To those of you who have gone through existential crisis, is it possible to get out...

Haven't actually gotten around to him yet, and I'm actually relatively unfamiliar with his views. What makes him especially helpful for op's situation (I wanna learn)?

As an 18 year old in the same boat as this guy, is this something that gets better? You all seem to dismiss it as a childish phase, but I'm always skeptical of the sincerity of snark replies. Should I just think a bunch? Read all the French existentialism I can get my hands on?

I can already feel this tightening of my future, all the doors that have already been closed to me, all the things that I will never get to experience, and it makes me very melancholy.

Sometimes it's fair to be dismissive, but doing so isn't helpful to the people who are actually feeling it. Reading and thinking can help, but you want to be doing the right kind of thinking too. A lot of people seem to jump straight from "there's no absolute meaning to my life" into wallowing, self-indulgent despair. That's the part I personally don't understand as well; I haven't experienced that part firsthand. Coming to terms with the possibility that I may have no objective meaning was startling, but it gets better when you think about the logical consequence of that idea. It means you get to live on your own terms (there's no absolute purpose to violate by living how you want to live). Also, if there's no life waiting for you when you die, the one you have now is just that much more valuable, so you should make the most of it. That said, I expect it won't be easy to get over the emotional barriers to happiness just by thinking "I should be happy." So to answer your question about reading, I'd encourage it, but don't let that occlude other opportunities, and avoid indulgent self-pity. That part's important.

Just ignore people like this: , lest you become one of them. There is still hope for you.

My advice? Go out and have new experiences. Fail. Fail again.
Be comfortable with failure, but always either try again or have the insight to redirect your energy.

Go out and have new experiences. As you do, you'll figure out what you want out of life and expand your horizons. Know what you would like to achieve, and then focus your personal goals.
If you aren't comfortable with your habits or behavior, seek to change them.

If you're already in the panic pit, there is no sense in digging yourself in any deeper.
Come on and climb back out. You're too young to fucking quit now.

To just answer your question, reading is the only joy I have as of late. Without literature I would be nothing.

You would love The Myth of Sisyphus if you haven't already read it

If you choose reading, then go for the books your ancestors have read to you when you were little. Look for the change in your own perspective.
Example: i have been raised on tolkiens fantastic cock, but when read again at late teens, inoticed that frodos only purpose in life was destroying the ring. After that goal was completed, he metaphorycaly faded into obscurity.
And so ibelieve your onlygoalis finiahing school. That being a reason for crisis.
Moral- better be a multitasking action man.

It passes. I was kind of baffled by how stupid life was and didn't want to do anything in highschool. Well, unless you kill yourself your biological programming takes over and gives you a forward push. We aren't made to be nihilistic. You either follow the normie path to success or recede into your own little corner of the world and please yourself with arts or hobbies or drugs

nihilism takes effort

So says Satan.

Thank you for the advice guys, I'm going to take a screenshot of these.

Read works by virtue ethicists. MacIntyre would say of people like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche "Well, at least they tried." Existential thinkers notice the same problems as virtue ethicists with the way we do ethics post enlightenment, but the existential response was just the teething process and virtue ethics is a much more mature response (hence the almost complete fallout of favour in academia for existentialism and the meteoric virtue ethics).

MacIntyre's After Virtue-one of the earliest works of modern virtue ethics-extols upon the problems of the way we currently do ethics and sets forth explaining what virtue ethics actually is and why it is preferable.

Once a handle has been gotten on what virtue ethics is and why you should do it I would recommed some thing like Irvine's Guide to the Good Life. He is a contemporary Stoic, and the book sets forth how to practice to be one. It offers very good bottom up account of what it is like and what it means to do virtue ethics.

I would generally discourage reading the classical virtue ethicists because their understanding of the terms you will read in translation will be so different, you will misunderstand the texts to such an enormous degree to actually harm your understanding of those philosophies and possible your pursuit of virtue. Read modern scholarship on the classical virtue ethics. I have a book that spends 300 pages explaining the stoic conception of what is usually translated into emotion. This is useful. Just seeing Seneca using a word that is translated into emotion and imagining something similar to what we mean when we use that translated work will leave you with an extremely impoverished understanding. So only read them after you have read good works from academia on the subject, if you choose to read them at all.

...

>discover that you have a condition called Giftedness
>find a woman with it
>happiness at last

if ur so gifted what kind of gifted things have u done? or are you just sure you're smarter than guys with phds for no reason?

It fades almost as fast as it comes, just accept that life is fucking pointless, and think of how stupid you were to expect it having one.

Just keep riding it, seriously that's all I have learned, I don't even know any more.

