Why do you live?
I often tell myself that I'm "already dead". I lost my ego long ago and I often don't mind looking dumb or making mistakes, because at the end of the day, why does it matter? We're all going to die and my existence will not change the earth's future.
Thinking this way has GREATLY helped me look forward to the future and reach true happiness. It feels like whatever happens, I've already reached rock bottom so I can only go ahead.
Having said that, ever since 2016, every year has been better than the last. I now have a good fulfilling career, I have a very good group of friends, I'm good financially and I have all the freedom in the world.
Why do I live? I live for experiences, I live to create memories, I live to explore, I live to create, I live to better myself.
So, what are your reasons? I'm always curious about other people's life stories.
This is one of those questions, I think, that don't have a straightforward answer, but I'm very passionate about this topic so I'll try to explain myself as best as I can. Fair warning before I start, I'm going to mention some triggering topics that revolve around it.
When I fell in love for the first time in my life, it was the best thing I've felt until that moment. I never had such a rush, and never had someone or something that completely emptied my mind of thought. When I looked at them, I couldn't think of anything else, and as an overthinker, this made me incredibly happy.
Then, like with many young people, we broke up due to some issues that could've been resolved by more mature people. Then I learned she had a brush with suicide, and I felt one of the worst pains in my life. I barely remember the first week following it.
This pain and overbearing feeling of sadness stuck with me. After it, I had other people close to me who also had suicidal experiences, and some others who revealed them to me even though I knew them before. Every time, I remembered the same pain and sadness.
It's a very sensitive subject for me, but I think I learned something from it, because when I had (or have) thoughts of suicide, I have the same reaction to myself. Suicide is incredibly sad, and I don't want it to be the end of anyone's tale. We deserve better. I deserve better. This is not even about making other sad, it makes me sad about myself. I simply think I deserve better.
I have a lot of rough days due to chronic health issues, which have a tremendous impact on my life, and I'm also coming from a house of neglect and abuse, so I was already inclined to depressive modes of thinking even before them. But I'm learning to cope better, and I don't know if I'll be able to get old, or get to some point where I'm unable to function, but that's an uncertainty I'm growing to accept. As cliche as it is, there's a lot of uncertainty in life we can't really control, and focusing on things we can do is so much better for mental well-being.
What keeps me going is not one thing but many things. Sometimes it's a good song or a story or a game, sometimes it's spending time with family or friends, sometimes it's contributing to humanity and the planet's well-being, sometimes it's my hatred of nationalists and Islamists, sometimes it's saying a fuck you to all the ordeals and the evil, sometimes it's being able to continue to write or do science, sometimes it's having a good walk while listening to an enriching podcast, sometimes it's a good book or an article, sometimes it's sitting in my warm home and just relaxing while the outside is cold.
There are so many things, because life is rich and complex beyond comprehension. It defies being put into a box and labeled. So, I don't think there can be just one thing. And I'm sure most people would still find themselves continue to live, even if the things (not just material things) they deem most important to them in life were taken away. Speaking based on data, people almost always choose to continue to live. This brings me to my further points.
At some level, we live because we're biologically programmed to live. The instinct to stay alive existed in us long before Homo sapiens developed the ability to form complex thoughts or the ability to talk. So, as much as we might like to think we're special and that our reasons we tell ourselves are the entire story, they're not. The instinct came first, the justifications later. But, and it's a very important but, this is not as simple as it seems. "Instincts", emotions, thoughts, behaviors—these things are not isolated, and they work together to create our psyche. Since the evolution of higher cognitive functions, they never were separable. This is why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works. It encourages people to act and think differently, which changes one's emotions. If these systems were isolated, this wouldn't have been possible.
So, to live, a human has to come up with good or good enough justifications to live. And these should be durable to hardships of life, because life will definitely rip you a new one, at the very least once in a while. So, this then makes it not surprising that a lot of people have suicidal ideation at some point in their life (based on data I've seen repeated in psychological books). But, eventually, vast majority of humans continue to live.
This is because, most of the time, we find some reason to keep going after all, even when faced with extreme hardship and loss of meaning. As Viktor Frankl mentions in Man's Search for Meaning, even people in Nazi concentration camps found reasons to keep going. In another example, sometimes even "yelling" at people how life is meaningless seems to be reason enough (look at the famous philosophical pessimist Emil Cioran, for example, who was aware of this).
This is not to say these reasons aren't worth it, and terror management theory hypothesizes some common ground on which these reasons are built. But even with this "meta" perspective, some of them seem meaningful to me, like having rich connections with people, having a sense of importance and purpose, or feeling like you belong somewhere. Some, less so, like narratives of nationalism and religion.
I think my approval of certain life-affirming phenomena can be attributed to several things.
In meta-ethics, meaning can be separated into two categories : mind-dependent vs. mind-independent. The latter seeks a meaning in universe that is separate from the human experience, but for an atheist this is impossible. If you're against any sort of metaphysical explanation, there simply is no way to create a mind-independent meaning about human life without contracting yourself. But if you follow a mind-dependent definition of meaning, you realize that the so-called meaning we talk about is only created as a result of human activity. Since humans belong to the same species, and, in very scientific terms, share a shit ton of commonalities, this makes it possible to create some sort of meaning.
Even if there might not be meaning created for the entire species, if you follow the mind-dependent way of thinking, there is enough ground to create meaning for different groups of people or even individuals. For example, a person might find themselves caring enough about other queer people to create a mind-dependent meaningful narrative about this. In another example, a person might find themselves caring for themselves enough to continue living and chasing happiness, despite all the hostilities against them.
You can read more about it in this article, which is the reason I changed my opinion about this topic.
Nietzsche's philosophy was mainly concerned with affirming life and creating meaning when the belief in God was starting to get shaken, resulting in the collapse of mind-independent narratives of meaning (which were the only dominant narratives about meaning so far). He subscribed to an entirely relativistic way of thinking, saying there is no objective meaning or morality in anything. But, at the same time, he believed that it all depended on perspectives. He hypothesized that, to deny a perspective you have to approach it from another perspective. And since we are all living beings participating in life, creating life-denying narratives would be utter insanity, as we could never approach it from a perspective outside of life.
I think he touched on something profound. Even if we might think and speculate about things grander than ourselves, we will never get to experience anything other than as a human. And as humans, we have certain needs in life that, if met, create happy lives. And I'm not just talking about happiness in hedonistic terms, but also in terms of meaning, belonging, contentness, etc. In other words, I'm also talking about eudaimonic happiness.
Nietzsche thought that the way to affirm life was through will to power, and even though I disagree on that part, I still agree that the rational thing to do as a human being is to chase life-affirming things, as the alternative is just suffering for no reason at all.
This perspective pushed me to learn more about the science of psychology, as I think it's one of the greatest contributions to humanity for creation of a good life. After all, a big portion of psychology is concerned with finding ways you sabotage yourself, resulting in unnecessary suffering, and correcting them. I must say, even in just a few months, it created a significant difference in my life. Among other things, I'm better able to cope with anxiety, and this alone improved my life quality significantly. I'm starting to realize that a lot of my suffering I attributed to inevitable responses to existential conditions, political situations, or whatever, are just my dysfunctional responses. Not all of it, of course, but a great deal of it.
The title of this item is a placeholder. In short, for a complex enough phenomenon, I don't believe in an explanation of it made on just a single level. And since the question "Why do you live?" is such a complex one, it can be answered on different levels. While the evolutionary explanation might seem like it overrides others, as if it "explains away" all the others, this is not true. As I mentioned, ever since the evolution of higher cognitive functions, systems in our mind started interacting. The biological drive to survive, for example, doesn't really matter if your environment creates highly dysfunctional patterns in you that lead to your suicide. That means, life-affirming patterns in cognition, behavior, culture, etc. still have to be developed. I grouped them all under environment, but each of them, and more, can be their own category.
In light of these perspectives, I'm trying to create a better life for myself by including more and more life-affirming things, and less of life-denying ones. It's sometimes straightforward, like deciding to work on my anxiety, and sometimes complex and hard, like my relation to politics and my conviction to change the world, which are both sources of meaning and suffering.
It's an ongoing process, like most things in life. As Rustin Cohle would say in his colorful way: "Nothing is ever fucking over." But just the process itself creates a lot of joy in me. In fact, I was in a sour mood when I started writing this reply due to a bad health day, but as I wrote more I started feeling better and better. Partially because I remembered my goals.
My aim, I guess, is to create a psyche that gets its life-affirmation 1) by tending to my neglected needs; and as a child of neglect who has internalized it, it's both hard and very rewarding 2) from a lot of different things, in order to prevent creating too much dependency on just one thing, which would create a weak point.
As I stated at the start, it's not a straightforward answer, but I think it's worth it. Hopefully, some of it will resonate with other people.
I'm happy my question brought this answer from you. I have some follow-ups:
How is it that it's impossible for an atheist to derive mind-independent meanings? The beauty of live itself and how we're alive in this cosmic mix is what I would call mind-independent. How is it any different than attributing it to a god? The "beauty" is akin to god, for me.
I also was under the impression that Nietzsche's philosophy boiled down to the self-improving Ubermensch, independent from others. In fact, I definitely recall my philosophy professor talking about how Hitler misconstrued this philosophy by thinking that the Ubermensch was meant to improve itself in comparison to others rather than to itself. I feel like your assumption that it's about power is wrong, but I've only read Zarathoustra, so I could be wrong too.
Reframing happiness in "doing life-affirming things" rather than "life-denying" things really speaks to me. I feel like it's been my philosophy for a while, but I've never really defined it like that. I think you really nailed it and I will start using those terms from now on, thank you.
Thanks. I think there's a misunderstanding about what I mean by mind-dependent and mind-independent. To elaborate, I'll quote the article I shared.
For example, the beauty you mentioned is a human value attributed to nature. Universe would exist even without humans, including the parts you deem beautiful, but this beauty is not an intrinsic part of it. You or other humans attribute it to nature. It wouldn't exist outside of human judgement.
Übermensch is Nietzsche's ideal higher human being, but it's not the base of his philosophy. It's what he aims his philosophy to result in. Übermensch is a result of a human being chasing Will to Power to the end. As I mentioned, Nietzsche thought this will was the main drive behind life-affirming attitudes in humanity, and only by its pursuit would one become a life-affirming human, and in its most extreme version, an Übermench. This part is clear in his philosophy. What is not clear is what he meant by Will to Power. There are a lot of different interpretations of it, and some of them approach it as the kind of self-improvement your professor describes. But there are also other parts in his philosophy that seem to defend a Will to Power that seeks domination over others. If anyone's interested in different interpretations, they can look up the book Nietzsche's System or the Stanford entries on Nietzsche (1, 2).
It's not directly related to the topic, but since we're talking about it, one interesting thing in all this is that Nietzsche's definition of "happiness" was extremely different from what we mean. He saw suffering as a good thing, and he wished suffering on people he deemed worthy. He thought, if used correctly, suffering coul lead to growth, which would strengthen the Will to Power. So, he welcomed suffering. I think he constructed this philosophy, because for all his life he struggled a lot with heavy health problems, but still wanted to live and find meaning in life. Since he couldn't escape constant suffering, he created a philosophy that affirmed it as a positive thing. I created a topic about this last month.
Trying to leave the world in a better place than I found it because there's not much else I can do. Committing suicide would make friends and family sad. Also my dog wouldn't understand, and that would be heartbreaking. So I can't do that to my dog.
The "Will this make my dog sad" standard is one I sometimes use to judge my current mental health. Fortunately, it's been a while since I've had to lean on it.
Inertia mostly. I'm already living. Life is decent enough, I see no reason to rush towards the final end. Every morning, I wake up, and for the most part, I'm not dreading existence. I want for little, and that's plenty enough for me.
This was more concise than my answer.
To each their own. I love life. I love living.
I think people use whatever they can to cope with existence. I also don't mind looking dumb or making mistakes, because - to me - it is a part of life. And, my experiences add flavor to the life I'm living. Some flavors are bitter and some are sweet.
I've had some incredibly difficult moments in my life. But I wouldn't trade those experiences for non-existence.
I used to think I would hate growing old, but I'm loving it. It's a gift denied to many.
I live because it's a gift.
