How is an atheist not to despair?

I don't see it that way

Who knows? It certainly stops people believing that this life is all they have.

Probably? Most don't think about it, those that are miserable wish for it, but those that both are not miserable and do think about it, what do they think?

>be atheist
>become vegan as I see it as the only consistent result

Consistent result of what?

I do feel despair. I feel despair every single day of my life. I'm in the middle of a panic attack right now.

d-don't make fun of me desu

Its not that not believing in the afterlife means that I don't value my time in life, its that my enjoyment and my self-respect for my time on this earth is in many ways entirely up to me.

I mean, its pretty obvious that spending my time worrying about when my clock strikes zero is, in fact, wasted time.

The healthiest mindset is one where you forgive yourself for your wasted time and try to do something productive as often as you can.

Honestly the worst thing isn't the use of social media or sites like this. Its endless consumption and scrolling of these websites where its been built to be my stress trigger, meanwhile I've got a backlog of books, video games, anime, and whatever that I should be making my way through. Not to mention learning more programming and languages.

I've basically replaced God as a center of morality with that of how my dad acted. Its not objective, and he was totally influenced by Judeo-Christian morality, but its as good a base as any.

I'd rather have that than the outlook of a ton of Christians I know, who manage to be more hedonist and narcisist, while using their confession booth as a toilet. I find that to be the most pathetic thing, to live as a nihilist and use the idea of God like Weaboos use their Waifus.

I'm not even kidding, I feel like my heart is going to explode.

Have you ever tried some mindfulness meditation? Is it racing thoughts, anxiety over stressful shit?

>Its not that not believing in the afterlife means that I don't value my time in life
I wouldn't have made the connection that way, I only meant the other way round: If you don't value your time, there not being an afterlife probably doesn't matter to you either.
>The healthiest mindset is one where you forgive yourself for your wasted time and try to do something productive as often as you can.
This I definitely agree with.
>meanwhile I've got a backlog of books, video games, anime, and whatever that I should be making my way through. Not to mention learning more programming and languages.
This too.
>a ton of Christians I know, who manage to be more hedonist and narcisist, while using their confession booth as a toilet. I find that to be the most pathetic thing
This also.

I-I'm right there with you.

I’ll worry about it later.

>caring about these sorts of things
>not meditating
>not embracing zensunni doctrine
>choosing ignorance over enlightenment

what the fuck is wrong with you people

I can't accept death, if I die all is gone. I fear it very much. I stare into my room, stare at the darkness, imagine myself to be a old man, I look at the wall. This is the final moment. I just feel terror, such terrible terror. My heart stops beating, something hollows my body.
Because something is, it does not mean it is good. And I'm not capable of ignoring death, I can't make it a problem for later.
Maybe we do live in the worst of all worlds. The terror is waiting, all beauty, all thought, all knowledge destroyed.

But what can we do? One has to accept that death is real but one should not give in the tempatation of giving death any positive element. Death is the injustice that will befall us, but we can not allow it to rule over us for the short moment we call life.

I think after death there's going to be nothing, and that's okay. If I could choose, I would construct my own afterlife, but I can't so nothing is better than anything since I already know what to expect... nothing. :)

To know that this is all, it's a lot of weight to bear.
To ignore this is to risk squandering it, to remember it is to risk despair.

What meme is this?

>use the idea of God like Weaboos use their Waifus.
you mean worship?

i tried meditation for a while. i had the following realizations:

- people weren't bullshitting that you don't get anything out of meditation, because you really don't (anyone who says they feel more peaceful/tranquil literally just placebo'ed themselves)

- you have to just accept that you feel like shit all the time

- it doesn't get better and you just go clean the dishes

I stopped meditating, can't say it made much of an improvement in my life one way or another.

it isn't a meme you fuck, get enlightened or i'll jihad you

Does your despaire inhibit you or does it empower you to make something with your time?

One thing I find that honestly separates people into adults and children is their conception of death. To really have any idea what death is you need to have a close loved one die, and by that I mean one of your parents. Not a Grandparent or Uncle that you don't see often or is kinda distant, a parental figure that was vital in your development or someone that is to you like one of your own limbs, the idea of them not existing is like your mind trying to do 2 + 2 and accepting it as 5.

You can't truly understand death until you see it take someone from you that didn't deserve it, see it cause someone suffering that makes you consider killing your own loved one to see them suffer less. The kind of thing that could make a christian doubt God and an athiest ask God to throw them a bone if he's out there. There's so many people that haven't had those moments where the craziest shit makes the most sense and logic has left the window. Its when that idealism you have to prepare for tragedy that has you saying "Oh I'll do X logical thing" and then reality can present itself in a way that you can completely fail to live up to your own expectation and you can torture yourself over it.

