People tend to interest themselves in things mostly to fill the void that would emerge otherwise. Consider the average PhD student. There’s no natural inclination anyone has to study the remains of paleozoic foraminifera. It’s too cynical however, to suggest people study all this stuff just to pursue status. If you genuinely seek status, you pursue a career in something like acting or politics instead.
No, most things people do are things that serve just to fill the void. Most scientific studies have very little chance of ever being of any real benefit to mankind, like comparative linguistics for example. Half of all studies are never even read by more than three people. Most scientific research exists to fill the void the scientist feels. Even children are born for the purpose of filling the void. People are rarely honest about trying to fill the void however, because when you acknowledge to yourself you’re trying to fill the void with something, it ceases to be fulfilling.
People have all sorts of tactics for filling the void. Some pursue a career. Others pursue parenthood. Some people take drugs that make life feel more meaningful and interesting than it actually is. Some people try to save the world, by blocking traffic. Some try to find some sort of sacred truth about the meaning and purpose of life hidden from their eyes. This can be through esoteric traditions, but conspiracy theories fill the same role.
It’s typically easy to recognize other people’s day to day activities as filling a void. “Oh you block traffic to stop climate change, go find a job hippie!” But it’s much harder to acknowledge your own activities as filling the void. And yet, when you stop to think about it, the main reason you do anything, is because you can’t be content with nothingness.
In hunter-gatherer societies, people spend a lot of time just staring out into the distance, zoning out, doing nothing, like animals. Not Western man. Western man needs to be kept busy at all times. Ideally he is at work. If he can’t be at work then he’s hopefully preparing for work (traveling to his job, studying). If all else fails, he is busy entertaining himself. We call this “recreation”.
I think if there’s anything we have to learn in the years ahead, it is to be content with nothing. Not because AI is going to “take our jobs”, but because most of the things we do are not worth doing.
I masturbate to fill the void.
I drink Wodka to fill the void.
Por que no los dos?
😛
Retrograde ejaculation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
ChatGPT: ————- The Denial of Death (1973) — Ernest Becker: concise but deep summary Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death argues that much of human behavior—especially culture, ambition, love, aggression, and mental illness—is driven by an unconscious terror of mortality. Humans know they will die, and this knowledge is psychologically overwhelming. To function, we deny death by constructing symbolic systems that make our lives feel meaningful, permanent, and heroic. ⸻ Core thesis Humans are unique in that they are: • Biological creatures (fragile, decaying, animal) • Symbolic beings (self-aware, meaning-making, imaginative) This creates an unbearable contradiction: we are bodies that die, yet we experience ourselves as special, significant selves. Culture exists largely to manage this conflict. ⸻ Key ideas 1. Death anxiety is the central human problem Becker claims that fear of death is not a minor anxiety but the root of most psychological defenses. We repress awareness of death because conscious awareness would paralyze us. ⸻ 2. Culture as a “hero system” Cultures provide immortality projects—ways to feel enduring and significant: • Religion (afterlife, salvation) • Nation, ideology, legacy • Career success, fame • Art, children, moral virtue By playing a valued role in a cultural system, a person… Read more »
You’d like Sheldon Solomon – he takes Becker’s ideas and expands on them.
The best rational explanation for climate change denial that I have come across is death denial.
Here he is being interviewed by my favourite Boomer Doomer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA3OMfRFigE
Wombat:
You’re a hero
Well, if it’s a choice between that and depression. . .
Let’s go slay some dragons!
Ernest Becker, Special Subject-The Bleedin’ Obvious.
Oh and
>Not Western man. Western man needs to be kept busy at all times.
Winter kills you if you are not prepared.
Females since the start of time have been stuck with continuous tending of kids and old people and sick people and it is very time consuming and labor intensive and it isn’t optional unless you just want to let people die. You could say “not letting people die is just you filling the void” but that is just not true; you wouldn’t want it to happen to your mom or your brother. I’m GenX and every female I know that is my age is dealing with 1-4 old people, most of whom they really do love, and many of whom still have their marbles and are good to the people around them.
And men have war and planning for war. I don’t approve but in some ways it is equivalent.
