The Complete Psychological Writings of Mark Pettinelli by Mark Pettinelli - HTML preview

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Chapter 21Life Is Tragic*

Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

2009/07/07 19:47:48 -0500

The cons are life is boring, and it’s a lot of hard work. You have to work all the time, and things you think you enjoy you really don’t, because you had to do work to get that enjoyment, taking away any pleasure you might get (the work the enjoyment took to get takes away from the enjoyment itself). There aren’t enough fun things in life to do fun stuff all the time, or even a tiny amount of the time. Sadness always exists, and we never wanted it there in the first place. Real sad stuff exists in life that we don’t want to be there, and that we can’t do anything about. When you’re sad, you’re sad, and usually nothing in the world can change that, there is just no hope. Overall, the negatives in life overshadow the positives. Everything in life makes you feel, but since bad stuff exists, it’s going to make you feel bad, and there is nothing you can do about it. Humans can’t even remember 99.9% of what they live through, so what’s the point of doing it if it’s going to be forgotten? If you analyze all the feelings you had today, you’ll see that only a tiny portion of them were happy or emotional ones, that life sucks, and human’s are robotic and unfeeling most of the time, burdened by anxiety and stress. Since people try to be practical they are fundamentally selfish, so life is really just each person for themselves, but they have to run into other people constantly in order to do that! The number of people you run into in life is limited, and therefore the number that actually know you is much smaller then the idea you have in your mind is. You can’t instantly rate how good your life is (on a 1-10 scale) so it needs to be analyzed slowly, but when that analysis is done (say by reading this webpage), you realize it sucks. The two main activities in life, school and work, suck because they are boring, repetitious, and structured. Although life seems large, in reality there are very few interesting things in it.

21.1Everything in Life Is Boring

Just add, "Well, all you're doing there" before something anyone can do, and you'll realize that what they are doing is actually boring, no matter what it happens to be. Say adding 1 to 1. "Well, all you're doing there" is adding 1 to 1 to get 2. See? You can go through everything in life and eliminate it this way as boring. It's a challenge; you won't be able to find something not boring. That's proof that life is boring, and it sucks. Or say you're walking, just add, well, all you're doing there is walking, and you realize how it's actually boring.

21.2If You’re Not Doing Something Intense You’re Doing Something Boring

If you’re not doing something intense, then you’re doing something boring. Everything in this modern life is boring because there is no real intensity. Just ask about any activity you’re doing, “is this intense”? And you’ll realize that it isn’t. The only real intense activities would happen if there was no human civilization, and you were just out in the wild. Typing at a computer is incredibly not interesting and not a very active activity. Watching a game involves you sitting there staring at a small field for an incredibly long period of time. Think harder, really everything you have ever done, no matter how small or how big, wasn’t intense at all. To understand how intense something you’re doing is, just compare it to how intense your life would be if you were in the wild trying to survive on your own. Everything really is boring now. Your mind really needs to be “woken up” naturally in order for it to have maximum stimulation. When you’re out in the wild hunting all your senses are on the alert so you are very energized. When you have that energy you really feel it coursing through your body. You can’t have any “relaxing” factors to relax your mind, you have to be trying your hardest, and the only way you are ever going to be trying your hardest is if you’re going to die from starvation if you don’t succeed. That’s a really terrible, slow death that will motivate you to be at your most alert. Conditions like that simply don’t exist in modern society anymore. In prehistoric times you’d be doing stuff like that all the time. Your entire life would be like that, all your memories and such, so it would all add up. Even if you could do it now for a short period somehow it wouldn’t be the same because your mind would still be sedated by our modern society from its memories of it. You’d be more aware of your surroundings and your physical senses would be absorbing the world around you all the time, you’d feel fresh. People today are feel stale and not alert at all. It’s like long term torture by not being in a healthy state, you’re basically just sleeping. That causes inner mental pain and trauma in slight amounts that is there all the time. You can feel that that pain from your slowness would go away if you were in a more natural environment, and go away even more if you were there your entire life. That energy just doesn’t exist anymore - “emotional intensity” will never equal physical alertness.

21.3God Is Evil

Take all your dreams and aspirations and goals. Unless God gives them to you right away, then he is evil for denying them to you. Unless you are as happy as you could possibly be, then something is being held back. Don’t “have faith” that God is doing the right thing if you want something and it is being denied. The only conclusion to come to there is that god is evil. Everything should be yours. Unless that is true, evil exists in the world. There isn’t more modesty in a humble life, if you want something, that desire is real. Life sucks because no one will ever get everything they want, and they have a right to get it. There is no reason to deny a person happiness other than to be evil and cruel, and God must be playing the world like his own cosmic joke, with all the enjoyment going to him.

Being “content” all the time isn’t enough. Life should be thrilling and adventurous. How exactly is that going to happen when literally nothing in life is thrilling or adventurous? How many things can you list that make you “glow”. How many things in life really give you a thrill. I can bet that very very few things do. The only way to be “thrilled” all the time would be if you were under constant pressure to live like humans existed before civilization. Civilization just slowed everything down, took human’s out of their natural state, and “domesticated” them. Domesticated animals are tame, not fierce. Without that ferocity there is nothing fun to live for, you’re basically just walking around bored. The sad realization is that the only way to really have fun in life is if you are forced to have fun by being under threat. That wakes up your mind like it is supposed to be woken up. Otherwise you’re not “awake”, you’re not “alive” and you’re not living. No one in modern society today is alive. They’re all dead walking. They’re limited by their tame and sophisticated environment, appeased by gadgets and their domination of the natural world. That appeasement leads to complacency, it’s a fact that whenever you get happy you are more relaxed, or even emotional in any way you let your guard down. In prehistoric times there wasn’t time to be “emotional”. If you weren’t emotional all the time like we are today, you’d more awake and aware, more interested in things naturally because you wouldn’t be content to stay in your own mind. Unless you are under constant threat, your life just isn’t worth living. The only way to be happy is to go back to before humans became domesticated animals. It’s hard to accept that because your mind is trained into being “content” and its hard to reintroduce domesticated animals into the wild. Imagine being slowly reintroduced into the wild and it is easier to understand then why that would be better. The rest of this article outlines conditions which exist only in modern society, for the domesticated human. And why those conditions are bad.

21.4Life Sucks Big Time

There is nothing fun to do in life. This leaves a feeling of extreme depression. You just have to give in and be a robot/sheep and do something that you’re not going to enjoy doing because it will keep you from being depressed. The expression, “busy hands are happy hands” is one out of desperation. If you’re not busy then you are desperate. Therefore you get busy so you are no longer desperate, but just because you are busy doesn’t mean that you are happy. In fact, no one gets happy in life because although there are some fun things to do, these fun things don’t take up enough time to do them all the time. In fact, it’s not possible to have too much fun or you’ll get anxiety, so we’re doomed to little fun. Pick your favorite activity in which you have the most fun, and imagine doing it all day, I find that it would get boring after a while, and I can’t find anything else that exciting to replace it, I think this is true for other people as well. If you aren’t doing something fun, then you’re doing something boring or not fun, and your life sucks. Since you can’t do something fun all the time because there just isn’t that much fun to be had, life sucks.

21.5Why Life Has No Meaning

Life has no meaning because there is no reason to do anything. No one has an ultimate “purpose” in life. Everything you do you do because you have to. Even when you are trying to have fun you do that only so you can have fun. Why do you even want to be happy? If you think about it you don’t need to be happy, you just want to be happy. There is no ultimate purpose in you being happy. You’re not going to achieve anything other than your own happiness. You’re not going to be contributing anything to the world, or making yourself look better. The sad truth is no one really cares that you’re happy. Why doesn’t anyone care? Because the only reason someone else would want you to be happy is if it made them happy, and since all happiness is irrelevant you making someone else happy is irrelevant. Though I don’t know why anyone would want anyone else to be happy unless it somehow fit their own ends. Everyone is fundamentally selfish so in the world each person is trying to beat everyone else. That is, if they are smart they are going to try to beat everyone else, and if they are stupid then they aren’t going to be contributing anything to the world because they are dumb. So it’s a lose lose situation. Why would someone smart only be looking after himself? Because that’s the best way to get happy, and for some reason everyone wants to get happy. We’re just robots that when we get sad, a chemical is sent to our brain to make us feel bad. None of us wants to feel bad when we get sad, it just happens because we happened to have been programmed that way. If we could program our self we would just make ourselves happy all the time. If we could design a human like robot that’s what we’d do. God must be an evil person for creating sadness. It serves no ultimate purpose. It’s just a reality of life. That’s right, people get sad, and people get happy. In fact, you’re never completely happy or completely sad, it’s always some mixture of the two. So the sadness is always going to be there. Not only does it exist, but it’s there all the time! There is no reason why humans couldn’t be programmed to never have sadness. The only reason we get sad is because god (or evolution) designed us so that we would. It’s just evolutions tool to get us to do stuff we don’t want to do. If you think about if you’re sad, it’s either because you did some things you didn’t want to do, or some things were done to you that you didn’t want to happen to you. So it’s a lose lose situation. Either way you lost out, and there is nothing you or I can do about it. The fact is everything in this world doesn’t happen the way you want it to. You can’t believe in a god because if there was a god he would work for you, and everything would happen the way you wanted it to. Therefore god can’t exist. That is, a good god can’t exist, an evil one surely does. That’s just a fact, unless everything in the world happens the way you want it to, you are losing, and god doesn’t work for you. It just means that god isn’t working for you, but against you. That’s not a big deal since it doesn’t matter that you get sad anyway why? Because when you get sad you just get hurt emotionally, and no one cares that you get hurt emotionally because you weren’t contributing anything to the world to begin with. Even you don’t care that you get hurt emotionally really, you just get an automatic response when you feel bad to want to make yourself feel better, that isn’t “caring”. If you say that people don’t really care about anything, including themselves, since their entire desire to want to care about themselves is based on a preprogrammed emotional response that they don’t want, then they are really just trapped in their own minds. They don’t care that they are trapped in their own minds, because they don’t want to care about anything because then they wouldn’t be sad. If you never got sad you’d never have any desire to do anything, because there would be no motivator, because one level of happy is only relevant relative to another level of happy. That is when you’re “happier” you’re only “happier” relative to a “sadder” state. Therefore you have to feel sad in order to feel happy. In fact by that logic, you’d have to be sad equally as much as you are happy, and that everything that happens in life is a part of that perfect balance. In order to make you happy just as much as you are sad the world would have to be designed so that events fall into place to make that occur, so that is proof that god exists. And that god supports having emotions, both sad and happy ones. God could have designed people to have no emotion, but then we wouldn’t be doing anything or feeling anything. And we wouldn’t be doing anything because we would never feel sad or happy so we’d never have anything to motivate our actions. Once again sad and happy are just emotions relative to each other, you can’t feel sad without once having felt happy because sad is just relative to happy. Happy is something you feel when you are achieving victory over sadness, that is all happiness is. Happiness makes you feel good because it makes you not feel sad. That’s the only reason to be happy, is to not be sad. Because being sad is your only motivator. That’s the only thing that you HAVE to respond to, when you feel sad, you get the feeling that you have to do something about it, and that feeling is automatic and preprogrammed into your body/mind. When you get happy, the feeling is just that you are a farther away from sadness. Our bodies are entirely programmed. You can’t be happy more than you’re sad because happy exists only relative to sadness, so if you were happy most of the time you would really just be happy half the time, and sad the other half of the time, get it? And the only way that people would be happy half the time is if god made the world so that events would fall into place that made people happy half the time, otherwise the equation wouldn’t work and the fabric of reality would fall apart. Also, what makes emotion real or meaningful? It is just emotion. Whoever said emotion had meaning? It is just a biological response that makes you feel good. Who really cares about feeling good anyway since they are just emotions? You are just an animal, and you only have emotions.

21.6Bad Things Exist

There are lots of bad things in the world which exist that make life worse, and there is no reason that they need to be there. There are bad sights, bad tastes, bad smells, bad feelings, bad attitudes, bad noises, bad emotions, bad situations, bad things, bad objects, bad toys. All those bad things don’t have to exist, but they do. That speaks for itself. It may seem like so far there is nothing insightful in this section, however bad things are really the source of all evil. If something is evil then it is bad and harmful. Those words contribute to sad feelings. There wouldn’t be a good if there wasn’t an evil however. If everything was good you wouldn’t know what the word good meant. Everything has to exist on a gradient from bad to good. Nothing is exactly the same. So if everything was good I guess one good thing would be good relative to something else, which is also good, but it would be bad relative to the good thing. But I mean a person is more good than a tree doesn’t make the tree bad. Only bad relative to the person. So if we eliminated all things that were actually bad by themselves and left only stuff that could be considered relatively bad, then the world would be good. So the expression, “there can’t be good without evil” is actually false. Bad things exist. This refutes my previous happy sad argument and proves that god really is evil, because you can be happy and have sad stuff, the sad stuff would be relative to the happy stuff, but not have any real sad stuff. And it’s the fact that real sad stuff exists which proves that god is evil.

21.7No One Is Happy All the Time

No one is happy all the time. In fact, when you realize that you’re not happy all the time, you get sad, worried, and stressed. If you’re not happy all the time then during the times you aren’t happy you’re experiencing some negative emotion. The key thing is that being happy the rest of the time doesn’t cancel out those periods of negative emotion, you’re still going to be sad for certain periods, during those periods you are indeed sad, it doesn’t “balance out”. During those periods there is nothing you can do about your sadness or discontent. Whenever you have to do something you don’t want to do or feel something you don’t want to feel, there is nothing you can do to avoid that reality. It’s there. You can’t say to yourself, “overall I’m happy because I’m happy most of the time”. That’s not true, overall you’re sad because the negatives in life overshadow all the positives. And you have to admit, there is always going to be a negative. Life is always going to be overshadowed and under the cover of evil. There is nothing any of us can do to eliminate that evil. It’s there. Whenever you’re sad or down, the statement, “it’s ok because it is going to get better” is wrong, because its not ok, if you’re suffering, then you’re suffering, and no amount of hope you have is going to change that. The mere fact that evil exists in the world is indicative that life sucks. It’s obvious that all evil is never going to be eliminated, and as long as a shred remains there is still going to be the probability that you are going to run into it, or think about it, or somehow it is going to invade your life. In fact, if there wasn’t evil, you wouldn’t even be able to comprehend what the word evil meant, because it wouldn’t make sense without evidence. So the mere fact that you can comprehend the word is evidence that it exists. Sadness and unhappiness are evils. Pain, fear, rage, remorse, negativity, sorrow, shock, terror, worry, loneliness, hate, horror, guilt, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, discontentment, depression, boredom, bitterness, agitation, apathy, alarm all exist in large amounts in our world. In fact, those emotions probably take up at least a significant amount of each person’s life. And there is no way to justify their existence. They are there, they are going to stay, and there is nothing you can do about it. There is an evil which exists which will always remain.

21.8Life Sucks because It’s Just Feelings

Everything in life boils down to a feeling. Anything you do, anything you say, or anything you think it’s just going to wind up making you feel some way about it. That’s extremely pathetic, that means you have to worry about emotional/feeling attachments to every single object in the world, how they make you feel, and what they make you do. That’s immensely complicated. Life sucks because it is way too complicated. There must be a million different types of feelings, even for the same piece of food you could probably eat it in 50 different ways. And each time the feeling you get when you eat it is going to be different, no single feeling is every exactly the same. That means you can never say, “ah I did that before, that was fun” instead each time something happens you have to spend time and figure out if you actually like it, and if it was actually fun. However, the work involved analyzing each feeling takes away any possible fun the actual feeling could cause, if you know what I mean. Humans are burdened because they have to think about everything. Humans are the only animals I have seen cry. It seems to me that the crying is much much worse than the happiness, and the happiness doesn’t “balance it out”. I mean when you see someone crying that’s a much more intense emotion then any happy feeling they could get. You give someone crying or very sad a more attention then you’d give someone extremely happy. That’s proof that the emotion is more intense. Have you ever seen a duck cry? Nope. Ducks are happy all the time, they don’t have huge emotional swings like humans do. They don’t have to deal with all the trauma and bull shit. I can tell you I would be much happier being a duck. It gets even worse when there are extremely complicated negative feelings, that makes you feel like you’re being pressed in by a lot of evil.