...

It gets better in a sense, honestly I found that it's pretty hard to maintain if you surround yourself with the right shit. I mean I've brushed shoulders with depersonalization (had to go to the ER.) Learning techniques to keep your mind off it is sometimes for the best. Reading can definitely help with the realization that you aren't alone, but surrounding yourself with things that are" good" is the most "good".

one day user... one day..

no I got a gains goblin aka gf
everytime I feel like im abt to fall back in. she starts nagging at me why I haven't taken her out to eat in awhile(3 weeks)

>Are there any options besides religion?
Love

>implying religion isn't just structured love

Some great advice in this thread. I agree that it passes especially with time but as for concrete, ground level advice:

1. Clean your living area
2. Take a shower
3. Get out of the house
4. Socialize
5. Get any job if you don't have one

hey brother, structured love is better than none

I wasn't saying it wasn't, essentially I agree with his post.

submit yourself to the machine, make yourself a cog basically, great advice dr. shekelstein

Well it's almost guaranteed to get you out of an existential crisis, so what the hell more do you want?

"--Listen boy; I may be older than the room we're occupying, but I want to tell you something I never had the chance to tell your father before he left. Something I've only recently become affectionate of."
His brittle arm, stuffed into a baggy, grey pullover, shakily reached out for my palm. Watching his crumpled, paper-like skin strum lightly out of his control was like allowing him to play the blues of his wrinkled heart through my empathetic thoughts. I gift him my hand and glide my eyes over his--like peering over top and into dusk reflected on, or perhaps momentarily contained within, the glassy surface of Lake Baikal.
"Do not run. Do not scurry. But busy like the bee, as they say; not by any king's decree, but in careful hopes to please your queen. You understand?"
I didn't. His cracked lips curl and continue.
"Live your life fulfilling-ly. Suffering--hard work--towards goals make the peace in between something even greater. The next time you're walking to and back from a place, or driving or whatever, just look at the world around you and try not to think for a moment--"
He stops for a moment, seemingly hooked on some sort of submerged snag. He let's go of my hand snd reaches over towards the end table just on the other side of the cushioned armrest of his reclining chair. Pop-pop picks up the picture of my grandmother, my father, and himself taken the day my father was graduating his senior year of high school nearly 23 years ago. This was also the same day my dad had met my mother, who was currently off paying the electric bill and buying groceries while I kept Pop-pop company.
"--well you can't try to not think; it doesn't work like that. But just watch everything you see, hear, and feel without judging it. Don't try to enjoy your presence in the world. Enjoy your presence, and enjoy the world... You've smoked marijuana before, haven't you?--don't be coy."
My cheeks grew flustered and rose and I felt my ears tingle. I had for a few years when I was younger, but had kept it fairly well hidden. There was no doubt my off-guard reaction had tipped him off with no need for me to say anything.
"I smoked it when I was younger too; so had your father and so has your mother. So don't be frightened by me knowing, this is between us." I believed him. "This may sound strange, but in my more creative days I had a theory about the weed that sort of carries over into what I'm trying to tell you. Our brains have cannabiniod receptors in them that readily accept the into the body, and that have preprogrammed reactions that are meant to happen. Just as alcoholism is inherited. You'll probably think this crazy of old Pop-pop sitting here berating you with his boring speech-- but I honestly believe thc from marijuana acts like the plants consciousness. And that when you smoke the compound, you're, in a sense, touching minds with the plant. Are you still listening to me?"
...

I was reluctant to answer. This was too strange and I didn't see the practicality of it. He -was- sounding crazy, but I didn’t want to upset him. He rarely gets a good conversation anymore and he is a kind, old man. I can see in his eyes he is telling me something he thinks is greatly important.
"Yes."
“Don’t answer too eagerly. But, where this is all coming back to is that we look at relationships so selfishly. And in so, since our entire lives are consisted of them, we live selfishly. And when I thought of how this relationship with marijuana would work, the more I saw something that interested me. Was it not possible that being intoxicated off thc was the result of mending experiences for a moment? A mutual relationship with a plant, much like that off certain fungi and trees. But what we offered to plant was a view of the world as something mobile and if free whim. While the pant could offer deep understanding and feeling of ourselves and our world, being immobile and deeply rooted.
I didn’t think I was talking to it or anything. But just that I was momentarily viewing the world as it does, and I was allowing it the same… Oh I hope this doesn’t seem like I’m preaching a plant to you. I’m just saying that this thought was why I was telling you to enjoy… Eh, what was it again I was telling you?”
“You don’t remember?” I hardly did either. I hadn’t stopped thinking about who texted me a little bit ago, in the middle of his ramble.
“When will your mother be back from her errands?”
“I don’t know. Let me text her and ask.” I took this the perfect chance to pull out my phone, and remain on it until mother returned to rescue me.

