Anyone have a philosophical issue that they've ever had an obsession with?

Anyone have a philosophical issue that they've ever had an obsession with?

Time related ones have been my lifelong obsession. As a kid I would often have the experience that it seemed like nothing had any duration or that all durations were equivalent because of how as soon as a moment passes into being it passes away. I guess that's kind of a Zeno's paradox type of thing.

For years I have been dead set on this idea that time is an illusion and that everything is already completed and frozen in a changeless and eternal state.

It's true, user.
Time doesn't really exist.
Follow this thought experiment:
Imagine that every single piece of matter in the universe froze and stopped moving, even down to the quantum/string/whatever level. Nothing moves.
Now imagine that 20 minutes passes in this state.
What has changed?
According to people who believe in "time" 20 minutes has passed. And yet what is the nature of that thing which has passed?
It doesn't exist.
And so it is.

I've had issues with identity since forever

how exactly?

Ideas that are constant sources for anxiety for me:

>there is no god and no objective morality
>compassion and morality are evolutionary weakness
>the eternal return is true
>it is impossible to reconcile my desire for some kind of redemption of all the meaningless suffering in the world (i.e transcendent forces, an afterlife) with the fact that suffering and conflict are the ground of most beauty and meaning

*of anxiety

>compassion and morality are evolutionary weakness
What do ytou mean user? How could they be evolutionary weakness? You seem to be blurring the line between a lack of objective justification for compassionate and moral thinking/behaviour + a real teleological negation of the value of compassion and morality. It might make sense to describe them as 'weakness' in some context, but hardly evolutionarily given the strength and prominence of those adaptations - unless you think there is some problem that isn't immediately obvious here?

Eternal return and reincarnation are my worst nightmares.

>For years I have been dead set on this idea that time is an illusion and that everything is already completed and frozen in a changeless and eternal state.

If that were so the experience of time would be an impossibility.
There is an eternal state. It is the realm of the archetypal. But on the periphery of that is this whole festival, and the way the orbits of the emanations relate to each other are constantly creating new worlds. Whether every possible iteration exists for all time in some frozen crystal somewhere in the higher planes is a possibility but that seems improable, even for gods.

There is the idea that we are the evolution of things. Your life in its limitation is the evolution, the happening-ness of things. Earth can be named anything, its a sphere that life occurs on. And when it becomes humanoid, that is to say self reflective, language-izing, cultural, historical, then you get this whole mess and problem. But that is itself a timeless thing.

The timelessness of things is not the spefic unfolding, it is the fact that it has an underlying essence, a narrative quality that is the golden thread which never dies. The details are where the devil lies, so it goes, but that is also where the beauty comes from, that is why god bothers to go on at all, to see the productions of his-her limitation aspects, namely you and me and any incarnation of itself into a confined space of memory and identity.

I am beginning to think that Parmenides was right.

>there is no god and no objective morality
Irrelevant in the scheme of things. If there is no god, then you are neither being rewarded or smote for its often arbitrary rules
>compassion and morality are evolutionary weakness
Maybe so, but the two qualities breed companionship, a much truer evolutionary strength than ruthlessness (an army always trumps a lone champion)
>the eternal return is true
What is the eternal return?
>it is impossible to reconcile my desire for some kind of redemption of all the meaningless suffering in the world
Again, trivial. There are things in life worth worrying about and those worth not. This is in the latter, as the universe we inhabit is indifferent to all things, and suffering is a symptom of this indifference. There will always be suffering somewhere; invest your worry in your own suffering instead

how wet colorful things like this
make me feel more than dry words

whose at the power station

I must admit I'm pretty autistic when it comes to time. I think I may be somewhat an idiot or something. Like when I was 12 this cool metalhead guy a few years older than me who stood at the same bus stop in the morning had an awesome ragged looking bag with a ton of buttons on it. I bought my own bag and covered it with sewn-on patches and one day I said "hey my bag is almost as old as yours now" and he and his friend were like "wtf that's not how time works retard" and I was embarrassed. I think perhaps applying this retardation to my entire life I may actually be such a procrastinator due to my internal clock being totally retarded and thus not realizing I'm going to die soon.

that dude was a dick
don't base your metaphysics around that guy

Specifically the uniqueness of identity. Since I was a we lad I remember wondering why I'm me and not someone else. Why specifically it's my being I'm in control of rather than another, and what conditions allow for it and what separates these.

No one

The righteousness of my actions.

t. hasn't read a good book

The reason you see these issues as trivial and he experiences them as sources of anxiety is that you act as if you have metaphysical certainty about the nature of things, while he is open to the anxiety inducing possibilities. But considering that you have to ask what eternal return is that is not very surprising.

I don't understand what you're saying, from what background are you coming from?

why hedonists cling to their ideas and speculations so much?

How to live a good life, when there is no intrinsic meaning to life.
And recently: Why did Nietzsche recommended aiming for 'greatness'.

tl;dr

I edited this image a few years ago

I disagree. Time does exist.
It is so inderdependent on space, which is dialectically bound to matter, that we can infer its existence from matter. In the "real" world, it may not exist, but it's formally necessary to function for all organisms. What is formally necessary exists.

The existence of proprioception vouches for its necessity, for example.

i dont get it

>matter
>"real" world

Read 'The Aesthetics of Disappearance' by Paul Virilio, OP. He talks exactly about this, using the concept of 'picnolepsy'. An interesting read.

Here's an excerpt. 1/3.

2/3.

3/3.

Thank you. Virilio's writing always reminds me of trains, I think there is great symbolic importance there...

Wow me too(when I was a kid)!
I think it is the inherent selfishness of mankind. And how beautifully it manifests itself in the world we live in. And how disgusting it is when you look at it naked. I just hate that. I have come to think that every action we perform is driven by the will of power, and if it's not driven, it's propelled further by it, that nothing we do can ever be purged from egoism and that the only deeds devoid of selfishness are the smolest ones (like giving a candy to your buddy), which do not stem from it, nor they get enough attention from one's own mind as to be fructified into something more beneficial for oneself.
I wanna crie :((((
In fact, user, it is the relative value both of them put into their metaphysical positions.

That's a very nice image

The thing that really fucks me is whether or not this instance of reality is actually worth it. Ive delved into the depths of existential questions and have come to a state of contentment, now the scenery is becoming less enjoyable and im trying to decide how far i need to travel before it becomes enjoyable

It isn't. This reality is the most overrated thing that can possibly exist.