Has a book ever triggered an existential crisis in you? The works of pic related really messed me up

Has a book ever triggered an existential crisis in you? The works of pic related really messed me up

All the time. That's why I stopped reading and only post on Veeky Forums.

Characters with crippling depression/midlife crisis are a little close to home. It's tough to put the specific emotions into words, but when someone manages to accurately describe every anxiety and problem you've been through it hits hard.

je pense donc je suis -- ceci est nul
je pense, oui
je suis, oui
mais les pensées ne sont pas la raison d'être

i feel like this would hel, because then you would realize all of your problems are contrived and banal

la question: pourquoi je?
la reponse: AT Field

I understand that perspective, but if anything it makes it more stressful and overwhelming. It's no easier to deal with divorce, being unemployed or the loss of a friend knowing that others experience it; all it does is add pressure, as if I shouldn't be having trouble like I am. It's something you feel constantly but can't describe accurately. Seeing someone with a much more articulate grasp on the english language hit it so accurately just makes everything seem pointless.

Yup. Latest was... "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Fuck, that book was awesome.

People play the blues to get rid of the blues. People read stories about sad things to help them be less sad.


But really, get your shit together user, I believe in you.

Bible... and some works of Plato and Aristotle maybe

You didn't watch The Matrix?

This. Platos dialogues, but not into a crisis, more into an existential comfy

Physics and Metaphysics are really disturbing for me.

Reading Antifragile made me a huge skeptic (including of the classics, which the author worships) and made me see all habits and life philosophies as a sign of weakness. The book was like the hammer that really shoved the Stirner nail inside me. I haven't recovered

I stopped sleeping after finishing Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.

My diary desu. No, seriously. I've been in enough existencial crisis without reading a book that's triggering it. Could you recommend something for untriggering? I've been trying to find something like that since 10 years ago.

...

You can't untrigger, there is only more triggering to be had from reading

Psalms always calms me down, as do Plato's early dialogues and Seneca. Stay away from Plato's later works and the rest of the Bible, though. they are just more triggering

why? anamnesis seems like such a comfy perspective

The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I had my first existential crisis because of a book (1984) when I was a teenager. The fact that I was probably dissociating most of the time didn't help

I personally caused my crises and books were the ones that fixed them.
However, my aunt was deeply disturbed by Sophie's World and the idea that this reality might be an illusion, so she stopped reading halfway through.

Really? I find the early dialogues incredible emotive triggers as you know Socrates is about to die. The later ones feel more like fond memories of travelling around with your buddies, especially since the limits of Socrates' thoughts are further laid out (Protagoras).

I had at least one book which felt like a revelation and that was Antifragile, but note that doesn't say anything about the quality of it, I just had a feeling of "being mindblown"
It had to do with the book connecting seemingly unrelevant stuff together into (practical) concepts

Taleb could be biased and wrong but he is certainly highly creative, and he stimulated me to up my reading of books and introduced me to systems science which openened even more paths to me

I've had other more scientific non-fiction works which almost caused a depression like state, such as one which described in detail how the planet will become unhabitable because it runs out of oxygen (I think it was, but I could be wrong)

I've had existential crises due to life experiences but never books

>such as one which described in detail how the planet will become unhabitable because it runs out of oxygen (I think it was, but I could be wrong)
Note after millions of years

I recently had a crisis reading that book. Taleb destroys a lot but isn't terribly programmatic, though he lays out a few things. I wish he could spell out in detail suggestions he has for how to design an antifragile society. I think now that any political view that doesn't incorporate his ideas is naive and incomplete.

I took a class on early modern philosophy a while back. Within a three month long semester, we read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, Spinoza's Ethics, a collection of essays from Leibniz (the most memorable being Monadology), Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge.
All of these things in such a short time, along with the classroom discussions and six papers I wrote throughout the class, completely triggered an existential crisis and permanently altered the way I view things. One of the best classes I've ever taken, and every one of those philosophers is mind blowing when read properly.

nothing literary or anything but Raymond Carver's short stories were something I could relate to being a low-grade teenager in a small town with no future in store

Stoner pulled me, albeit briefly, from my existential wormhole.

The bromance in the Epic of Gilgamesh gets me deeply