Knowledge.
Life itself is a labyrinth of extensive disasters and fleeting prosperity, where every shadowed corner hides a lesson of some form, something new to pry and gleam from the depths of existence — each moment a puzzle to be solved that teaches not only of itself, but perhaps unlocks the mechanisms of all things in the codex of life.
In the end, all the suffering, the endless tedium, the ephemeral tortures of boredom incarnate, are little more than the price of understanding.
This goes both ways for me. Some things I wish I didn’t know but then again that doesn’t make them less real and pretending they aren’t has brought us into this mess.
I don't believe there is a single thing I wish I didn't know, but I can think of a million things that I wish hadn't happened, that I now know the knowledge of.
I don't know. Even when I'm happy, just idk. I've never had long-term goals, never really felt like I care about others in the way they care about me or their loved ones. I am not intrinsically motivated. I try to convince myself to do things because it's bad to not do them. It has not precipitated real changes. I need external motivators to do anything really. I have unread notifications on Tildes from almost a year ago because I have wanted to implement what is in them, but I have nothing pushing me to work on it beyond the first few hours until I encountered the roadblock that made me need to ask for help.
I don't know how to be like other people and I don't know how to make important life decisions that are longer-reaching than applying for jobs or buying a car. From the outside, people probably think I really have my life together and really love my life. I do nothing to make them think these things, but I do talk about doing a lot of things, leading people to think I love what I'm doing, but I'm really just fine with it. I have never been proud of myself, but I have felt accomplished and I have felt like things I have done were accomplishments. Strangely, those were distinct emotions.
I think a lot about certain people a lot and do things not exactly seeking their approval, but hoping to spend more time with them. I know they don't want to spend as much time with me as I want to spend with them (or at least they want to limit interactions for one reason or another), so I sit alone feeling sad for myself until it's appropriate to talk to them more, but they still don't want to spend time with me. I do want to spend time with romantic partners and they want to spend time with me, but there are long gaps between these. One of these gaps has essentially started, but it will almost certainly officially begin soon enough (I plan to initiate it). I will probably feel lost after that.
You could say that I want to live to be with other people, but that is impossible and, of course, it becomes harder as I get older. I don't always know if I even like the people I want to spend time with, but that hasn't stopped me, even when I am able to acknowledge that giving each other space is probably "best." I feel like a pet that never knew where or when its next meal was going to come from, so now it doesn't know how to live with the knowledge that more food will come in just a few hours.
So I don't live for anything. I just live.
And I just wrote a lot given that I was initially going to stop after "I don't know." And I suspect that because I essentially wrote this as a stream of consciousness, it's probably incredibly dense. I don't blame anyone for not reading it all (or most of it (or really any of it)).
Also, I was really confused by the prompt because I thought the post title was "where do you live?"
It was "maybe one day they'll make a good Pokémon game again." But then Legends Arceus came out, and it made me feel like I was 5 again, so now it's specifically "because Legends Z-A comes out next year and I want to fuckin play it." Also because I've got a wife and kids and dogs who deserve some support, but, y'know. Pokémon.
I'm of the opinion that we may be kinda pointless out here, a bunch of atomic golems just firing some electricity off here and there until there isn't any energy left to do it. But at the same time, if everything is pointless, then it's neat we can waste that energy trying to be positive. I think we beat entropy by making that ultimate expenditure a fun time for all of us.
Are your kids into gaming? Bonus enjoyment there too :) think of all the Pokemon games y'all can play together and maybe if you're so lucky, grandkids!
It is super neat that from big bang to entropy not only did atoms move around in a pretty pattern, they also had fun.
Kid #1 is still under 2y/o and kid #2 is incoming, so not yet! But there's no shortage of games in the house between my wife and I, and kid #1 sleeps with a Pikachu plush at my MIL's house, so... Good chances?
I have had chronic anxiety all my life but didn't really know it wasn't normal until recent years. It was really bad, like I'd want to go to the store to buy food for dinner but think about a million different ways I could die or get mugged or lose my wallet on the way. All totally unfounded of course.
I realised I had a problem and I needed to fix it. I went on a bit of a journey of self discovery and it took honestly years to work out and reinfornce myself and I've always got work to do, but I am light years ahead of where I was.
Because of that I have a much more positive outlook on life. I know it's not forever and I'm no-one special. Thats why it's so important to make the best of every day.
So why live. Honestly just for the experiences. As long as I'm getting to see, do and learn new things all the time I'm happy. Real life is complicated, people are especially complicated. And there's no end to the amount of unique experiences you can have while being alive which is fantastic in its own way.
An aside on negitive thoughts
I see a lot of negitive thoughts these days, in my friends group too. And I understand it honestly. I have plenty to be upset about too, as much as the good.
It's sad to see though, because I think it's much easier to only see the negitive than filter it out. And it's a long and hard road to change your mindset (I went through it!).
Part of me wishes I could genuinely wave a magic wand and change a person's way of thinking, but it doesn't work like that. It's not fun to see the optimists turn pessimists as the world keeps turning.
Because after a couple of decades of self-hate, trauma, closeting, helplessness, and psychiatric treatments, I've finally got a few good things happening in my personal life in recent years, and so I finally want to actually live for the first time in my life.
For my mom and a few friends.
I appreciate you being around. You're a good friend.
As for your reasons, pretty much the same here, but we've already established that we're more alike than we care to admit sometimes.
<3
For me it's mostly hope. Hope for something to come along that will change the current course of my life. Most of the time I don't have the energy/motivation/willpower to try something new due to depression and/or my avoidant personality disorder, and I just hope something comes along and changes me for the better. Other times I try with the little energy I have and something new comes off it.
It's planting those little tiny seeds in your mind garden that can sometimes grow into new interests/hobbies/careers or what have you.
And sometimes it's people you reach out to for no apparent reason other than a feint sense of connection because what they said resonates a lot.
So here's to reaching out more to each others when you feel there might be something there. Send someone a message that you appreciate what they've written and maybe something can grow out of it. People are naturally inclined to be among each other. Lets end individualism together.
I live for the same reason a dog does.
To eat everything that could potentially be food and shout at every stranger you see?
Thanks for the laugh.
I chose to build a life so that I no longer have nothing to lose.
Because "it's no longer painful to" is a big one. it did get better. A lot a lot better. I don't think my teenaged self could have imagined not only continuing this long, and not just thriving but downright having a ton of fun with loads of stuff to look forward to.
When I was in a bad bad place, i asked my pastor and he didn't give me the "it gets better" spiel because how can he have known. He did offer "because you can do something good for others".
Life's gotten better and I don't have to grit my teeth and mark my time to do so now, so I try to keep doing good for others. I believe people are immortal: it matters more than we were kind to each other than the short life of a galaxy blinking in and out of existence.
I live because every day something happens. Might be good, bad, or neutral.
The list goes on. I don't know if there is a place beyond this life. But I'd prefer not to trade any of these worldly experiences for the unknown just yet. So I keep on living to see what's next.
This reminds me a lot of my favorite Zen kōan, The Maybe Story. It reminds me to never get too caught up in emotional fervor with life as happiness or suffering can be transient, and sometimes a negative experience can lead to a positive one (and vice versa). It also encourages me to appreciate the “good times” when life is not particularly difficult, because things can easily turn around.
I’m writing this comment after a doctor’s visit about a recent knee surgery that will take 6 months to fully recover, so I have a newfound appreciation of baking able to walk, which I took for granted. The original knee injury happened while having fun dancing at a wedding, so good/bad times can shift very quickly or sometimes take very long. Regardless, nothing is forever, and the ephemerality of life is what makes it interesting.
Agree! I'm convinced that the ability to step outside oneself and see the bigger picture is a super power.
I hope your recovery goes well, and that many more fun (and safe!) dances are in your future. :)
I finally had a chance to read the story you linked. That was really nice. Thanks for sharing. I'm going to keep that in the ole memory banks to help describe this philosophy. :)
As Tyler Durden said:
Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat, it's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go.
It seems like you actually followed this advice and it works! I do not why but I always worry about everything. Even when I tell myself that I shouldn't I still do.
I have a few people in my life that'd be devastated if I didn't. Also, more often than not, I enjoy living. I don't have life changing experiences or interactions often, if at all, but there are many small things that make me happy and keep me going.
