It's funny to me how stupid pessimism is. I look at people praising Schopenhauer, and I'm just thinking...

It's funny to me how stupid pessimism is. I look at people praising Schopenhauer, and I'm just thinking, how is this supposed to help people? I don't mean in that he says religion isn't good, I mean in the fact that he likes to tell people that trying to be happy is futile and stuff. I'm pretty sure if you just focus on negative things, then by self fulfilling prophecy you're just going to see negative things. Do you see the conundrum here? If you think of everything as negative, you'll inevitably see everything as negative, and it's just a feedback loop of negativity that feeds back into itself. I mean, your brain is capable of things like happiness, and there doesn't have to be some arbitrary justification for it from outside your head.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously
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Fuck off normie

If you expect nothing from anyone then you're myopic and leave out the fact that if you weigh the possibility of a positive outcome against the negative, with a health skepticism you can accept disappointment and still be pleasantly surprised when things work out. God, I sure sound smart today, don't I?

i agree desu. i used to read schopie & friends and ended up a confused, actionless and scared mess.

stuff like that might be healthy on lower doses but going full autist on it just doesn't lead to anything worthy.

If you want some serious pessimism forget that cuck and start reading Giacomo Leopardi

>your brain is capable of things like happiness

It actually isn't according to my therapist. She says the best she can do is give me advice to not kill myself and just keep living. One of these is to indulge in the few interests I have, and one of these is pessimistic philosophy. If I didn't have that I'd be gone a while ago desu.

yes listen to the woman who married someone who cheated on her constantly and put her head in an oven.
it is. but so is optimism. as with any western mental construct one needs to approach all philosophers in the same way that an agnostic approaches religious scripture.

Good for you, not even being ironic or anything. Thing is I can't say "And now I'm happy!" and so be it, it doesn't work that way. I can't see how pessimism is supposed to be stupid, when it's pretty much the truth. The shit in this world outweighs the good things 99 to 1. It's bullshit, that I'm supposed to go on like this for 60 more years, when I'm already more than sick and tired of it with 21. 99% of the human race are phony, stupid, shallow, disgusting and have no self reflection and I'll most certainly never find someone who I can connect with. I can only focus and see the negatives, because they're the only things there.

People only like things they are good at. Thus, if you're a perfectionist because you hate dissapointing poeple, your life is going to... wait, did you tell me to enjoy my life? To be happy just for the sake of it? That's debauchery! That's hedonistic! That... just might work...

Just kidding, anything without a reason to be liked could never be treated so. Ignorance is like the flimsy toy you enjoyed when you were younger. You played with it for hours at a time until it was forgotten. Then you learned about the world of adolesence and, subsequently, pain. What is understood here is that ice feels best after a burn, or that breakup is the death of the heart after its enlightening. There must be a give for a go you see, and just saying you're going doesn't move your legs. there must be a sacrifice of calories and nutrients.

Hi Colden Haulfield.

Your post keeps repeating itself because your argument has no substance.

Suffering is without a doubt more potent than happiness. Schopenhauer's idea of happiness as the negative of a positive suffering is pretty convincing.

There is a big difference between "focusing" on negative things and making yourself sick, and actually seeing the world and happiness for what they are. The very definition of happiness is at stake and that's what you should be talking about.

>implying Colden wasn't correct but that the solution wasn't to be some detached fucking retard

>goes to a therapist

>Fell for the therapist meme
Let me guess, she's female?

Reminder that women cannot be therapist since they can hardly be depressed and will never ever understand the life of a man.

>everyone should think the same way as me!

How pessimistic toward other people's points of view.

He used the word "she" when talking about her... so good guess.

YEAH REAL MEN DON'T SEE THERAPISTS, ISN'T THAT RIGHT, CROOKED HILLARY???

I really agree with OP here. I went down the pessimism route and it turns everything sour when it genuinely doesn't need to be. And anyway, Schopenhauer literally discovered the beginning of Buddhism yet didn't have the willpower to reach it's blissful conclusion.

in my opinion, the choice between pessimism and optimism comes down to the following question: What do you value more - the truth or lies? If you choose the path of the truth, whether a certain lifestyle/decisions/thoughts/etc. are positive or negative (in terms of how they affect you) is completely irrelevant. Sadly, pessimism is the consequence of accepting the truth. I do not judge anyone who holds on to illusions in order to feel better - it is only natural; a natural illusion, a natural lie

It's not about that, but the fact that therapists, especially females are a fucking sham.

