To my brain, nothing is worth pursuing or trying. “How can you guarantee that you’ll be alive to finish anything you start?” My brain asks. And it’s right. I can never make that guarantee.
It directs me to spoil myself with instant gratification because it knows I will still be alive to experience it. There’s no risk of working towards nothing. Don’t make goals. Don’t take risks. Embrace mediocrity. Do the bare minimum needed to survive. That way, you will never be disappointed.
I’m so tired of thinking like this. It started when I got a serious chronic illness that couldn’t be diagnosed. I always manage to survive for longer than I predict, and then I look back and notice that I have done nothing for the last 3 years.
I hope that I don’t continue to make the same mistake in response to Current Events™. I’m sure that falling for it again would be helpful to the exact people I really don’t want to be helping.
The only answer is radical optimism: trust that things can turn out better than the facts say they should.
Any moderate/rational takes on reality predict only failure so we have to lean into radical optimism on the off chance that we can pull off a miracle with enough determination and work.
At the very least don’t squish someone else’s radical optimism!
This is one reason I refuse to carry pepper spray despite it being a reasonable response to the realities in my area. To do so is to treat each stranger as a potential threat and I refuse to live like that (this isn’t advice don’t put away your pepper spray! Just an irrational choice I’ve knowingly made so I can squash reality into the kind world I think is worth living in).
The answer that my mind seems to be converging on is: “We can use the power of local community to help insulate ourselves from outside forces and replace technological addiction with genuine social connection to achieve a more natural and healthy state of existence.”
Or, put simply, “Friendship is magic.”
It doesn’t answer existential questions about the future, but I think it makes them less relevant by making the present nice enough that work towards the future is less of an emotional sacrifice.
I like that. Building community spontaneously builds coalitions because people naturally become mutually invested in protecting eachother and pool their various skills to do so.
That is a radical way of living! I like your example. Cops are living the exactly opposite world view I guess. Radical negativism?
Yeah I’d say so with their shoot first vibe, also think some true crime fans I know fit in the category of ‘radical negativism’ (haha I’m going to try to normalize your term).
Thanks for sharing yours! :)
I just wrote that off the top of my head because I couldn’t think of the opposite of optimism being pessimism, lol. Only nihilism popped into my mind but that’s different from what we’re saying. Radical pessimism is most likely better, but same meaning. Maybe nihilism could go hand in hand with either term. If everything is meaningless you can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic, would you agree?
Yes I agree! Nihilism lets you dictate the terms so dealers choice how you decide to create meaning.
Also agree that pessimism is probably the more immediate opposite but I kinda like negativism because it feels like it carries a little more agency for some reason.