Ok, guys, what about the second existential crisis?

You've realized life is meaningless, and have resolved to attempt to give it meaning. You do so but you begin to realize you're stuck in cycles. Whether you decided you wanted to be a great artist, or derive pleasure from living a simple life, you've realized it's all terribly cliché. Why would you want to be a great artist? Are you implying that you're somehow special and have a unique view of the world? How utterly bourgeois, and quite pathetic. You feel the need to be special to be validated in living. Why would you want to live a simple life? Do you want to actively attempt to be like everyone else? Won't you be endlessly bored looking around you and realizing you're just like everyone else? Your everyday task becomes mundane; everything seems to function as some replication of something else. You realize it's only natural that people want things to be different, to change, to be special: it's how interest works. You can't possibly be interested in everything. Cliché is only a natural part of human life. But then you realize this: everything operates in inescapable cycles. Interest to boredom, happiness to sadness, satisfaction to dissatisfaction. You can't help but hate cliché but it makes up almost 100% of what you are. You try to accept it? No, that doesn't work, because acceptance just turns out to be a cycle between acceptance and doubt. Everything just leaves you feeling empty, until it doesn't, and then it does again. You can't escape. And you can't feeling a fool for all of the above.

Where's the solution?

Existential crisis: Teens not wanting to come to terms with not being God's gift to the world.

Solution: Stop thinking that you are deep or special or particularly enlightened. You're a little conceited faggot pussy.

done

i'm in the same boat.

Dismiss the people telling you to get out. If you can't find peace whenever and wherever you are, you are regulating yourself by externalities and therefore will eventually be subject to them, i.e. your revolution has consisted of getting a new tyrant, and are still as conditioned as you were before.

You have to understand that everything in this world is really insubstantial (there's no deeper essence), and is subject to decay. By their own origination, things become subject to time, and so to development, and therefore to ending. You don't have starts without ends, and you don't have happenings without either. An experience unlike that, is not an experience that we can understand as we are now.

Now that you have acquaintanced yourself with the fact that all of this stuff is pure form, that you see it all as a formality, you are on even footing with the world. Since nothing is fixed, all of your actions, all of your existence, has been an irreplaceable, irreversible change to reality. To think otherwise is thinking a puzzle lacking one piece is really complete--it's thinking partially and that way of thinking leads to another host of problems.

You might want "something" to identify with, to hold on to. Not "everything", you might say, but at least "something". Wrong! Identify with "nothing"; not in the sense of absence, but in the sense of truly void. You are a hole in reality through which experience passes, you are the single point of your world. Everything else, your body, mind, relations, whatever, is not you--if you can perceive it, it isn't you, because perception is a two player game, in which one thing is perceived and the other perceiver. Because of this, aim your thoughts outwardly, like your senses already are. To be blunt: if you can make an object out of nothing, you have everything by the balls, it's that much better, and the things you have are unnecessarily gained and lost, and so become all the wore unique and enjoyable, and you are not dependent of them. As it is always a surplus, any good is good enough, in comparison to the total void. Everything in your life had to be as it is for it to be as it is, yet nothing should have been as it was, and could have been any other way.

This my way of seeing it: if you close your eyes, simply say yes to what you see.

Read:
The Tao te Ching
The Upanishads
The Dhammapada
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts

Not memeing in the slightest

>If you can't find peace whenever and wherever you are, you are regulating yourself by externalities and therefore will eventually be subject to them, i.e. your revolution has consisted of getting a new tyrant, and are still as conditioned as you were before.

I agree, but at the same time: if you sit on a tack, move your ass

that is to say: there is no need to subject oneself to avoidable suffering

All suffering is avoidable and unnecessary. And if it were insufferable, there'd be no person left to suffer. Now it's easy enough to move your physical behind away from it, it's the mental one that really troubles us.

It sounds like you don't appreciate yourself enough. Why try to find meaning in your life with respect to the world, when you can find it simply with respect to yourself—your own life, history, and innermost thoughts? Have respect for the core of you which is "you," and reference only it while you try and build up your life narrative.

Give it time bruh. Nothing matter and that fact doesn't matter.

After feeling bad for a while you just will stop caring. Just sit tight and don't kill yourself.

>b-but what am I suppose to do with my life?
Whatever you've been doing. Once your existential crisis passes you will find things fun and entertaining again and things will naturally sort themselves out.

