Have you developed an existentialist mindset?
I can't help but think life is totally pointless and meaningless.
I also have feelings of depersonalization and derealization. I sometimes feel like this world isn't real, this reality is too constructed, artificial and fake feeling, etc.
I'm not depressed or anything though. I think we should still live life to the fullest. We might as well live life to the fullest in this tiny, tiny little time we have on this planet than just end it now.
Still I've begun to realize just how much I 'drift' through life, especially things like school. I literally put the bare minimum effort into everything to succeed because I'm so apathetic and unmotivated to excel. I'm satisfied with barely trying and getting a C- for example.
Not just school but relationships and friendships as well. There's only a tiny little fraction of people I speak to and am very satisfied with this. Most of them I don't have very strong friendships or relationships with either. My family of course I love them and spend time with them but I also spend a minimal amount of my attention in their lives.
Either way all this conformity gets drilled into my head and I can't stand it. At school they're always mentioning about how we find our 'purpose' in life, how we find meaning. How we 'contribute' as a citizen, as a member of the community, etc. It's starting to get annoying. I'm also a socialist but no I do not believe in this 'find meaning in your life to be a part of your world!! Your great, big, exciting, happy world of meaning and purpose!!' stuff.
Anyway enough about me.
So, are you an existentialist? Could it even be an Aspie thing that we are more inclined to these types of philosophies? Or do you think it's not and we can all have different philosophical views? What do you think?
What's your story/when did you start feeling you were an existentialist, why, and how has it changed your perspective on the world?
Lovely to hear form someone who sounds so alike.
I noticed the meaningless-ness at age 12.
I'm 40 now and still not sure about the 'your great purpose' in life. If there is any perhaps it's spreading the 'existentialist mindset' as you call it?
Since age 24 I have enjoyed studying Buddhist philosophy, the existential part of it. I should finish my PhD on the subject but sort of can't be bothered … MA is enough I guess.
You might enjoy the concepts of inter-dependent arising, emptiness and non-self as well, do look into it when you have time and feel inclined to do so.
(I would recommend steering clear from the western new-agey neo-buddhist bunch though, they only paint mandalas, chant and pretend to be holy loving-kindness-es … Unfortunately there is no concept of loving-kindness in Buddhism originally, there is only concept of compassion!)
But I don't know if inherent understanding of non-realness is an Aspien thing though...
Last edited by f9 on 19 Mar 2015, 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Good one.
'Love' in Buddhism is one of the attachments which tie us down to the inherent suffering (dukha in sanskrit, does not mean big dramas, even discomfort like cold hands while typing text can be cause of suffering when we view it as negative … but let's leave this aside for now or it'll get too long).
'Love' relates to the dualities of liking and disliking and does not lead to better understanding of the world. On the contrary 'love', like it's dual partner 'hate', only ties us down more and more.
Compassion is closer to being able to see things from neutral point of view and to understand other beings's suffering - it is related to understanding that suffering is our human's natural state of mind (unless we are enlightened).
I could feel compassion towards a peasant shouting on a street if I were able to see the world through his eyes. I could understand he is not shouting because he wants to annoy people but he is shouting out of his personal version of suffering - his own discomfort of living. Whatever it is at that point. I could comprehend that this his only way to react to the situation he's in and he simply does not know any other way.
I could choose to
a) not react by shouting back to him to shut up but
b) to respond. The response can be simply not reacting at all.
Or it can be something which benefits the person shouting if it is in my capability.
Or sometimes saying 'Do not make fool of yourself. It's shameful to shout on street' could be the appropriate response when others are disturbed by the noise.
If I had developed compassion I'd have more understanding and more choice of appropriate response.
But.
I would not have to love the shouting peasant. I would not have go and hug him or pat him to shoulder. I would not have to pity him. And I would not have to think I was being kind to him.
This sort of arrogance - the better, cleverer, wiser, kinder me showing love and kindness to the lower shouting person or feeling sorry for this person - has not place in Buddhism. It is a Christian do-good-ing way of seeing the world.
