an arbitrary standard. I thought brute was past that?

brute isn't certain that there is a test coming up, but he also isn't sure there isn't one coming up. presumably, different life situations will be the different tests, so success in overall life-fitness cannot be evaluated until life ends.