I should have clarified. Waifufags can totally use their waifu to shelve their own estrangement and focus on their own self improvement such that they can momentarily defeat their own downward spiral. Many though just use their goddamn pillow to get comfy while they ride the downward spiral and everything else in their life falls apart. Its ultimately something that no matter what must be moved on from, as they can get trapped in identarian user politics, like the fanbase for pic related.

I suggested mindfulnes earlier and I'm still early in it.

I deal with over rumination on shit all the time and being able to let thoughts pass without dwelling on them is very helpful. Granted I'm not good at it, but some of the techniques have helped me calm myself down.

>didn't make an improvement
you nigger. it's accepting the shit you can't change. death, outside shit that happens to you, even emotions that appear outta no where. You can't preempt that shit from happening. everyone gets depressed. when it comes, you just have to stand apart from it and observe. in that moment of observation, you are separate. so yes you faggot, when you observe you cease being carried away by whatever the fuck. now shut up and go sit down and meditate somewhere.

>you nigger. it's accepting the shit you can't change. death, outside shit that happens to you, even emotions that appear outta no where. You can't preempt that shit from happening. everyone gets depressed. when it comes, you just have to stand apart from it and observe. in that moment of observation, you are separate. so yes you faggot, when you observe you cease being carried away by whatever the fuck. now shut up and go sit down and meditate somewhere.

Yeah, you're not wrong. You really can sum it up as "not getting carried away in the first place"

I can't change the fact that I will die, but I can change what I do up till that point.

it's a start at least. if you want to change the fact that you will die, then you still got some work to do bro.

>enlightemnent
Either we are really in the Kali Yuga or a degenerate age of the Buddhidharma or it just don't actually works because I've yet to see someone who really got something from decades of meditation practice besides being less stresfull.
Where all the sotapannas, masters of the Jhanas and Siddhis?

>Does your despaire inhibit you or does it empower you to make something with your time?

“How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? Or that the fear of death is not like a young person running away from home and unable to find his way back? The Lady Li Chi was the daughter of a border warden, Ai. When the state of Chin captured her, she wept until she had drenched her robes; then she came to the King’s palace, shared the King’s bed, ate his food, and repented of her tears. How do I know whether the dead now repent for their former clinging to life? ‘Come the morning, those who dream of the drunken feast may weep and moan; when the morning comes, those who dream of weeping and moaning go hunting in the fields. When they dream, they don’t know it is a dream. Indeed, in their dreams they may think they are interpreting dreams, only when they awake do they know it was a dream. Eventually there comes the day of reckoning and awakening, and then we shall know that it was all a great dream. Only fools think that they are now awake and that they really know what is going on, playing the prince and then playing the servant. What fools! The Master and you are both living in a dream. When I say a dream, I am also dreaming. This very saying is a deception. If after ten thousand years we could once meet a truly great sage, one who understands, it would seem as if it had only been a morning.”
― Zhuangzi

I know that feeling way too well. What is this from?

Even if I believe that there is a God and an after life I still reflect on the shortness of my life and the small ripples my death may cause to those around me. It's actually kind of liberating and damning at the same time. I feel like life would be more fulfilling if the memes of careers and retirement weren't a thing.

Would it be more comfortable to just be erased out of existence, or to get tortured for eternity?

I will make a lot of money and fund research into the nature of consciousness, so that my conscious can be stored indefinitely on hardware, then I will wait until technology and society will have made true immortality possible.

Plot twist, the best you can hope for is a clone whose consciousness will be completely different and independent from the one you have

discord.gg/ftSbffu
discord.gg/DDpUqJh
reddit.com/r/longevity/

Enlightenment and meditation is fucking bullshit for people to delude themselves into thinking that their miserable poverty is actually good somehow.

Epicurus wasn't an atheist.

Some fucking retards hand picked a thought experiment out of a few things he wrote and thinks that he was fundamentally an atheist.

>How is an atheist not to despair?
The majority of Christians are in an entirely different kind of hell. Iv been to both. No one is without problems, religion is just about pretending it's all going to be solved by sky daddy after you die.

>This is all there is, this is all you get, and you're wasting it on a byzantine mongolian-import tapestry market.
If what you are doing is wasteful, then do not do it. Do what you find fulfilling.

>Epicurus and Seneca can talk all they like about how death can't be bad because you can't feel anything in death, that is only convincing to someone who doesn't want to live.
They are correct. The second half of your statement has nothing to do with the first.

The real problem is you find the things you are doing in your life to be wasteful but instead of confronting them you are here, trying to rationalize your suffering instead of trying to end it.