The Meaninglessness of it all

post by foxacc (ajfox) · 2022-03-14T17:56:14.901Z · LW · GW · 12 comments

This post is somewhat of spill of my inner thoughts that fill me with paradoxes and self-fulfilling prophecies that fill my day as I do the ever so popular activity of working from home. 

I sit at home all day and do work on my company supplied computer that seemingly has no substance. This allows me to run through theories in my head all day and does not allow me to escape them. The largest one that crosses my mind on a daily basis is the impermanence and pointlessness of life.

A strong disclaimer that I will make before continuing with this post it is not intended to suggest taking ones own life. 

I read a book recently called "Dopamine Nation" and one point in particular stood out to me which was the discussion around our culture's obsession with sex and the author's opinion for it's reasoning was that it is one of the only naturally human activities that we still take part in. Another item I would add to the list of things we still take part in is death. 

It is an intriguing topic to me as there does not seem to be much "point" to anything we do as humans. If you quit your job and take on a massive amount of debt - it does not matter. If you receive a promotion for working hard at your job - it  does not matter. If you die tomorrow - it does not matter. There is nothing that really matters in this world as I hope many others alongside myself have recognized, life is not real and has absolutely no meaning. 

The only meaning which would be (and I simply cannot think of a another word that conveys a positive connotation without adding any seriousness) cool if anyone who reads this post could take away from it, the only rational and meaningful thing to do in life is love. To make choices with love in mind in order to create a domino effect of love is just about the only cool thing to do with our lives. 

12 comments

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comment by Dagon · 2022-03-14T19:16:30.248Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What distinguishes love as the "only rational and meaninful thing to do"?  Why not "eat" or "contemplate" or "build numerical models" or "solve Wordle"?  What are the attributes of your experience of love that so differentiate it from everything else you can do?

If you mean "love" in a more general (and less correct) sense of "appreciate the experiences in life", then I'm with you.  The only meaning is what you give it.  But there's a lot of dimensions to that personal generation of meaning.

comment by Jiro · 2022-03-14T18:51:36.659Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A strong disclaimer that I will make before continuing with this post is that in now way does this post encourage suicide.

Whether a post encourages suicide is a factual statement about the content of the post. This disclaimer doesn't change that.

Perhaps you meant "is not intended to"?

Replies from: ajfox
↑ comment by foxacc (ajfox) · 2022-03-16T01:12:12.740Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

thanks, edit has been made

comment by Viliam · 2022-03-14T21:05:55.170Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think hobbies are fun. Or satisfying one's curiosity. Love is also okay, though.

comment by Flaglandbase · 2022-03-15T08:49:49.399Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If AI is ever solved it will be trivially easy to provide minds with intensely deep meaning, even if they spend forever solving simple problems for higher-level minds.

comment by Mo Putera (Mo Nastri) · 2022-03-15T02:37:51.877Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You may be interested in Kevin Simler's essay A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning, which is a sort of graph-theory flavored take on meaning and purpose. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much mileage he got out of his working definition, how many examples of meaningful vs not-meaningful things it explains:

A thing X will be perceived as meaningful in context C to the extent that it's connected to other meaningful things in C.

comment by Razied · 2022-03-14T22:10:19.135Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah, the fundamental equations governing the evolution of the universe make no reference to humans, but that was a silly place to search for meaning to begin with. I would also ask for a more precise definition of what you mean by "matters". If you quit your job, you will certainly cause various other things to happen in the world, if you have children their standard of life will drop, if you die people will miss you and grieve you. Your life is causally connected to the rest of the universe.

If what you want is some form of "existential satisfaction", like wanting the answer to a question that you don't know how to phrase, or you feel like there has to be more to life than the mundane day-to-day stuff, then the answer is meditation, lots and lots of meditation (most effectively of the buddhist variety). In my opinion meditative awakening is pretty much the only thing that actually answers the fundamental question of meaning. If you're somewhat unpatient and non-risk-averse then 5-meo-dmt does a good job of temporarily catapulting you to the end of the path, but be careful and do lots of research before trying.

Replies from: SaidAchmiz
↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2022-03-14T22:27:08.387Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If what you want is some form of “existential satisfaction”, like wanting the answer to a question that you don’t know how to phrase, or you feel like there has to be more to life than the mundane day-to-day stuff, then the answer is meditation, lots and lots of meditation (most effectively of the buddhist variety). In my opinion meditative awakening is pretty much the only thing that actually answers the fundamental question of meaning. If you’re somewhat unpatient and non-risk-averse then 5-meo-dmt does a good job of temporarily catapulting you to the end of the path, but be careful and do lots of research before trying.

I want to strongly push back against this. Do not do this (either the meditation or the hallucinogens) unless you want to, with a terrifyingly high probability, break your brain (i.e. do serious, quite likely irreversible, damage to your cognitive capabilities).

(The worst thing is that you won’t even get ‘meaning’ out of such things, only an illusion of meaning… but even if that weren’t true, I would still strongly urge you to never do such things.)

Replies from: MondSemmel, Razied
↑ comment by MondSemmel · 2022-03-14T22:52:42.407Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I understand your worry about drugs, but not at all the worry that meditation has a "terrifyingly high probability" (which means... 0.1%? 1%? 5%? 20%? 50%?) to "break your brain". Why do you believe that?

↑ comment by Razied · 2022-03-14T22:54:02.159Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Are you referring to Dark Night stuff in the Daniel Ingram sense or something else? I'd agree temporary emotional turmoil is likely past a cerain point, and might be extreme in certain cases, but I haven't heard of decreases in cognitive capabilities (it certainly didn't do that for me). We'll just have to disagree about whether the meaning brought by high-level meditation is real or not, since I'm not sure how to respond to that except to quote personnal experience and the reports of other people who have done lots of meditation.

comment by Raythen · 2022-03-14T23:41:32.738Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It is an intriguing topic to me as there does not seem to be much "point" to anything we do as humans

I am very confused.

Do you think that is a normal thing for a human to feel?

Well, obviously yes.

But is it a common thing for humans for feel?

Well, obviously yes.

But is it a thing every human feels?

Probably sometimes, yes.

But is it a thing every human feels all of the time or most of the time?

Well, obviously, yes!

Do you agree with me?

For that last answer was very much a troll answer.

But maybe you do actually agree with it?