I've unfortunately had my share of dead friends and relatives. I wish I could say that it somehow has made me stronger, more mature, but I'm afraid that the opposite is more true. Each is a trauma that I never entirely recover from. They make the world more bleak, confusing, cold, scary.
And it makes it harder to comfort people, to speak the lie, "everything will be alright, with time." It can be, but it isn't a conveyer belt. If you get there it's under your own power.
Honestly speaking from someone who has 2 beautiful little girls and very squarely middle class life with all its ups and downs. I've recently, but slowly mentally shifted towards being a nihilist.
There are so many things to live for, I agree, but at the same time there's like a 10:1 ratio of why living sucks. My privilege, I feel, brings that closer to 1:1 but I'm pretty far from the median/bulk of the world's population. Most of the world struggles - constantly.
If life isn't enjoyable (very hedonist) why do we bother producing offspring who will be forced to endure "life"? Why does it matter that the human race survives?
I'm not the first to ask this, definitely not. I'm just sort of here and am unsure where to go next.
A large proportion of people certainly must think life is worth living and continuing, and probably most of them have less wealth and resources than you do!
I think the main problem is viewing struggle as mutually exclusive with happiness, and happiness as the absence of suffering, which is propagated by western consumerist culture.
-Life has no intrinsic purpose, only that which you give it.
-Happiness and life satisfaction are largely independent of material conditions and struggle. Surveys show similar levels between impoverished and rich countries.
-Pursuit of happiness for its own sake is a futile philosophy and a hedonistic treadmill.
-Pursuit of more tangible values like honor, compassion, excellence ect result in happiness as a byproduct.
With respect to kids, Im happy and most of the world is happy, so I expect my children will be happy too, and be thankful to be alive.
It was until this year that I properly internalized that the universe does not give a shit whether “human race survives”, or Earth survives. Or anything survives. Heat death of universe is slow but inevitable. The universe is merely a bunch of elementary particles interacting with each other via force fields. It has no ulterior motive.
All Gods are human made Gods to give us meaning.
However as a human, our experience and feelings is the ultimate personal truth. We are the hero of our own story. We have some other characters and everyone else is a NPC.
We are here because our parents survived to have us, and their parents to have our parents and ongoing for millions of generations.
Nature selects those who survive to reproduce. Human desire has been shaped by evolution. Anyone not passing on their genes, has their gene-line terminated. Those that remain preserve certain behaviors.
If there is some eternal meaning - it is selection. To survive, procreate and proliferate until the heat death of universe.
We were not built to enjoy. We were built to be paranoid and feel we can do more, be more, have more. In the hope it leads to better survival.
However dopamine - the reward molecule can be hacked.Orgasms give the highest natural release. Now most of humanity gets dopamine kicks from Porn, social media, sugar, fast food, drugs.
We are dopamine driven beings.
It can.
Whether you're happy or not boils down to hormones in your blood. Your goal is to maximize the amount of happy hormones and to minimize the negative hormones. Lots of things are biological reactions you can't do much about like "hungry = angry" but modern industrial life already covers most of that, so we're left with psychological reactions "Monday = sad" which can be trained and rewired, but you need to put all the work and basically fight your natural reactions until they change.
I decided to care less and be happier, and it's a long journey, but I see huge changes. I used to be constantly depressed, now I have moments of happiness.
What snapped me out of my nihilist arc was that whether or not life made any sense or had any purpose (and I wasn't sure at the time that it did), I certainly preferred to be as much as possible "my own tool" rather than someone else's.
Yes, most of the world struggles constantly and has struggled forever. But I am the result of that struggle that made it this far, as are we all. The best I can do is keep that survival going, and maybe make the world a little closer to a less idiotic and brutish reality than the one I entered. That requires an intense dose humility.
I am not going to change the way everything works all at once, but to view things as all or nothing somewhat entails believing that I have a lot more power than any one person does. That's unrealistic. If I more realistically instead "think local" then my actions really do matter, even if it's on the microscopic scale rather than macroscopic scale.
And surprisingly enough, thinking and acting on the microscopic scale has proven in my experience to have a funny way of creating macroscopic effects if iterated consistently over time.
That is in itself a rather bleak and scary outlook but I least I feel honest with myself. The human species won by being full of sad people, some of who fought the environment to be slightly happier for a while.
You are not alone in that path of thought. I think that yes, happiness is fleeting, but I tend to think something like satisfaction or contentedness is within reach for many people. Because people aren't going around being actively sad I don't think either. It seems like most folks (and research backs it up) are "getting by" so to speak. Not elated but also not constantly mopey or whatever.
Anyway I think it's a deep and interesting introspective path you've taken.
Expecting more than one or two to demonstrate something more is already a pretty high bar.
I think this is why religion is so important and I say that as someone who is incapable of believing in any.
It has changed my perspective, and not in a bad way. It has inspired me to live more in, and appreciate, the here and now. Though I do think faith in something beyond this life does make a big difference in how we are able to cope.
I struggle to believe this
After a few months, I described my situation as "I'm no longer bleeding, but the wound still hurts if something bumps it."
I notice it getting bumped less now, and it hurts less when it does. It still hurts at times, though.
Note well: I wasn't super close to my dad. This may not apply to someone you were really close to. (For that matter, it may not apply at all - people are different.)
My recommendation, take it or leave it, is don't speak the lie.
Too many times I've been invited to wish a deceased friend "happy birthday." I go to their page and find it memorialized. Nevertheless, there are many friends wishing them happy birthday, oblivious to the indication that the page has been memorialized.
The worse was the time my wife discovered her brother had died via FB. He had estranged himself from the family decades earlier, but still... A shared friend posted the status to his page, otherwise we might never have found out.
to come at this from a different direction, how is any different from the online version of visiting someone's grave? it could just be their way of remembering someone and letting others know they were thinking about them.
granted, i'd assume most people are being obedient to the Zuck by click the button, or a bot doing it, or many other fake/insincere means because I too distrust anything from the socials.
It feels about the same as inviting someone (alive) who couldn't possibly come, who would feel good to know they were being remembered - it's a little way to say "wish you were here".
If they visited a grave and said "let's do lunch" it would be no different.
It's often clear from the comments they leave whether they are honoring a friend who has passed or reaching out to someone they think is still alive.
I have zero. I cannot even think of a far off acquaintance ever killed in traffic. Why is traffic such a deadly thing in the US compared to the rest of the world?
And from another perspective: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-26180127
Some years ago a neighbor of mine was hit by a light rail train after darting across the street, biking during his lunch break at work. I’d talked to him for a couple minutes almost every day for two years in the parking lot while he worked on his car or arrived home from work. Just like that he was gone. I have a vivid memory of a neighbor sharing the news. We went to his funeral. His parents and young wife were devastated of course. It was so unexpected. Thought about him for years afterwards.
He was working the night shift at the front desk. We'd exchanged hellos and goodbyes a few times, and got to the stage where we recognised each other and would refine our greeting slightly at each repetition.
I figured we'd ended up chatting more and would get to know each other.
But then he had a heart attack.
I feel grief, in the sense that I no longer inhabit the universe where we got to know each other. There's a loss involved.
But I didn't actually know him.
I'm also more aware of the grief I'll feel in the future and I'm reminded how death can literally come at any moment.
It does feel like a strange liminal state, though.
But I believe you don't really have a say in the matter. I'm not sure you should be supposed to feel one way or another. You can only accept your feelings as is and others should accept how you feel too.
I think especially when someone close die, it is well known each of us has their own personal / specific way of reacting.
(of course you can prepare yourself to face expected situations to some extent; also of course, if you don't feel well you should seek help, especially if it lasts)
what about introspection? What about what is considered mentally healthy or not? what about how it affects others around you? If you have past experiences or trauma or other orangic or inorganic neurological or mental issues having a "flat affect" can be "wrong". If what you're feeling isn't helping you, how would you know that there's another way unless you get help?
This sounds defeatist and if you peek just a little behind the curtain this can lead to all kinds of "bad". IMO.
Just imagine the worst thing you can that someone could think, and then they say "it's okay, it's just how i feel, it's not right or wrong." I get that we shouldn't gatekeep or police thought, but obviously this isn't some "universal truth"...
* because everything is far apart and designed for car usage, public transit, walking and cycling are inversely very bad. this simultaneously makes doing any of that dangerous; and it also puts a lot of people on the roads who probably shouldn't be (drunk drivers, distracted drivers, people with failing vision, etc.)
* in some of the worst affected areas, the transport department has applied road standards meant for interstate highways to local roads with traffic lights and no center barriers, and so these roads in particular are quite dangerous and full of rampant speeding
* Americans have tended towards larger cars, and unlike Europe there is no testing in the US for how safe automobiles are for pedestrian impact, so the cars themselves are actually more deadly to pedestrians
Why are you using an anecdote to define your data here?