Dear Kareninca, if I may – just as females find sense and pleasure in helping others, men do too. Men at large have built and do maintain the society we live in (technically speaking) – in a saner society, both men and women would be grateful for what the other sex can provide – in ours, they are both increasingly taught to ridicule and look down on each other. Which is not a good way – but it is possible, that in time more men and women will realize again that they can complement each other in gratitude and love – which is way more gratifying than staying in resentment and anger. Anyhow – have a blessed Christmas and may you continue filling the void – for there is much to be found in there. Take care
The ‘nuclear’ family, that monstrosity born of capitalism, has a lot to answer for. Extended families are more human.
Once again, I am with Uncle Ted on this – the mere act of maintaining existence alone in a primitive lifestyle where an individual had to expend meaningful effort and step through the power process with a relatively high degree of autonomy just to stay alive is/was enough to sustain primitive people psychologically.
They just don’t have the same issues as modern man.
Meaningful goal (e.g. get food to live) + meaningful effort + attainment of goal + autonomy = healthy psychology.
Not being able to go through all steps of the above power process results in frustration, anxiety, depression, etc.
In the modern world, the frustrated need to fulfill meaningful goals spills out in the pursuit of ‘proxy activities’ such as esoteric scientific endeavour, or a middle-aged man flogging himself hard while cycling about in lycra, etc. Ultimately, these activities ring hollow though, and are unsatisfying.
Once again, primitive people just don’t flog themselves with pointless exercises.
We are just not designed for the modern world.
Wombat:
What you say strikes me as just another way of proposing a lifestyle that seeks to make sense of a reality that is cracked at its foundation.
REALITY IS CRACKED AT ITS FOUNDATION
Some people might find solace in farming and being “close to the land”
Others will feel fulfilled by technological innovation.
“Fulfilled”
Huh. Funny word.
https://youtu.be/Qnd-bB-3EV8?si=z3CvPUeQaMDrBtT8
There are no solutions.
At my age, I’ve subscribed to the belief that “there are no solutions — only trade offs”
Just kidding.
You guys are my family.
I’m sorry Rad never got to experience the raves in the late 90s
Everyone hopped up on MDMA (when it was the pure kind) and sometimes LSD
I only had a brief taste of it. But it was glorious.
No alcohol.
Just pure love.
And dancing (if one was so inclined)
Drum & Bass was ascendant at the time.
https://youtu.be/egd1cC5hH7s?si=Uu_iTg0G6mxtUXl4
Stolen from the Sydney University Psych Lab, before it was commercialised as ‘Ecstasy’. A certain purity of purpose.
I’d say it’s more a case that the modern world causes mental illness, which is not the same thing as reality itself being cracked, but rather ‘the machine’ cracking us.
The level of madness is off the charts. There are benefits to the modern world, but downsides too. People seem unhappy. There is alienation etc. The techno innovators don’t seem fulfilled to me on the whole.
Yes though, the way people live will have a bearing on their mental health, but just naming that phenomenon a ‘lifestyle choice’ doesn’t make it go away, nor do we really seem to get a lot of agency in the ‘choices’ they system lets us have.
Whatever though.
I’ve come to accept that ‘the system’ and its consequences are all just a wee bit beyond rational human control. On that score, I suppose my own interest in this kind of thing is just a proxy activity for me in the absence of something meaningful to do at the moment. I certainly don’t think about this stuff at all when I’m in the zone and fishing for something to eat.
Great post.
Been thinking along similar lines myself.
I love the part about hunter gatherers just staring off into space, like animals. If conservatives said this, they would be ridiculed and called racist. But it’s obvious the H-Gs don’t have the intellect to build/maintain even the systems others had 2000 years ago. So they’re really just doing all they can.
> In hunter-gatherer societies, people spend a lot of time just staring out into the distance, zoning out, doing nothing, like animals.
The Buddhist Bros have it all figured out:
https://buddhism.net/posts/buddhism-for-all/b802-right-samadhi-and-the-four-jhanas/#:~:text=The%20Pali%20words%20that%20are,a%20calm%20sense%20of%20pleasantness.
“That first jhāna gives you what the Buddha calls “rapture and happiness born of seclusion.” That is an extremely important stepping stone for you as a practitioner because it offers you the ability to reliably experience intense joy independent of sensual pleasures. Prior to this, you suffer from a reliance on sensual pleasure for joy, and in that sense, you are a slave to sensual pleasure. When you arrive at the first jhāna, however, you realize that you don’t need pleasant sensory experiences at all to be joyful, you can be ecstatically joyful just by sitting there with nothing happening.”