… hope this makes some sense ….
techstepgenr8tion
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Toward the end of my 20's I had a few years where I was pretty certain of atheism, reductive materialism, and full-determinism. The existentialist viewpoint that took me may have even started well before that when I was reasonably agnostic, it probably happened as well because my life was marked by exquisite social duress - even having friends wasn't enough to change how that worked. The best way I can explain it - people who knew me liked me, people who didn't would think everything and anything negative (I became a sign-wearer for whatever they wanted to project on me) and I realized that under such oppression - who I was inwardly literally didn't matter, the quantity of people who didn't know me would vastly outweigh the people who did, every opportunity would be taken from me based on the world simply not liking me on sight and I'd have to fight like heck just to make it, and do so all the while realizing I'd been given a nightmare scenario to survive in.
From that perspective the idea really developed, again this started even in my early 20's, that if something within me wasn't externally validated by other people it didn't meaningfully exist. If I had profound thoughts on one topic and took them to the grave no one would ever have known I had them and in a relative sense it would mean that I never had those thoughts because no one registered them other than myself. In fact a lot of my creative endeavors with music were really me trying to do just that for a long time - let the world know that there was 'someone' in here at all.
Around my late 20's was also when my absolute limitations started hitting home, when my dreams of being x, y, or z in terms of outrunning the pains of my life by achievement were shattered, and I had to face the possibility that my life would be a horror story where I was accused of being a zero as a child, treated like one no matter what I did through my teens and early 20's, and that I'd end up exactly that - a zero. Lol, on some levels that seems to still be playing itself out just that thankfully I've gotten a different grip on life and just as thankfully that new grip on life came from new information, something cogent enough to actually work and pass the standards of my BS-detector.
I don't really know at this point where my life will go or how far I'll achieve, just that my interest continues to be in personal development and to continue 'doing' as much as I possibly can. I might make it, I might live with my parents for the rest of their lives; I don't know, the best I can do however is the best I can do. Thankfully I feel a lot better at this point with a sense that there's a way to get my life right and maximize the returns rather than feel like who I am is governed by whatever common-denominator calumny I might strike a chord with.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
Does anyone know if there are hormonal differences between AS and NT ?
Generally our belief systems create our feelings but if your wired not to need social connection then feelings are just physical responses ? Could this be why u have feelings of detachment because the feeling doesn't link to anything as such ? Dunno just a random thought ?
Our social needs were about survival of the fittest. Now its more about validating our existence. Education helps us understand more than one view point but interesting how fear can make people feel they have to believe in something to feel accepted in society.
Last edited by jajaboo on 19 Mar 2015, 5:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I have developed an existentialist mindset, but I do not believe that life is meaningless. I believe that each person is responsible for defining what life means for him or her. I subscribe the existentialist school of psychology which asserts that one must work through the negative feelings that come with believing that life has no meaning. A psychologically healthy person uses moments of existential doubt to redefine his or her worldview. This person moves from feelings of fear and hopelessness to feelings of hope and determination after finding his or her personal meaning in life. I have gone through this process several times because society and other people's beliefs seem so nonsensical to me. I can't commit myself to any religious belief and the things that U.S. popular culture says we should believe in are ridiculous to me. I have to find my own way through life, my own way of understanding the world.
Life from the POV of the universe is pointless, but not without meaning. As information can mean something relatively, but there is no actual point to existence. There is no meaning to all of it. Just the data tells us thing about the Universe, catarateristics. It is interesting, but it is up to you whether you concern yourself with it or not.
However the "meaning of life" has no meaning. You could try an get something out of life that stimulates your brain, basically do what you want, preferably without hurting people. Or perhaps not, whatever floats your boat.
Camus denied being an existentialist. He was not concerned with speculation or meta-physics. He considered man's desire for meaning in life an absurdity. This is about the human condition, not an intended philosophical classification (though you could call it absurdism).
"Depersonalization" and "derealization" are feelings, and you could argue that that you are still desiring meaning but doubt it. Camus would also class this as speculative or pointless cynicism. You can be comfortable in no meaning, too.
Camus hits the nail on the head, becuase when people think of the "meaning of life", they think of it from a very human "mind's eye POV", and this is clearly an absurd exercise. Existence does not think, and we could be an accident of nature.
techstepgenr8tion
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs ... eir-lives/
I think also when you're constantly getting bumped and jostled by society and life in general in ways that seem to have zero correlation to any moral story (ie. what you get hammered on for autism usually has nothing to do with classical morality issues), and being raised in the west where everything's cast as a moral story, there's too big of a gap between life experience and prescription. As an end result it just doesn't wash.
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin