ribbonfarm: A Brief History of Existential Terror

Gonna go out on a limb here and say I can't take this article too seriously. It is chalk full of false dichotomies:

The very premise of this article rests on the idea that human beings live solely by our need to balance between two sides of a spectrum.

"An author working on a book, or a freelancer working on a project, or an entrepreneur working on a business, does not spend their time in a perpetual state of flow, but rather experiences little moments of flow, while mostly vacillating between anxiety and boredom."

Why couldn't a freelancer experience moments outside this spectrum? Why does the author frame our life's experience as bound to this particularly solitary scale? What about the spectrum of awareness of self and surroundings? What about the spectrum of communicability with others, a social spectrum?

The author treats the subject, a human being, as alone, with mention of social interaction as being merely a product of our conformism, which too, rests on a premise based upon a false dichotomy:

"The widespread existential vacuum of the 20th century, the feeling of boredom, was brought on by both biological and cultural evolution: biological in that man is the only creature whose behaviour is not guided by instinct alone, and cultural in that during the 20th century many traditions that constrained behavior collapsed, organized religion being the major one. For most, the vacuum is filled by one of two strategies, both of which seek to avoid the sensation of existential terror: conformism (doing what everyone around them is doing), or totalitarianism (seeking someone out to tell them what to do). The clueless seek out both the totalitarianism imposed upon them by the sociopaths, and the conformism imposed upon them by the rest of the clueless class, as ways to relieve the pressure of the existential vacuum. "

The author sees two camps: the rulers and the ruled. The author has no conception of anything resembling cooperation. Like humans couldn't POSSIBLY be social creatures capable of communal efforts.

I'm not sure what else to say. While I support the message that one needs balance between boredom and anxiety, I can't help but find the article imposing a blind view on the subject.

Well, I for one really liked this post a whole lot.

Depression is perhaps too strong a term. In my observations it seems to mostly manifest in a subclinical form of depression commonly called “being bored as fuck.”

This ignores possible physiological causes, such as bad nutrition or lack of exercise. I find it ironic that the author later writes:

When I went to the doctor seven years ago with back pain, I was prescribed a chair with more lumbar support and told to “take it easy.” What actually cured the back pain was the opposite: a standing desk and strength training. I was suffering from too little stress, not too much.

Note that "too little stress" in this cases didn't mean "bored as fuck", but it means lack of exercise. Maybe on a sufficiently abstract level it seems the same, but for everyday life "your mind doesn't have enough fear" and "your body doesn't have enough exercise" are two different statements, leading to two different advices for cure.

Even the diagnosis that we don't have enough fear seems not specific enough. It's true that we have the safe roads in life, which are quite boring. But you can always fuck up your life easily, for example by becoming a drug addict, or doing crime.

What seems missing to me are the culturally approved ways to increase the risk moderately. Many choices are binary: you either do crime or you don't; you either use drugs or you don't; you are either an employee or an entrepreneur; you are either a citizen of country X or country Y. Situations where one option seems too boring, but the other one too risky, and there seems to be no way to increase the risk gradually. When you do 90% of university, you won't get 90% of the diploma. It may be very complicated to find a part-time job on the job market.

Some of these examples probably aren't good ones, but I hope the idea behind them gets across. The safe way seems conditional on you staying on the safe way 100% of the time; you have the option to go completely crazy, but seem to be few options to go 10% crazy.