Not to hijack a thread or anything, but whilst I never had a 'true' existential crisis (the fact life is meaningless doesn't really bother me), I'm having a hard time believing in love without God.

I don't understand how in an atheist (not that I am, but near enough) world, love can be considered anything but chemicals and stuff, but my day-to-day life and relationships seem to contradict this.

Is there anything at all I can read on this as it's wrecking my head, even if its something I can disagree with I just need something to conceptualize my arguments against at the very least.

As for religion, I grew up in a religious household (dad's a minister), so know a decent bit about that, but any reading (on any religion) I'd dive into over the summer.

>love can be considered anything but chemicals and stuff, but my day-to-day life and relationships seem to contradict this

What? How could your day-to-day life contradict that?

Sorry, badly worded. I guess what I mean is that I don't want to believe that the loving relationships I have are just biological and chemical quirks, evolutionary tricks or any kind of science.

You have nature in bad regards is what's happening. You believe "good things" can't come without intent, or that things need to be something special to be good, need to be purporsely good.

[trigger warning: Alan Watts] youtube.com/watch?v=NIX3r1_ZPRE

Is that it?

You should think of the mind as a process, rather than a thing (read: soul).

Atheistic existentialism deals with this, kinda

Maybe you're right, I'll need to think about that. My main problem is just that, for example, when my parents say they love each other, they're basing that on the love the believe in from God, something pure. When I say I love someone, all I'm thinking is 'I care about you deeply', and whilst there's nothing wrong with that, I'm worried it's because they've become habit. I lived with my girlfriend for almost two years now, and when we're separated I miss her, but i'm worried its a combination of habit and sexual desire if you understand what I mean.

Any specific authors?

OP the bad news is that this feeling of emptiness never really goes away. There isn't a magical piece of literature that will solve the problem since no matter how smart you are you can't defeat the basic problem that time passes and destroys everything in its path.

The good news is that once you are aware of this it actually becomes easier to live your life. You are no longer burdened with finding a deeper meaning. The whole notion of meaning is a red herring since it only makes sense to a human being or something similar to it. We are still animals and our emotions aren't something outside of the bounds reality, they have physical or chemical causes and real applications for our survival. The search for meaning is just a facet of the pattern recognition abilities that have helped us out so many times in the past. You can use this knowledge to manipulate your body into feeling better, for instance by crafting a healthy lifestyle for yourself. If your habits are sound, I can guarantee the amount of anxiety inducing introspection you experience will decrease.

Instead of closing your mind and trying to feel less conscious, you might as well try the opposite. Try to learn as much as you can and actually make an effort to experience and appreciate what life has to offer. In the worst case scenario, something bad could indeed happen, but you won't live forever so in the end it won't matter and your pain will be finite. In any case, you already feel trapped in a crisis so there is nothing you can learn, no terrible as of yet undiscovered truth that will really make the sense of emptiness significantly worse.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism_and_Humanism

>Read modern scholarship on the classical virtue ethics. I have a book that spends 300 pages explaining the stoic conception of what is usually translated into emotion. This is useful. Just seeing Seneca using a word that is translated into emotion and imagining something similar to what we mean when we use that translated work will leave you with an extremely impoverished understanding. So only read them after you have read good works from academia on the subject, if you choose to read them at all.

could you please provide some pointers on Stoicism and what papers you need to read

Whe need a chart of the levels of existential crisis.

All these Camus shills in this thread.
I thought Veeky Forums grew out of him a year or more ago, why is he getting memed seriously again.

life itself is just a long drawn out meme

Why did you have to go to the ER for depersonalization?

Yeah going outside is such a submission to the man. Much more liberating to stay inside all day absorbing and generating useless information.

Worrying about being bourgeois is the most bourgeois thing one can do. Just as life is meaningless, whatever personal meaning you choose to arbitrarily assign to your life is also meaningless (to everyone who isn't you). No one is watching you, no one cares what you do. Take solace in the fact that everyone is a fool.

Put a different name on a habit and it's still a habit. Your parents' love is no purer than yours.

I imagine the turnover rate here is pretty high

>I'm worried it's because they've become habit.
Why would that be bad? Love of God also is habit. The way your body is also is habit in a sense. The ways of society too. It's all patterns repeating through time. Take the ones you find good and dispose of those you consider bad. Trust your judgment, because even if you base yourself on God, you're still coming from your own judgment.

You guys have given me some stuff to think about, thanks.

No, existential crises fold into one another. The best you can do is to succumb to it, but then another one will be just waiting right around the corner.