I once read an account of an Australian aboriginal woman describe their life before the arrival of the White Man.
They would just wander around during the day picking up lizards to eat. At night they would just lie down and sleep in the dirt. No shelter, no bedding, no written language, no boats, of course no wheel or technology of any kind. This was their daily routine for tens of thousands of years!
Not like us.
Krap!!! More exclamations, please. The psychological, mystical and story-telling achievements of the Indigenous were prodigious, and they still exist, out there in The Dreaming.
That’s about right, from a certain perspective.
Apart from a bit of rock art, some worked stones, scarred trees, they left no visible marks on the landscape here.
Amazing really.
Thousands and thousands of years. . .
They’d wander from where I live in the interior, down to the coast,
The whole of the landscape was their house you see.
No need to permanently build a damn thing.
They didn’t build a house – it was ALL their house.
Imagine that the different places were like different rooms.
And they walked through it ALL as part of it, connected to ALL of their house in a never-ending dream,
Did they make a cathedral? No. They made it ALL their cathedral.
Good people.
Saved my Great Grandmother who was terribly burned.
Bandaged her wounds with dressings made of spider webs.
>People are rarely honest about trying to fill the void however, because when you acknowledge to yourself you’re trying to fill the void with something, it ceases to be fulfilling.
That’s not true. I need to walk stupidly to keep my knees functioning (I suspect everybody should, but I digress). Now that kind of walking is like filling some void. I know it does. I could use my skeleton less overall and trick it away. But each time I walk around I either find weird or useful stuff, encounter weird or nice humans, animals or plants or I come home and have the feeling I did some work.
If it feels nice, don’t avoid it. Even if it is pointless.
I wasn’t much of a dancer.
Too repressed…too inhibited…
But I still could appreciate the vibe.
No aggression, no fighting, no arguments over whether some dude was hitting on your girl.
Just love for a communal experience.
Rad, I think you should give more attention to David Pearce
And yes, “Drum & Bass” was also referred to as “Jungle” at the time.
Yes, niggers can sometimes provide “good times” to repressed and inhibited white boys
I’m just here trying to avoid being runover by the trolley bus.
Merry Christmas all. Best wishes to you and yours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxhP7Z8srtw&list=RDyxhP7Z8srtw&start_radio=1
Only believing into the Afterlife can defeat death anxiety.
But if you do this, they call you a fool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZISWgVyjp4
Most people are idiots, lack direction and motivation. Basically can’t reason. Also anybody else get recommended videos from youtube that have been up a week with 674 views, kind of odd, they tagged me for it. Mr Rintrah if your looking for something to write talk to the Google AI about the fundamental changes they have made to their search, massive delisting, ask it why Yandex works so much better than Google now. The little guy is quite honest at how he sucks now.
I drink too much wodka!
Can you russian people explain to me not to drink too much wodka, please?
My Little Pony fills the void for me. I dunno how it does it, but the world just feels a lot less nihilistic since I got into the show.
it’s not a sexual or romantic thing. Unironically. It’s just got a welcoming vibe that I enjoy, and while it may not be novel to everyone, it was to me.
It may be because I’m from a background where everyone acts like that tranny who convinced Rin to go vegan, both in my family and every subculture I’ve ever been a part of. So seeing a show and fandom where the prevailing vibe is being comfortable in your own skin and kind to your neighbour, well, it does mean a lot.
Ok I don’t know why I bothered trying to communicate with you. You’re sick in the head.
https://youtu.be/th4u1yrpuRE?si=GrJNjzX-l1UjFlIz
I really don’t like it to be called a “climate denier”, so this is my revenge:
You are all core deniers! You deny that there is a hot core. Deep inside our planet.
Technically it’s a little sun and it’s remarkable that this little sun inside our planet has the same temperature like the surface of the real Sun, around 5000 degree Celsius.
This is Science, you Core-Deniers! There comes a lot of heat from this little sun inside our planet! I read that heat-pulses from the core need millions of years before they reach the surface. Which means, the oceanic heat-pulse from 2021 and later was sent out millions of years ago! And you crazy core-deniers really believe the heat comes from a trace gas, and that 200 or 400 or 600 parts per million would make a difference.
Come on, and forget your crazy conspiracy theories about CO2.
Come back to the world of Science and believe into the sun inside our planet.
What I do love about such omega Dunning-Krugerite morons, is the certainty with which they spew their gibberish.