It's expected of me as a member of society to execute my duties. Go to work, care for my parents, interact with others. I am simply existing.
I live because I live, I will die when I die. Obviously the day to day isn't quite so stoic but overall, I am alive simply because I am alive.
Why do I do anything else? Well, I have to fill the time somehow. Might as well see what's out there, what I can do, who's doing things. There's certainly an amount of nihilism to my worldview but I find the discovery of personal meaning/worth/value without inherent meaning/worth/value to be freeing. In that mess, however, I do find a struggle to envision a "future" and find it hard to plan accordingly for anything further than a few weeks out.
Sorry this isn't my most formatted post, kind of just doing a stream of consciousness response here.
I don't know, to be honest. I don't have a well thought out, philosphical, nuanced reason to exist, which I'm simultaneously comfortable and conflicted about (should I have one?).
For the majority of my life thus far I've mostly been propelled by doing things because I wanted to, usually for enjoyment. Plans were far and few between and at furthest extended into the next year or so. This has been shifting as I hurdle through my 30s, though, because I've become increasingly congnizant of the limited nature of my lifespan which has brought the realization that if I don't spend some amount of time planning the years ahead and arranging things to enable those plans, there's a large range of things that I either won't be able to experience or will only be able to experience them in an extremely limited manner and that I won't be able to support the people involved as well as I'd like to. I've felt driven to find ways to escape the treadmill that the overwhelming majority of us are stuck burning our time away on so I can do more things and spend more time with people who are important to me while I still have the mental and physical acuity to do so.
So, maybe it's experiences I live for. Probably the thing that's been most consistently on my mind for the past few years is that no matter what I do, I'll only ever get to enjoy a very tiny fraction of the human experience. I wish so much that I could spend a lifetime on doing each of the things I find interesting instead of being forced to skim the surface of most things, only going into any mentionable depth on a tiny handful.
Life is fleeting, precious, and rare. I quite enjoy life, and try to appreciate it for the opportunity it is. I'm also blessed to have been born into a country not racked with famine, plague, or war. I've had challenges in life, but even when going through them I always just sort of kept swimming, not focusing on the bad, but investing in the good.
Now that I'm in a good place, and have been for quite some time, I try to create positive change, pay it forward for others, and enjoy the simple things in life. Friends, family, cooking, coffee, and nature. Not necessarily in that order. I've made a positive impact on thousands of young people I've personally mentored or taught, and have impacted many more through my work in public health and public policy. I've championed the inclusion of women and LGBTQ persons in clinical trials through my work with IRB's and setting terms of funding agreements, and am happy with the work I've done. I've also worked my way up the IT ecosystem, built some amazing things as an engineering director, broken up a monopoly, and built some useless but rewarding systems.
I never set out to do any of those things. I just kept swimming, just kept doing what seemed rewarding and worthwhile.
"Do that which deserves to be written, write what deserves to be read, and in all things make the world better for having been in it."
I don't know why I live, other than I enjoy it.
I want to live out the values I've got, with faith that the better I do at that the more life will become what I'd like it to be. Adapt to what comes, thread the needle when necessary, pay whatever the price is. I am not a particularly religious person, but I think if folks got to talking about it with me they'd find what I've got relatable. I like to learn things but I don't like pondering mysteries - I'd rather put things into practice, solve some problems, make some progress. Take some risks and see what happens. The challenge is working out how to keep to the values through the times when they aren't recognized, when they're misunderstood, when other things present obstacles and when other notions become prevailing among folks around me.
Maybe another way to say it - the point is to be here. I try to live in the moment as continuously as I can manage, be present and look intentionally for what's beautiful, interesting, and helpful. Enjoying things matters too, but not quite in the same way. Improve what can be improved, maintain what needs to be maintained, understand (and mostly ignore) what I can't control, wake up tomorrow and do it again, just grateful for the opportunity. Sometimes that's hard to do, but the challenges are all opportunities. Opportunities to strengthen, learn, and adapt.
You can’t pause an online game. The only reason anything good happens is because there’s someone around to do it, the only reason anyone feels good is because they’re around to feel it.