Is there a term for those who hate existing?

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Yeah, the real 'gas' of it all is realizing that I'll be spiraling down the drain. Look wonderfully high functioning and yet I don't think there's a job I'm qualified for that earns a living wage. Think it'll only be a matter of time before I'm fired from the one I have and then, I have no idea what to do - try to defraud my way into another company with my 3.8 GPA? I really thought that palliating with accomplishment could cut it but, I'm really thinking that I just don't genetically have that in me. As a kid I was cut off and exiled for a reason, as an adult I'm finding out there were largely right about me.

Its funny, the times that I can hide from this I feel more at peace than most people in the sense that I know that the things pulling at me and the veritable snow-storm of 'what ifs' aren't legitimate. At the same time though, when I'm forced to confront my own worthlessness as a human being, it brings that sentiment to a whole other level.

Ah-- But your own worthlessness as a human being is just another illusion, a matter of opinion.

Whose opinion and what matters??

Well, I'm not really sure about that. I give myself varying answers depending on my mood.

If you survived school with a 3.8, you're probably not swindling your way into a company. You probably have some professional worth. You're no more a failure than anyone else, on average. Statistically speaking. You're just seeing your failings right now, and that's all you're seeing, and that's all you expect anyone will see.

Because Aspies tend to be perfectionists.

So saith Tony Attwood, anyway.

BuyerBeware finds it to be representative of her own personal experience.

'Course, I can't give anyone advice on the job front. My last paying job was French Fry Dolly. Then I slept my way into being a stay-at-home mom and support personnel for a mechanical engineer.

Someday I'm going to go to trade school. I hope he'll be around to be the primary breadwinner and bringer of medical coverage so I can go into business making custom cabinets and furniture.

In my dream world. In reality, all I'll probably make is sawdust.

If so, I'll think of something else.

So will you.

The human condition sucks. Welcome to the human condition. I think it is the human condition for everyone, and Aspies are just more likely to have the intellectual capacity and lack of psychosocial normative barriers to enable them to THINK about it.

Every day is a struggle to rise above it. For that day only. Yesterday you struggled, today you struggle, tomorrow you will struggle. Some days you are the dog, some days you are the fire hydrant, on good days you are the tree that watches serenely the interplay of dog and hydrant and is sublimely glad not to be getting pissed on (or pissed off) at that moment. To borrow a line from David Allan Coe, "Heads or tails, you have to choose. Heads you win, tails you lose."

You get up tomorrow and flip the goddamn coin again.

The human condition sucks. Welcome to the human condition.

Thanks, that meant a lot to me.

Well, but then this is what you've been looking for - determinist (which is inevitably followed by the feelings you've described). I would think this is an extremely fallacious thinking; which was spred in Europe some few hundred years ago. Now can you tell me how science has proven that, in fact, *god does play dice*? In some cases determinism has also been proven to be just a mere tautology.

Here's the problem with that - there's absolutely no action in the universe that doesn't come as a reaction. The reaction in and of itself is proportionate and generated by its cause, you can play the same cause and effect over at either a microscopic or macroscopic level and you will get the same result whether you play that stretch of time 10 times, 100 times, 1,000,000 times.

I've explained probability and statistics to people before - their essentially fictional. There's no such thing as 70% chance of rain on Thursday, its just that the detain of input that goes into making our climate a reality is data in quantities that we simply do not have access to. Just like probabilities themselves are just that - risk management based on guesswork and our attempts to hone that guesswork. Guesswork is nothing more than lack of perfect knowledge, with perfect knowledge there would be no guesswork, no probabilities, no 70% chance of rain, and furthermore it comes with the realization that the seeming 'decisions' that we have to make in this world are resolved long before they even enter our heads - no matter if you decide to continuously opt for the best outcome, mistakenly decide to make things worse in the belief that this would be taking control, or alternately deciding to flip a coin to determine as many of your outcomes rather than choosing your actions - its really all the same. Our processing faculties are half of each parent's DNA, our upbringing and teaching are input reflected off of that DNA, and every choice you make is a reflection of your needs and values at that time as well as what you do or don't know. The speed you make a particular decision with, or whatever amount of hemming and hawing you put into it, if played over and over, would result exactly the same way - so perfectly that you would never be able to recreate that kind of causal perfection again; you'd even have all of the molecules in the same point in the air, all of the same brain chemicals in the same places, spitting image identical. We, for some reason, *feel* that we are making our choices but, in reality 'we' are simply a gateway or passthrough for natural dynamics. Think of the wind, think of a river flowing down hill, we are perhaps significantly more complex but no less natural and no less predetermined by the very nature of our inputs and operations.