It's always possible to accept the dark truths of life yet hold optimism for your own psychologies sake. It's a balance.

where do i start with giacomo leopardi? I 'm in the mood for something pessimistic.

You're retarded. I don't even give a shit about women but depression has nothing to do with gendered psychological differences or 'the life of a man'.

It is better to think of Depression as something like the flu rather than a psychological phenomena. Go read up on the link between Depression and the immune system and inflammation. People make it out to be something more complicated than it actually is to personalize it so as to help deal with the pain and hide from their own shortcomings

t. someone who was severely depressed for slightly over a decade and started taking so called anti-depressants at the age of 11

Get out, Normo, reeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

>started taking so called anti-depressants at the age of 11
the jews never gave him a chance

Meh, I'm doing alright, all things considered partially becoming a zombie during your adolescence isn't the worst thing that can happen and it came with some advantages

Of course you can be an optimistic individual in a very dark context, I did not dispute that. My point was that if our existence is objectively miserable, then being optimistic in such a context is an illusion, a helpful lie that makes it easier to cope with everyday life

let me illustrate my point with an example: let's say you are well-aware that you live in a decadent society that is drawing its last breath; a society that desperately seeks meaning in vanity (materialism, hedonism) and that the chances for its revitalization are very slim, if not non-existent. you are free to lock yourself in your own, optimistic bubble, but that does by no means imply that the situation as a whole is bright. on the contrary, it is depressing and it is delusional to convince yourself that you can find enough objective reasons not to be pessimistic in such circumstances

This is literally the dumbest thing I've ever read on the internet.

Start with the Small Moral Works if you're into unsystematic philosophy. If you like reading notebooks and collections of thoughts, check out the Zibaldone (2600 pages long). Otherwise, just read his poems, which are the best thing he did in his troubled short life.

>how is this supposed to help people?

That's real spooky user

>catharsis? Never heard of it!

>It's funny to me how stupid
>how is this supposed to help people
seemed to make you laugh

>assuming genders
>2092
GEET OUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT

>2092
this doesn't seem right

>just writing some green text
because it makes the thread more colorful :')

The only delusion is to think that there is a point to any "revitalization". You're sucking the dick of a ideological, anthropocentric spook.

...

It helps people by not indoctrinating them with accepting how things are.

Speaking personally my appreciation for the minutiae grew immensely when I started to appreciate just how awful life itself is. I think an affirmative view of life is necessarily given over to ingratitude because you'll always be trying to reconcile this overall perspective that life ought to be good with quotidian experience. Naturally you'll be more inclined to see what doesn't fit into that picture. But if you view life as a piece of shit then you'll spend a good hour at brunch ordering scones and coffees trying to keep that moment going. When you think that 90% of humanity has trouble meeting its needs you can really appreciate the rarity of genuine pleasure.

the shit must necessarily outweigh the good. The world would have to be explicitly designed FOR us or else the condition of entropy would have to be nill for it to be otherwise. We are fighting against this thing. Fighting things isn't fun.

>brunch

what are you some kind of fagomolish?

yes actually

>and I'm just thinking, how is this supposed to help people?

Denying the will to live through asceticism is the only way to escape insatiable desire which will only leave you chasing the proverbial dragon.

God fucking damn it, Schopenhauer explicitly says his philosophy is intended to lead people to happiness via cessation of striving, striving which is suffering.

>being invested in "society"
wew

>It's funny to me how stupid pessimism is.

Retards.

That post was correct. A woman can never understand the life of a man and every piece of advice she gives has an underlying desire behind it to sabotage that man without her knowledge of even doing so.

>female therapist
there's your problem

>go to the school therapist when 6 after bullying people
>get sent to another professional therapist
>get diagnosed with ADHD
>go to therapy til 7
>parents are divorced and my mom never told my dad
>finds out I'm talking ADHD medication
>talks to my mom, convinces her to take me off the medication
>bullying problem has stopped by now
>I always read more than other kids and wanted to be a Navy SEAL

I always had a problem doing homework but I ended up getting my diploma at the age of 19, I had to go out of my way to continue schooling when I was a super senior in my highschool. When i was a super senior I got straight A's, I'm not sure why I never did homework or anything before, but I fixed my effort and did the work and got results.

ADHD is a meme, same with therapists.

I'm pretty convinced my father saved me from becoming the broken, "smart", college students that I see post on /g/ or in IRC that want to kill themselves and tuck their penis's pretending their girls.

Liberally proscribed modern medication might be the issue.