21.9Your Feelings Are At Best Robotic

Since most of your brain is neurons feelings don’t really exist, and you’re just a neurological robot, that thinks. You think you have feelings, but what’s really going on is just what condition your physical body is in. If you’ve done something to make your physical brain happy and content its neurons, then you will think that you are happy. But really all you’ve done is achieved a healthier state of neurological stimulus. Or a different chemical balance in your brain. So you don’t need to say “I’m happy” you can just say “the chemicals and neurons in my brain are in the state that I happen to call happy”. I hope you don’t seriously think you’re happy when really you’re just chemically altered. The happiest you ever were was really just a disgusting mess of guck in your brain acting differently than it ever had before. I mean why does one mental condition matter as being better than another? It’s all biology. Your body is just a bunch of neurons in your brain which are now not moving around versus moving around. Your neurons don’t care if they are “happy”. All they do is send off chemical signals in your brain. In fact, your neurons are constantly rearranging themselves, you are never the same person you change all the time. One way you change is you forget most of what happens to you, if your eyes were a video camera they’d be a camera with a 5 second memory that’s perfect. You forget 99% of what you see. What’s the point of living if you are going to forget 99% of what happened in your environment in 5 seconds? What about 10 seconds? Can you remember everything that was in your vision exactly 10 seconds ago? I doubt it. You can’t even process what everything you are seeing is at one time, you can only focus on one or a couple of things. You miss MOST of what is going on. You’re just a very limited biological animal, that can’t remember in detail anything that was going on near them after 10 seconds. How long does a “happy” feeling stay fresh in your mind? An hour or so, then it becomes just a memory, most of which you forget in a day. If you are happy at 12:00 today you are probably not going to remember you were happy then two days from now. 6 months from now you are going to forget most minor things that made you happy. 1 year from now you’re probably going to forget everything but a few things that made you happy in this month, if you can even identify why you’re happy in the first place. What’s the point of living if you don’t remember almost all of what you live through? And you were never really happy in the first place, just “neurologically satisfied”. So most of the “feelings” that you are going to forget, didn’t even really exist in the first place. Also, most of the “feelings” you have aren’t even happy ones. If you look back to a long time ago you probably only remember good memories, but that’s because that’s all you remember. That’s altering your perspective on how much you go through is actually “fun”. Most of the feelings you have are not “happy” ones but mundane and ordinary. Most things in life aren’t fun and you can check that by seeing how your “feelings” are doing. You will realize that you’re not even “happy” a tiny portion of the time. What’s the point of living if you only like living it 1% of the time? Are you even happy 1 minute out of every 100? Can you say that you’re happy most of the time? When you typically say you’re happy you are just looking at how happy you are relative to how happy you usually are, or to how happy other people are, not how happy you really are, which is determined by looking minute by minute how you feel. If you look at it that way, (in minutes), how many minutes of each day are you happy? Probably less than 60, that’s a tiny portion of your time that you happy, that means that you were never actually happy in your entire life, since that one time you said you were happy it only actually lasted 60 minutes. When someone says they are happy they are just really looking at the little time they were happy when they said it, everyone is actually overly optimist about how happy they are. Assuming you’re in the BEST mental state you can be in, then you’d be at best neither happy or sad most of the time, just “going through life mundanely, not really enjoying most of it, not really feeling anything”. You’re just unfeeling and cold most of the time, since most of the time you’re neither happy and sad. Therefore all feeling is at best robotic. When someone says to you, “hi how are you doing” and you reply “good” by good you don’t mean happy most of the time, you mean, most of the time you don’t feel anything at all! Because that’s your best, highest mental state, not feeling most of the time, rarely being happy, and at least being sad as much as you were happy, that’s the highest state you can ever achieve. Sorry

21.10Life Sucks because There Aren't Feelings, Just Neurological Stimulus

You should realize that humans don't really feel anything - Any feeling you have is a chemical in your mind sending off "happy" or "sad". That beauty is just how pleasing the things you see are, there isn't a delusional idea that people really "feel" or "love" Love is just a chemical in your brain. Its not a "truly moving, fascinating, deep, wonderful experience". Sorry to break it to you, but there isn't anything magical going on. No need to be delusional. They're just neurons. You're just a practical person, trying to achieve practical goals. One of those practical goals might be happiness, and love might be a way to get there, but you're really just looking after your own neurons. This brings about the point that people are fundamentally selfish, if the only thing that matters i