Then again 'determinist' doesn't mean 'hating existence', it doesn't mean necessarily believing there's no point, it just means you have a deterministic outlook which can be good, bad, or neutral all depending on who you are, what you're going through, and additionally how your brain is wired.

Existential nihilists?

Oh dear. I think maybe that could possibly perhaps work.

It does, although it comes with or without hating being here.

Meh. Maybe one of these days I'll train myself to compartmentalize my care for things, do things like joining "occupy ____" as a conservative just to get play and smoke dope, yaknow - forget my ruling principles of conduct. I just wonder, if slightly after 30, I can make the slightest dent on the preset values I have from childhood, its not that I'd want to become part of the world's problems, just that if I were a little more worldwise and less uptight I'd be exploiting them at the same time.

Causality goes only one way. Given an effect sometimes it is impossible to know the exact cause, there might be an infinite options to choose from. Okay - I will give away the answer. See, at microscopic level we have different, quantum, laws. At macroscopic level we might have, say, the many body problem. So you perform these experiments as long as you wish and you will get the expected distribution. Which is not to say that every single experiment is somehow determined, it is rather random by its nature. Is being bounded by some probability = determined? And it might not even be *real* - it is after all only an assumption.

I doubt that you could explain me statistics or better than I know it already. As I see it you just hold some fictional beliefs and what is worse is that you are very sure of them. It is like hearing creationist trying to contradict evolutionist.

(a) Have you heard of the butterfly effect? Chaos Theory? Try to explain that with the lack of knowledge.
(b) I am still puzzled that you managed to forged Quantum Theory! Really, have a look at that there are many great popular books written on a basic level since apparently it was so ground-breaking. I would recommend Heizenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, short and sweet.
(c) Yeah, well okay – twin studies do provide some interesting insight on the topic of free will. But I am sure you could explain that one as well.

(Existentialist) Deterministic Nihilism. There you go. To me it is all riddled with contradictions anyway. I think its worth stressing that you should emphasize why do you hate the existence, i.e. because it is pre-determined (if I got it right, that is). In short – this is wrong and it was proven to be false. And you have, I think, may assumptions. I find it really disturbing that nowadays such views still exist. And please excuse my misanthropic rudeness.

As for the hate - feelings are rarely included in philosophical doctrines. One's relationship with one's thoughts is completely personal. Our culture is saturated with the matter, though, and people apparently have a ton of different feeling towards it. I, for instance, hate the *free will vs determinism* debate.

I'd be more inclined to say that we likely have a language barrier. Apparently what I'm saying is coming off as specious at your end, what you're saying is reading a bit incoherent at my end. I'm not even sure...further below....what axioms of my beliefs you're actually refuting nor whether you have any clear understanding of what my actual beliefs are.


Don't know what lack of knowledge you're talking about but:
Wiki's 'dumbed-down' version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Its another way of saying - yes, its all fully predetermined, but far too complex for our ape minds to work out. So far this is in full agreement with what I told you, not sure why you're bringing it up as a counter-argument?


Can you explain where I supposedly forged Quantum Theory or how this unravels my deteminism?


No outcome of a twin study either confirms or disproves determinism. Either outcome - sepate twins being identical or separated twins being different, regardless of the claim, seem to at best just go as political fodder over whether nature or nuture has more influence. Neither outcome promotes free will.