I became a theist through this question. I can't just tell you the way to faith because everyone has their own way of finding it, but for me it was a combo of recognising that consciousness cannot be explained fully by science (hence leading to a belief in the soul) and the idea that love is an approximation of the love of a perfect being which provides a moral object of the universe

No prob OP.

What if consciousness were able to be explained by science? Would you stop believing in God and the soul?

Certain things can never be explained by science, by their very nature. See the Chinese Room experiment

Got a chronic disease, almost died, and gained a new perspective on the gift of live

I don't really know what to call it but I'm sick of this kind of "universal nihilism" or whatever the fuck pseud 14 year olds believe

"if i dont effect literally everything in the universe, life is meaningless!"

Life has meaning in making connections in other people and helping them, growing your hobbies, and developing yourself. There's plenty that you can use to find your own meaning.

You're welcome.

What's so different about consciousness? What do you mean by "consciousness", exactly?

For you people mentioning virtue ethics, stoics and so on : youtube.com/watch?v=gwUJHNPMUyU

For you people who feel you want to shoot up a school or at least understand how they and Elliot Rogers felt:
youtube.com/watch?v=MLp7vWB0TeY
youtube.com/watch?v=Gacjj2aCo7Q

For those wondering if there can be anything sacred despite us being so rational and atheistic youtube.com/watch?v=2c3m0tt5KcE

For the best breakdown of existentialism
youtube.com/watch?v=SsoVhKo4UvQ

For those wondering if they should start fixing their little (and not so little) problems and getting their life in order
youtube.com/watch?v=REjUkEj1O_0

In general, when it comes to suffering, depression, existentialism, evil, Jordan B Peterson is your fucking guy

Consciousness for me is the (vaguely wishy-washy) concept of being able to "understand" things. In my previous comment I referred to the Chinese Room experiment- if you accept its conclusion, it fundamentally distinguishes a program, which cannot understand anything, and a person, which can (I know this because I am a person). Therefore, humans must have something "extra" which allows them to understand rather than simply imitate understanding. I choose to call this the soul.

go to bed Jordan

Fair enough, but my question was strictly hypothetical. Why does everything need to be explained, anyway?

Well that's like me asking you "if it was proved that God existed, would you believe in God?". It's just a silly question, because it can't be proved.

Not so much about finding purpose but embracing the absurd.

I agree though, a little Camus can never hurt.

How do you know that you can understand anything? How do you know that a computer program cannot? How can you be sure that your understanding isn't identical to the mechanical "if A, then B" process that a program would go through?

Peterson "cured" my existential crisis and answered so many questions and cleared up so much its absurd. Can't recommend his lectures enough

>Chinese Room experiment
I don't see why a machine would necessarily be incapable of having such a feeling.

>Therefore, humans must have something "extra" which allows them to understand rather than simply imitate understanding.
I think this is based on a fallacy of origination, in which there's an original and a copy--but those concepts are pure abstractions, there's no two equal things.

In the end it seems any argument against machine personhood could be applied to people; how do you know the rest of the world isn't philozombies?

>want to watch all of these
>have to work on an essay
>still posting doe

>How do you know that you can understand anything?
I know that I can understand things because I am me... That's like asking "how do you know you're real"? Sure you can never prove it logically but I trust myself as a reputable source.

>In the end it seems any argument against machine personhood could be applied to people; how do you know the rest of the world isn't philozombies?
You can't, I guess. That's where my faith comes in. The end result of my thinking is either philosophical solipsism or belief in God, both seem equally likely so I'll go with God because it allows me to have a happy and fulfilling life.

>I'll go with God because it allows me to have a happy and fulfilling life.
Do you really need "God" for that though?

>You decide your own purpose.

Total nonsense.

Why ?

That's kind of what I'm working through, though the religious background makes me highly skeptical, any suggested reading?

>consciousness cannot be explained fully by science (hence leading to a belief in the soul)
No offense, but this is pretty nonsensical. The specific study of how consciousness arises though different brain structures is relatively new. We're talking like ~50 years of actual study, largely because the tools needed to do the study, like fMRI, haven't been developed until recently. Maybe your conclusion will be reasonable if we don't understand the idea of consciousness in, say, 100 or 200 years from now, but it's just ridiculous at the moment.

Just because nothing means anything doesn't mean you can't act as if something does. It doesn't need to lead to nihilism or relativism.

No God or higher law just means you're accountable to the people around you.

you don't "have" anything
you're making a conscious decision to dwell on this
stop making that conscious decision

If there is no 'Free Will'
Then I should not be held accountable for my actions

Retreat unto yourself. Everything's a drag...

>not using reading as a concentration discipline