Personally I think the bigger issue is that everyone seems to think their broken in some way and they can never grow and change.
>"my doctor says I can't run because I have a blood pressure problem"
>"I can't take tests well because I had ADHD"
>I can't talk to girls or get a job because I have a social disorder
>I need to take my meds because I suffer from depression

You need to meet the problem and overcome it yourself in my opinion. I've yet to see meds and victimizing bullshit help anyone.

>how is this supposed to help people

Are we talking about Philosophy or something else here?

happiness is only attainable by those who do not feel the need to pursue it. "No one who wants to be happy is or will ever be happy. Only those who don’t care if they’re happy or not, are happy. Have you noticed that?"

If understanding is not conducive to happiness, should you still want to be happy?

Go back to facebook grandma

There is nothing new under the sun.
>he who would save his life will lose it

Logic pleb detected.

If understanding is not conducive to happiness, that doesn't entail that being happy is/is not conducive to understanding. In other words, even if it's true that understanding isn't conducive to happiness (i.e. something like understanding tends to decrease happiness), that doesn't entail that happiness tends to decrease understanding (or increase, but the conclusion you seem to be drawing is the former).

That's absolutely retarded.

>waaaah life is hard
Your lack of this-worldliness is showing.

>muh the world is so dark and bad
Only if you choose to moralize the world and live in fantasy-land instead of facing the world head-on and accepting it for what it is. Pessemists are just feminized retards who would rather cry than re-evaluate their cuck ideology and realize that not all suffering is bad and that suffering and struggle is essential to a fulfilling life. You're like hysterical liberal women who think that all forms of killing and death are "bad" and empathize with people outside of the tribe.

On the contrary, striving and succeeding makes you a fulfilled person.

>muh tribalism
>muh vanity
you've seen one too many commercials user

Mass culture is what made you so passive and weak. Anyway, if you don't care about any of these things you should just kill yourself because you obviously don't have the will to truly live.

It might seem retarded to you, but that's basic logic. This is literally what I'm studying in grad school (mostly formal semantics actually, but the same shit).

Not even trolling. If you can't see this then you're a complete retard. The statement that A implies B doesn't entail that B implies not A. For example, if your reasoning is true, then we can infer from the statement "A decrease in temperature is conducive to freezing" to "freezing is conducive to a decrease in temperature". It seems like you're reasoning is what's "absolutely retarded".

Maybe due to you're mathematical and logical ineptitude you're confusing a statistical claim with a logical claim (confusing induction and deduction, as it were)? It's true that if understanding is not conducive to happiness, then we can expect that lower rates of happiness are generally correlated with higher rates of understanding, but we can't also conclude that being happier diminishes one's understanding. I don't see how this isn't completely obvious (maybe I'm just being trolled). If understanding causes a decrease in happiness that doesn't mean that happiness causes a decrease in understanding. This is literally one of the oldest logical fallacies (lol it was identified by Aristotle in the very first work on logic in history, if I'm not mistaken).

*A implies not B doesn't entail B implies A

Fuck I keep making typos

*"A implies B doesn't entail that B implies A"

>takes Intro to Philosophy once
grad school my ass, you're a high schooler

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously

Your reversals are stupid and nonsensical, contextually the statement is quite clear in its meaning and interpretation.

Weak for the defined metrics of said culture.

Passivity is liberty, is the only worthy pursuit in my own metrics.

lmao analytictards
>lmao category mistakes theory of grammar n shiet
>what is poetry

cuck

You sound real spooked, user.

That's what is believed.

>trivializing suffering
Typical Neetchfag. Grow up.

Lel you obviously know nothing about logic or linguistic theory. I just said I'm studying linguistics in grad school and you gave me a link to "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as if that's not something I'm quite well familiar with. Perhaps this seems like some esoteric shit to you, but "colorless... furiously" is usually discussed in a introductory course on syntax.

The reversals are logically equivalent to the claim that "understanding is not conducive to happiness" entail "happiness is not conducive to understanding". Hopefully you're at least familiar with the notation of entry level propositional logic for babies. What you're saying is that (A => B) => (B => A), which is logically invalid.

Also you clearly don't understand how logic works. It doesn't matter if my reversals are "nonsensical". The semantic content of the predicates is irrelevant because the value assigned to logical tautologies is what's called invariant under any interpretation of the non-logical constants. In other words, any logically valid statement is logically valid under any interpretation of the non-logical element of the proposition. That's why we can make logical claims about things that are meaningless (like the variable A and B in the above illustration). For example we can say "All wubs are grue. Fleeg is a wub. Therefore fleeg is grue." That's a valid argument even though its "nonsensical".

