I was curious about what most of this forum's posters identify as and thought it might be interesting to have a thread for random philosophical thoughts/discussions.
While it is difficult to peg myself down to one philosophy and that takes too much dedication, most of my cluster of thoughts on life walls within nihilism/schopenhauer-ism. Schopenhauer is often quoted for his famous essay "On Women" in the manosphere but I don't know how many of you have read his other works or subscribe to him. These quotes should give you a general idea of his outlook.
"Yet what a difference there is between our beginning and our end. We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death - does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest. We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce."
"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value"
I have genuinely tried for my own sake and happiness to find fault in this, and couldn't.
This makes it particularly difficult to decide if I will ever have children. When you look at a person with say, Downs Syndrome, it's pretty evident what the process of life is(a cut throat, amoral, gene pool competition), and if one miniscule genetic mutation could make it such hell, what is it all worth then? Who am I to force somebody into existence?
While it is difficult to peg myself down to one philosophy and that takes too much dedication, most of my cluster of thoughts on life walls within nihilism/schopenhauer-ism. Schopenhauer is often quoted for his famous essay "On Women" in the manosphere but I don't know how many of you have read his other works or subscribe to him. These quotes should give you a general idea of his outlook.
"Yet what a difference there is between our beginning and our end. We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death - does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest. We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce."
"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value"
I have genuinely tried for my own sake and happiness to find fault in this, and couldn't.
This makes it particularly difficult to decide if I will ever have children. When you look at a person with say, Downs Syndrome, it's pretty evident what the process of life is(a cut throat, amoral, gene pool competition), and if one miniscule genetic mutation could make it such hell, what is it all worth then? Who am I to force somebody into existence?