Post by PassingWanderer on Dec 31, 2018 21:21:05 GMT
Get rid of all attachments.
A. Not feel fear
Nothing that happens to you is permanent, therefore you don’t need to fear anything. The first stage of this is not fearing how others treat you. Let’s start with the worst possible case scenario: Imagine you’re being harassed, maybe even being beaten up by a group of people. Eventually they have to stop. After they stop, how has anything changed? Assuming they didn’t break your bones, you can still get back up and go about your day normally. People can’t affect your choices, so why fear them?
Physical injury will heal in time. Though severe injuries may not ever heal, eventually you will find solutions to live with them and return to a base level of happiness. The Hedonic Treadmill theory posits that over the long term, happiness is not significantly affected by otherwise impactful events (Hedonic treadmill - Wikipedia).
Even blind men can navigate the world independently through sound if they practice the skill. As a result,some will find a way to recapture their freedom and quality of life, even dealing with something as devastating as losing sight.
Some might say that how people think of you, and consequently how they treat you, will affect your success in life. This is so, but it doesn’t mean you have to be emotionally vulnerable to them. Even if you are completely outcast by a particular social group, you can rationally try to reflect on what you did to result in their reactions against you, and next time use what you learned to make better choices in order to optimize people’s reactions. In this way, you’re not emotionally affected, but you are still learning social skills.
B. Not feel love
Love as we understand it doesn’t exist. People treat others well or become attached to people only when they are able to provide something for them, whether this is material benefits or emotional support. Those who argue against this are simply not self conscious enough to deeply evaluate what they truly feel.
Your friends love you because you give them time: you entertain them by having fun with them and you listen when they need to rant or cry. You make them feel good. You are the human equivalent of a nice chocolate sundae. They love you, but only because they are able to use you to maximize their own emotional satisfaction.
Your parents love you in a deeper way, but this is probably more out of habit than anything. They don’t truly love YOU. They could have given birth to any other baby and loved them just as much. Even if they love you, they are loving the idea of you: The idea of a child who loves them and will treat them well. I guarantee you, if you went full psychopath mode and told them you wanted to kill them, even your parents will stop loving you.
Therefore, true love does not exist and everything we do is a barter. Even something seemingly altruistic is done in order to make a person “feel good”. So in this case, we engage in altruism in exchange for a pleasant personal sensation. So it’s still selfish in the end.
“Love” is a manufactured concept that was generated to tie communities together in order to further survival. Humans evolved as tribal creatures. Natural selection has bred certain predilections into our brain, including emotions, in order to better facilitate this. We care about how others feel towards us, because if we didn’t, we would never cooperate with them. The naked ape who doesn’t cooperate and who does not have fangs and claws to protect itself in the wilderness will be hunted down before they can reproduce.
TLDR; Love isn’t real. It’s a delusion that was likely meant to maximize our survival as a tribal species.
C. Not feel joy
Do something you really like every single day. Eventually you will become bored of it. Just as a consequence of our human nature, this will happen. We are programmed for novelty. Do the same with something else. Repeat until you realize everything is the same in the end. If this doesn’t work, start asking yourself why you are doing these things. What will they lead to in the end? What will they change in the world? Are they merely for your hedonistic entertainment? If so, how are they different from lounging around and eating donuts all day? And while we’re at it, what is the point of doing something to alter the world? Everything is fleeting and when the world ends, we probably won’t be around to care anyways.
If that doesn’t suck all joy out of everything then I don’t know what will.
D. Not feel pride
For everything you can do well, there is someone else in the world who can do it better than you. Everyone is replaceable. The population is big enough that this is true. You can disappear entirely and the world wouldn’t have lost anything significant. Even those who might cry at first will move on and find new people to love and build memories with.
There is nothing in you that is special, so there is no need to feel proud about anything.
All the things that you might like about yourself, like your intelligence or your looks, are things that were given to you. Your looks were given to you by your parents’ genes and the universe’ luck. Your intelligence was given to you by your parents providing you with a good environment in which you had the resources and free time to read, study, and think.
So everything good about you, don’t really belong to you anyways. What’s there to be proud of?
Final Message
Phew. I depressed myself a little bit writing all that…
Now for the sake of my happiness, I don’t actually believe in all this all the time. There is an equally rational counterpoint to this argument, which argues in favor of emotions and love. But that’s not what you asked for. If one day you want to feel again, then maybe I’ll give that side of the story to you
A word of warning for setting down this path: it is liberating but sometimes can be incredibly dull. You need to feel passion to feel alive. You need to feel alive to even want to live. I’ve lived like this for eight years and I’m now switching over to the other side. So I wish you luck on the journey. Maybe you’ll be different from me or maybe one day you’ll change your mind as well. But you never know without going through it yourself.