Again, you clearly have no mathematical or logical ability and probably think that a course of Calculus I sounds intimidating.

Lets consider a more concrete example. "Mammals are animals" does not entail that "Animals are mammals". Or "If the sky is green then my teeth are yellow" does not entail that "if my teeth are yellow then the sky is green". Or "If I'm hungry then I will eat dinner" does not entail that "If I eat dinner then I am [was] hungry".

Toppleb
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent
You're basically denying the antecedent. The examples being "nonsensical" is completely irrelevant to their logical form. If your reasoning is true then we should be able to infer that being unhappy is conducive to understanding

I'm guessing most of us agree that understanding/knowledge is not conducive to happiness. So becoming smarter/more educated tends to make people less happy. Have you noticed the converse, namely that being unhappy makes you smarter?

Yeah no I'm actually in grad school for linguistics doing work on formal semantics/categorial grammar. I just started this fall. I don't know why that's so hard to believe. I have an undergrad in math and philosophy from the UMD. I did a bachelors honors thesis that investigated the relation between formal grammars, ellipsis, and ambiguity.

everyone is capable of happiness

shut the fuck up
you haven't even read Schopenhauer
just shut the fuck up

...

Positivism and its many consequences says hi.

>I'm pretty convinced my father saved me from becoming the broken, "smart", college students that I see post on /g/ or in IRC that want to kill themselves and tuck their penis's pretending their girls.
>
>Liberally proscribed modern medication might be the issue.
I was never on meds and I turned out that way.

Your pessimism is rooted in your lack of imagination. If you actually thought about how much shit could go wrong in your body alone at any time you'd quickly see that the things that allow your life *at least* even out to the things that put it in danger. Yeah, you're going to die, so what? Why do you care about it so much? Why can't you worry about that when you're old? Who told you you should live forever? Why would you even want that? Can't you see that if you had things as you wished all the time you'd only end up sick and resentful of them? Do you really think you're such a beautiful soul that you would avoid that fate? You're so naive and hopeful. You're running on so many assumptions. Just give up, will you? If you want it so hard, put a bullet through your head, the rest of us isn't going to weep because we lost the next Jesus. Otherwise stop complaining and stop caring so damn much. Deal with what you can deal with and fuck the rest.

You little ingrate, all you can think about is what you don't have while using the fucking internet. Produce your own goddamn value instead of caring about what others get that you don't.

true

>>Your pessimism is rooted in your lack of imagination. If you actually thought about how much shit could go wrong in your body alone at any time you'd quickly see that the things that allow your life *at least* even out to the things that put it in danger. Yeah, you're going to die, so what? Why do you care about it so much? Why can't you worry about that when you're old? Who told you you should live forever? Why would you even want that? Can't you see that if you had things as you wished all the time you'd only end up sick and resentful of them? Do you really think you're such a beautiful soul that you would avoid that fate? You're so naive and hopeful.
it is actually too much imagination which lead to this question and pessimism. the more you have mental proliferation, the unhappier you are

Nah, it's just shitty idealism. You only use your head to think about the way things should be rather than try to get the gist of them. The moment you hit a wall you think you've seen the truth and the big bad world is after you because you think pain has inherent value.

>"It's bullshit"

I hate this Hemmingway-esque meme of our time that depression and melancholy are signs of some kind of authentic intelligence. Yes, if you asked any experience person on the world they would tell you that it contains an awful level of suffering, and that if there was a final purpose to it, happiness doesn't seem to be reign sovereign. But to leave things at that - just to accept this superficial miserability - is so petty. I won't use "weak" because I think strength has nothing really to do with it, and I sympathize with the medically incapable, but the flipside to the darkeness of this world is a palette of all colours. I don't think we would ever have excitement, risk, adventure, or beauty, without the sadness within this place. If you want the fake, shallow sunshine that you accuse "normies" of gracefully shitting out day to day, or some Humian "what if" scenario of a perfect world - you're not going to be satisfied at that either. There's an emptiness to those lives, and your disdain for it shows some kind of intuition towards it. Life is intrinsically sad, but life is intrinsically many things. It doesn't require one didactic response, it's too far beyond that.

>idiot who hasn't read Schopenhauer maes a thread with some vague statements
>obvious that he doesnt know what he's talking about
>other people begin a "discussion" based on this
>the shitflinging continues for 100s of posts

I feel bad for you if this is your only way to engage with different ideas.

>the flipside to the darkeness of this world is a palette of all colours.
Jesus, this. It's not like tragical stuff is even the whole of negative emotion anyway. You people don't even suffer interestingly.