this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Man, that is one of the most depressing views of life I've ever seen. Most people go for either "hedonism is fine because life is hard and people suck" or "life is so great on its own that you should restrict the amount of pleasure seeking behavior you engage in".
You've managed to take the shitty parts of both of those philosophies and combine them into a stew of cynicism and self loathing. That's honestly pretty impressive from a psychological perspective.
My life has taught me from a very young age that if I expect the worst from my species based on experience, I'll be correct 99 times out of a hundred and spare myself a lot of shock and disappointment. World history only reinforces this.
I made a deal with myself a long time ago, my core value is the pursuit of truth over blissful ignorance. And the truth is, we have very few positive traits, at least ones that our various societies bother to nurture in anything but empty rhetoric. Given that reality, I choose not to delude myself into rooting for the home team just because it's the home team. Humanity is welcome to surprise and humble me in all of this, but it's going the opposite direction.
You're not wrong in a lot of respects but the only thing you're accomplishing by holding on to that attitude so tightly is making yourself bitter about the world. If you want to live that way that's your choice to make but I don't see the point.
Fair, but I don't see people accomplishing much of anything other than enabling or rationalizing further rewarding the world's most successful sociopaths at Earth's ecosystem's and the vast majority of other human's expense, regardless of how they see the water in the glass.
All I would be doing by pretending otherwise is maybe be personally happier until the next daily reminder of who we are and what we stand for. To me, there are no good options, but I'd rather stare down the horror in judgment than embody just another all too common symptom that those most responsible, who benefit most from humanity's greed and gluttony disease, encourage all their victims to indulge in: willful ignorance.
It's hard to imagine how, in your pursuit of truth and knowledge, you've managed to ignore all the beautiful and unfathomable advancements humans have made in biology, mathematics, philosophy, music, art, literature, and any other topic you could possibly imagine. Instead, you've focused on the negative to excuse and reinforce your antisocial biases.
Because of those advances, we know that negative experiences are promoted for memory retention and recall. Overcoming that neurobiological bias can be very challenging to some people, whether because of significance of experience, timing, or having neurodivergent brains that need a bit of help.
Go touch grass