A. Not feel fear
Nothing that happens to you is permanent, therefore you don’t need to fear anything. The first stage of this is not fearing how others treat you. Let’s start with the worst possible case scenario: Imagine you’re being harassed, maybe even being beaten up by a group of people. Eventually they have to stop. After they stop, how has anything changed? Assuming they didn’t break your bones, you can still get back up and go about your day normally. People can’t affect your choices, so why fear them?
Physical injury will heal in time. Though severe injuries may not ever heal, eventually you will find solutions to live with them and return to a base level of happiness. The Hedonic Treadmill theory posits that over the long term, happiness is not significantly affected by otherwise impactful events (Hedonic treadmill - Wikipedia).
Even blind men can navigate the world independently through sound if they practice the skill. As a result,some will find a way to recapture their freedom and quality of life, even dealing with something as devastating as losing sight.
Some might say that how people think of you, and consequently how they treat you, will affect your success in life. This is so, but it doesn’t mean you have to be emotionally vulnerable to them. Even if you are completely outcast by a particular social group, you can rationally try to reflect on what you did to result in their reactions against you, and next time use what you learned to make better choices in order to optimize people’s reactions. In this way, you’re not emotionally affected, but you are still learning social skills.
B. Not feel love
Love as we understand it doesn’t exist. People treat others well or become attached to people only when they are able to provide something for them, whether this is material benefits or emotional support. Those who argue against this are simply not self conscious enough to deeply evaluate what they truly feel.
Your friends love you because you give them time: you entertain them by having fun with them and you listen when they need to rant or cry. You make them feel good. You are the human equivalent of a nice chocolate sundae. They love you, but only because they are able to use you to maximize their own emotional satisfaction.
Your parents love you in a deeper way, but this is probably more out of habit than anything. They don’t truly love YOU. They could have given birth to any other baby and loved them just as much. Even if they love you, they are loving the idea of you: The idea of a child who loves them and will treat them well. I guarantee you, if you went full psychopath mode and told them you wanted to kill them, even your parents will stop loving you.
Therefore, true love does not exist and everything we do is a barter. Even something seemingly altruistic is done in order to make a person “feel good”. So in this case, we engage in altruism in exchange for a pleasant personal sensation. So it’s still selfish in the end.
“Love” is a manufactured concept that was generated to tie communities together in order to further survival. Humans evolved as tribal creatures. Natural selection has bred certain predilections into our brain, including emotions, in order to better facilitate this. We care about how others feel towards us, because if we didn’t, we would never cooperate with them. The naked ape who doesn’t cooperate and who does not have fangs and claws to protect itself in the wilderness will be hunted down before they can reproduce.
TLDR; Love isn’t real. It’s a delusion that was likely meant to maximize our survival as a tribal species.
C. Not feel joy
Do something you really like every single day. Eventually you will become bored of it. Just as a consequence of our human nature, this will happen. We are programmed for novelty. Do the same with something else. Repeat until you realize everything is the same in the end. If this doesn’t work, start asking yourself why you are doing these things. What will they lead to in the end? What will they change in the world? Are they merely for your hedonistic entertainment? If so, how are they different from lounging around and eating donuts all day? And while we’re at it, what is the point of doing something to alter the world? Everything is fleeting and when the world ends, we probably won’t be around to care anyways.
If that doesn’t suck all joy out of everything then I don’t know what will.
D. Not feel pride
For everything you can do well, there is someone else in the world who can do it better than you. Everyone is replaceable. The population is big enough that this is true. You can disappear entirely and the world wouldn’t have lost anything significant. Even those who might cry at first will move on and find new people to love and build memories with.
There is nothing in you that is special, so there is no need to feel proud about anything.
All the things that you might like about yourself, like your intelligence or your looks, are things that were given to you. Your looks were given to you by your parents’ genes and the universe’ luck. Your intelligence was given to you by your parents providing you with a good environment in which you had the resources and free time to read, study, and think.
So everything good about you, don’t really belong to you anyways. What’s there to be proud of?
Final Message
Phew. I depressed myself a little bit writing all that…
Now for the sake of my happiness, I don’t actually believe in all this all the time. There is an equally rational counterpoint to this argument, which argues in favor of emotions and love. But that’s not what you asked for. If one day you want to feel again, then maybe I’ll give that side of the story to you
A word of warning for setting down this path: it is liberating but sometimes can be incredibly dull. You need to feel passion to feel alive. You need to feel alive to even want to live. I’ve lived like this for eight years and I’m now switching over to the other side. So I wish you luck on the journey. Maybe you’ll be different from me or maybe one day you’ll change your mind as well. But you never know without going through it yourself.