Does anyone else struggle with existential thoughts?

PhantomBand
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 10:16:41 +0000

I've had derealization since august 2019, and about 1-2 months after that I started having uncomfortable existential thoughts. It all started with super reductionist thinking which made me aware of nihilism and had me struggle with that for a while before I finally stumbled upon existentialism which basically rendered nihilism void.

However, after that I read about Sam Harris and got into the whole free will rabbit hole, but nowadays I take solace in knowing that most philosophers believe in free will and think Sam Harris is a goof.

After that they kinda subsided for a while... but nowadays I freak out over the whole "self is an illusion" thing that's super prevalent in buddhist/drugs users/science circles, and it's by far the hardest to overcome. Like, with nihilism the solution is existentialism, with free will, well, there's compatibilism, but this? It seems like everything skews toward it being true and it deeply scares me. In fact, if it is true indeed, doesn't that automatically render existentialism and free will impossible as well? I mean, existentialism relies on the self and free will to create meaning, so if those aren't real, then the meaning crumbles apart as well. And free will also seems dependent on a self to exist.

Most people seem to not really care either way when I talk about it with them but for me it's nearly an obsession and I feel like I've discovered some sort of dark secret truth that I wasn't meant to see.

Does anyone else have this issue?

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