For example the US has around 12.9 traffic related deaths per year per 100k inhabitants, and France has around 5. That's a ratio of 2.58:1.
But people in the US drive an average of around 23000 km/year. French people average around 13000 km/year. That's a ratio of 1.77:1.
That means that per kilometer driving in the US has about 1.46x the chance of resulting in a traffic related death as driving in France, which is much lower than the 2.58x that most people here would use when comparing.
In terms of absolute risk, which is probably what most people consider when deciding if their car is safe enough, the US has around 1 car related fatality per 130 million vehicle kilometers. For France it is around 1 car related fatality per 190 million vehicle kilometers.
Both of those are low enough that most people probably consider them negligible.
They drive because they have to, not because they want to, so it's a sensible comparison.
I think about that guy sometimes and wonder what his version of the story is. Further I sometimes question if he was ever in danger and I was just being overly cautious.
It reminded me of the movie Due Date:
Peter Highman: How have you made it this far? How have you not run yourself over in a car?
Ethan Tremblay: I've done that.
Peter Highman: How have you survived? That's my question.
Ethan Tremblay: Mostly luck.
I never put on headphones till I was inside the train, as a rule of thumb.
Data: https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/services-informatio.... SWITRS hasn't published a report since 2020 due to the pandemic, but that works perfectly fine for my purposes because I'd have probably had to discard those years for other reasons, and since we're talking about a ten- or fifteen-year trend I'm perfectly okay coming to a conclusion based on data from 2011 to 2020. Traffic fatalities per city are in section 8 chart E.
Fatalities have also not been increasing per mile traveled. Data: https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/daily-miles-travele...
I choose traffic fatalities as the metric because federal and state reporting laws mean that these numbers will be effectively complete - there is no sampling or selection effect, unlike numbers about traffic enforcement.
Even if deaths are relatively flat, they should be going down as older, less safe cars age out of the fleet of vehicles on the road. As time goes on, a greater percentage of vehicles have better crash safety, ABS, traction control, better airbag systems, and 'driver assistance' aids.
Make sure any stats you do cite include pedestrian and cyclist injuries, but note that exposure data for them is exceptionally poor, because they are typically not included in traffic survey data collected by contractors hired by the government to do traffic counts.
Overall pedestrian and cyclist deaths have shot up, by the way, and are the highest ever.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...
Your data shows that traffic citations are down. It doesn't show anything about whether that's due to lax enforcement or less occurrences.
In fact, if you look at a lot of those graphs, they hit a low point in 2020 - right when covid WFH would have drastically reduced a lot of traffic, and in turn, traffic crimes.
Even in the trenches of WW1 there were smiles sometimes.
The question of children is one that I've long wondered about in this context as well; my take is that there's a lot of peer pressure that goes into perpetuating society (one of my grandmothers actually told me it was the basic reason she had children). This is another area where religion is quite important; we see fertility falling as religion recedes the world over. I could never really consider consigning more people into the existential dread that I've lived with for the majority of my time, and so the thought of having children never passed my mind.
Most people do what they do without considering what they're doing and why, it's just a habit. I think you are categorically wrong.
The cousin was killed in New York around when we implemented Vision Zero [1]. San Francisco appears to have attempted something similar [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero_(New_York_City)
[2] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti...
Religion too, is just a collection of those stories into a larger moral framework.
Try reading more
even some of those who do believe in god sometimes have doubts, and here is someone who (i imagine) thinks that it would be nice if there was a god, but they just can't see how it could possibly be true, given many things they see in contradiction.
so no, wanting something to be true, but not being able to believe it to be true are not at odds at all.
in this context you may also consider pascal's wager.
the key is to keep searching for the truth, and to investigate the claims that various religions make until you find one that does work for you.
(As an aside, I think of counseling as “optimizing my life”. Perhaps that framing may help those that find the idea off-putting.)
Is it humane to subject the vast majority of the future human race to taxes, inflation, menial jobs, so we can satisfy our curiosity?
“I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"
- Marcus Aurelius.
And 48k from firearms (including suicides and accidents)
[https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D158/D362F919]
COVID-19 is also estimated to have killed 48k in 2023.
Both combined are still less than from drug overdoses though.
[https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D158/D362F367]
Check the top causes, and you’ll find heart disease still at the top at 680k/yr, and all of these causes listed above as essentially in the noise.
[https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D176;jsessioni...]
I'm asking, why should the majority of the world have kids given that life is largely a struggle and in so many places of poverty an extremely difficult one?
Regardless of suffering levels.