Existential depression

[jacob]

Nah, "101010b -> decimal" always seemed too simplistic/arbitrary nerdy as a root of belief.

[Tyler9000]

As tyler9000 said, people generally fill in those blanks with God/religion because it provides ready answers.

To be clear, I simply offered that religion does provide answers. As a believer myself, I have a more optimistic perspective on the motivations of the faithful but I can also appreciate how non-believers meet those fundamental needs in their own ways.

[peerifloori]

"death, freedom (absence of external structure), isolation, and meaninglessness"

Regardless of your personal beliefs, I find it interesting that religion directly addresses all four aspects of existential depression. I can see how the lack thereof may perhaps create a hole that needs to be filled in one way or another.

It is important to mention that it is not possible to decided to believe something if I don't actually believe it, no matter how much that belief would assuage existential yearnings.

We can make choices that influence our beliefs but we don't control whether we believe.

In times of depression, isolation, meaningless, etc, I have often wished that there was something similar to organized religion but without the belief system. In high school I tried to become a church-goer after being raised in a staunchly atheist house. The social life, structure and direction was fantastic, but I never could really believe in the basic tenets of the religion which made me feel like an impostor. It only lasted about a year.

This thread inspired me to reacquaint myself with Camus.

Camus argues that human beings cannot escape asking the question, “What is the meaning of existence?” Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological, metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life's purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus's philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

Camus's understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle.

Camus puts both sides of his argument into a single statement: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation”. Only in accepting death and in being “stripped of all hope” does one most intensely appreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he now suggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, and contrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are what one has and one knows: “To feel one's ties to a land, one's love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the heart can find rest—these are already many certainties for one man's life”

His early philosophy, then, may be conveyed, if not summed up, in this passage from “Nuptials at Tipasa”:

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.

The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fully experience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longer try to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.(source)

It resonates with me in a similar way of the ERE philosophy. If we have only this one life to live with no guarantee on our number of days, would we choose to live it in a Sisyphean cycle of work-consume-work drudgery? Or would we choose to seek freedom and appreciate the small joys in life?

I guess I feel like there is existential optimism, too. Maybe I'm just existentially bipolar.

[fiby41]

"At times of depression, isolation, meaningless, etc, I have often wished that there was something similar to organized religion but without the belief system."

@peerifloori: Spinoza tried that but the idea never got off paper. But that was ~350 years ago, you think there's a market for it now?

Forum members could start the FI School of Philosophy where weekly mass is held on Sundays with chapters read from the ERE and other books or something and progress is shared by having a guest speaker...

This kills three birds in one blow: Making freedom the meaning of life.
And reducing isolation by having people come out, and maybe bring a friend to the mass once a year... This'll get more 'converts' as 'social proof' is there and real people are there instead of an impersonal blog to do the introduction.

Members could also take care of the (fear of or what was the point of all of this?) death part, more or less, by letting people donate the remainder of their money that they couldn't use to the school, which the school will use to spread the word of Jacob, patron saint of FI, to places far and wide...