How do you get over the feeling of utter insignificance as an individual?
This feeling is especially strong when I'm reading philosophy, and sometimes fiction, because I'm just 1 person out of 7 billion(and counting) and I just feel a deep,slow anger because learning about shit just feels like a waste of time because I could be killed at any time or something.
Those lofty ideas just seem inconsequential when I'm just another cog in the machine.
I know my perspective is the only one that is supposed to matter but I can't really shake this feeling off.
Reality has a severe nihilistic bias.
poo
for me it doesn't have an angering effect, but a depressing one. The feeling that your life, in the end, doesn't matter any more than one sand particle on the beach. But, I learn to live with my depression, mostly ignoring it.
Wait until the certain fact of your own death becomes absolutely concrete, then your insignificance will be the least of your problems.
>>7461223
>Le Tyler durden face
>*makes soap*
>>7459226
Lofty ideas are pretty dumb. Just embrace a life-affirming nihilism.
>>7459226
>Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
>>7459226
recognize that which is bigger than you
>>7461235
yeah but with the eternal recurrence that moment is like the only good song on a really big album
>>7459226
>How do you get over the feeling of utter insignificance as an individual?
You don't. You embrace it.
>>7461244
The eternal recurrence was just a little thought experiment, lad, Nietzsche didn't actually propose it to be real.
You lot are fucking gay
>>7461250
it was real in my mind
>>7461230
>it's not happened to him yet
>>7461235
yeah, but redheads are cool though
Everyone is insugificant desu senpai. So what if a million people know your name or no one does. Those one million people are going to die, their thoughts along with them. Just as you will die one day.
>>7461256
How can it be real in your mind if your mind isn't real?
>>7459226
You are the only determiner of significance.
>>7461248
elaborate.
You're better than all of them, champ!is what I tell myself every morning
>>7462817
Read the existentialists
>>7463140
key texts?
Just Hegel your shit up, you'll be fine.
>>7459226
u srs? for me it is the opposite of a waste of time for the same reason. if I can be killed at any time, I would like to read as much as I can, in order to understand as fully as I can what the hell is going on before getting obliterated.
I've been thinking a lot about that while reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations...
>>7463232
but what's the point of understanding when it doesn't matter in death?
>>7463249
Meditations actually caused that feeling for me, because I realized that human life is so transient and small and fragile that I just want to go to sleep forever.
>>7463250
if you believe that is true, then death should not matter in life. you won't know when you're dead, all you will ever know is what is going on right now, so I would say it is worth paying attention to.
>>7463274
actually, I did not think about it like that.
first time I've gotten my opinion changed on 4chan.
I tried so hard and got so far but in the end it doesn't even matter.
>>7463303
You mean Marcus Aurelius' Meditations?
It's a great introduction to Stoicism's ideas and did significantly change my worldview.
>>7463315
Is it okay to buy the penguin classic's translation???
>>7463327
I got the Gregory Hays Translation but the Penguin translation works too.
I also recommend Discourses by Epictetus(Penguin Classics) for a further explanation of Stoicism after being introduced to its ideas in Meditations.
Kill some pimps or assassinate a politician.
bamp
>>7459226
so you look around yourself and are astonished by the number of humans on the planet, in turn you feel inconsequential. Somehow fathoming the vast universe that we know, and the even greater universe that we do not know, you cannot come to some feeling that this is a very precious and rare thing?
