LastThursday

It's about contrast. If you're just like everyone else, then you won't be noticed. But if you're unique then you'll stand out. Why stand out though? Simple, to get attention. Why get attention? Simple, to feel loved. Thing is, to get attention you have to be unique in very narrow ways, to the detriment of all your other qualities. The reality is that every single one of us is unique in an infinite number of ways: and we should love everyone for their unique mix of qualities.

It's unfortunate, but I have no answer. My instinct is to go meta, but I wouldn't know what that was exactly. Maybe start by asking: "Am I truly a nihilist or do I just like scaring myself?". Maybe look for an absolute that you can rely on: the experience of existing or consciousness itself - but that doesn't give much to hold on to. And life isn't as bleak as floating in the ocean, there is actually a lot of stuff to get lost in and distracted with (i.e. kicking is more fun than drowning).

@rachMiel by your own definition, Nihilism is complete relativity. The despair comes out of naively believing in absolutes and then through some process having to reject all absolutes, it's a form of grief. Then comes the realisation: how does anything get built, if there is no base to start from? Or the flipside: there's all this stuff, but it's completely arbitrary and absurd. It's like treading water in the ocean, you're only held up as long as you keep kicking - and whether you stop or not, it's despair both ways.

I suppose an absolute is a truth that is unchanging and eternal, everything else is finite and relative. An absolute isn't relative because nothing can affect it. So to know an absolute, you must know with certainty that it is unchanging and eternal. But how can you know something is eternal without experiencing its entirety? How can you know an absolute never changes, again, without waiting for it to change? If you do anything else it's blind faith. No, we only ever experience relativity.

@caspex I think you can pick out nuggets of truth from nearly anything, but I wouldn't rely solely on Chess to give you everything. Some things Chess has highlighted for me and it's relation to living life: Positional blindness. Many times you feel stuck and can't see a way out. But actually you're not seeing the bigger picture and looking at ALL the pieces. There is nearly always a move that can be made - as in life. Being pinned. Whatever you do you will lose a piece. In some life situations, whatever you do, things will get worse. You have a great move, your opponent finds a better counter move. No matter how good you are, there will always be someone better, cleverer, more skilled. The grind of mastery. You play and play and make progress, then slide back all the way and it's soul destroying, yet you go on. You can only really get better by studying chess hard. Yes you can just play and improve, but it'll be a slow slog and you may cap out at a certain rating. As in life, sometimes study and being instructed will supercharge you. That's it.

@rachMiel I can't help but think that it's a hopeless endeavour (for me personally). Is a story ever truth? A particular truth is absolute because if it ever changes then it wasn't truth (or it was finite relative truth only). So you seek absolute truth, but use a relative tool to do it: storytelling. And if you don't seek absolute truth, then any relative truth will do and you can collect them like butterflies. If you allow in absolutes then Nihilism sort of becomes redundant. Groundhog day is an excellent film BTW. In the film the situation doesn't change, but just Bill Murray's (emotional/rational) reaction to it. He gets to escape the loop, but I don't think we have that option IRL, the absurdity continues, changing our reaction to it only makes it more bearable.

@rachMiel there's danger of circularity in what you believe. You know you're telling yourself a story, but seemingly you can't escape it? OR: You want to believe (the story of nihilism), but you can't bring yourself to do it?

More background music

A bit of background music (that's not me!).

I'm a closet perfectionist - I confess. If asked most of my acquaintences would say I was not, and may even say that I'm the opposite: anything goes. I suspect we all have an inner rocky core surrounded by a soft atmosphere of maturity and sensible experience. I've worked hard to be an anti-perfectionist. But I still feel that twinge of pain when I lose, when things don't go my way, and when reality doesn't match idealistic expectation. There are many things I want to be perfect at, I want to play the piano like an angel, I want to use perfect words to gain admiration, to be the best in my field of technology, to be unified, whole, unbroken and a perfect example to others. I'm none of those things. A few years ago I watched a program about the concept of Wabi-Sabi and it clicked that my self-enforced anti-perfectionism was just this. Wikipedia says it's: "a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection". It started of as a way to ameliorate the pain of imperfection and being less than, somehow I would just pretend that the pain didn't matter. In the end it became the counterweight to my perfectionism, and it's given me a kind of freedom of expression and abandonment that I wouldn't have otherwise experienced. But the soft blanket of Wabi-Sabi still hasn't seeped deeply into my rocky core, that would be the ultimate perfection. Still. There are moments of unforced perfection. Those moments when someone allowed me to kiss them sweetly, when I played Bach without a hitch, when I didn't worry about myself, when the rain fell but the sun shone. I savour those moments. I'll continue to balance myself on the tightrope between perfection and imperfection and hope I don't fall.

Not at all, in fact in can become easier to learn new skills and take on knowledge. That's because you build on the things you learnt before. Cognitive decline only really happens much later, say past 60 if it happens at all: there's a great many factors including diet and exercise, disease and using your brain in general. What does reduce as you get older is time. You have a great many more responsibilities and your attention is spread over many more different things. This can make it exponentially harder to take on new skills or learn new things. So most people end up doing this through employment as that's really the only place you can have solid blocks of time to build up skills.

@Emerald it seems to me that the common thread between your waking disgust and your sexual dreams is intensity of emotion, i.e. there is an emotional connection there and they're also both to do with men/masculinity. I've often woken up from dreams and had a certain amount of repulsion at what I dreamt, but I realise that's just my logical mind kicking in. Underlying the logic is a sea of emotion and often that involves giving yourself into it - despite how irrational it seems. In order to grow (and understand better) we need to experience what it is to give ourselves up to what we find disgusting or repulsive. Dreams are a "safe space" for that, I guess.

I would say that a self hasn't experienced non-existence so the fear can't be quite that. A self has to set up a wall to keep everything else out. What a self really fears is the wall dissolving. It's a like a nation state which has an army to defend itself, any incursion into its territory has to be seen as an act of potential annihilation, so it will defend itself at all costs. From a higher perspective though, the wall around the self is a complete fantasy. There no difference between what a self thinks it is and everything else.

We can. Using the hands, the mouth, the body - that's the most efficient way - but a lot of us seem to forget that.

It can be better to just let the information wash over you. What happens over time is that connections between disparate bits of information start to be made, either consciously or unconsciously, and this can often "stick" better than narrowly trying to unpick this or that. It's just a different style of learning, more right brained so to speak. The advantage is that it can help with overwhelm.