Is there another group or topic of twin studies that I'm missing?

No. The determinism itself doesn't bother me as much as the absurdity and evil in this world that comes from the very paradigm of being based on the genetic code, the fralties of that code, and the kinds of cruelty that these things not only have us - involuntarily - acting out on one another but you realize, in a rather scary way, when you look at the animal world and its attitude on eugenics, aside from a WWII Germany, we're quite kind to each other compared to how things are in the jungle.

Its that sense of being part of a seething, writhing, self-cannibalizing mould that in a strange way reminds me of (going back to your midieval Christianity example) Dante's Inferno's third hell - the pool of bile, where everyone is submerged under a pool of foul liquid (rotten grease or whatever you can think of) and everyone's climbing over the next to try and make their way to the top of the heap for a breath of air. Its a fully futile exercise and it seems like to even have senses or sensory input is to have those things pitted against you.

I'm afraid using such colorful language though I'm probably confusing you even more? My advice: if you want to explain to me why and how my beliefs are dillusional we're going to need to have a much more clear dialog. Please try to make your points readable, let me know where you're coming from with them and what you're points are meant to say about the underlying structure of reality and how determinism has already been completely and utterly debunked.

Thank you.

I really wish I could give you my horrible neck and thoracic spine pain, then. From what you are saying, it sounds like we'd both be happier if there was a way you could take that over for me. It could very well be a 'the grass is always greener' scenario, though.

Last edited by blueroses on 25 Oct 2011, 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't suppose I'd be looking for it within philosophical doctrine either.


I don't even see where there is a debate. The most I've noticed is fractures within determinism where some people want to try jumbling up liberty and free will to then argue for a pseudo-free will. I've never understood the point of that because liberty and free will are not the same thing.

I know what you are talking about, OP, and it is a reason why I left my life twice to try my luck in Europe. Unfortunately my visa ran out (twice) and I kept ending up back here again. I would love to take off again overseas, leave this dull jumble of suburbia and meaningless industrialism behind me, but I now have animals to think of....

To conclude myself : I was only trying to say that:
(a) Quantum physics shows that it is in the very nature of matter to behave randomly. It does.
(b) People can suck on their own and most of them cannot/will not change and there are good biochemical reasons for that.

Firstly let me apologize if there were any misunderstandings which I can see there were. As I probably wrote somewhere I unfortunately have a hard time understanding your writing (and probably do not do so well myself).
As for Chaos and stuff, lets forget that one for a moment and see where we stand. I meant nothing important with the twin studies and as I said you explained everything just fine within your system. Never mind all that, I was making subtle and irrelevant-ish points and am glad to explain them some time. The problem is that I so do not see any problem in this that I probably allowed myself not to be as clear as I should've been.
I trust you red some wiki on quantum as well but whatever:

So obviously there's a ton of arguments against it, not that it's wrong but that tere are ways of explaining it from a deterministic standpoint. Most of them keep failing. The majority of science world is convinced by this rich and wonderful theory that determinism is indeed flawed. *Theoretically this does not completely disproves determinism if you want to be so precise but in actuality it does! It gives numerous examples of clear and simple indeterminism*. Idk what's your background on QM so I will stop here. You know how it is with all those fundamental matters.

I would think that I understand what you mean. I just got too absorbed with *determinism*. You meant stuff that kinda follows from determinism, so I took the source instead just to generalize. I think that you should make your points more concise, artsy descriptions might be misleading. I also think that the fundamental parts should be discussed separately.
See, I very much agree with what you say about human society and one's life in it (if I understand it correctly, that is). But I tend to view people essentially as animals. This is kind of a Buddhist outlook - we can end suffering by following The Noble Eightfold Path. Or, in other words, learning how to control our mind and feelings or something. Which is possible because we do not have our fates determined - this is what makes us human.
Few more things:

What I meant was that the term which is sought will probably not include any feelings. They come as a consequence from those thoughts (which are described by the term) and thus are completely irrelevant and should be left aside.

Well, there is one and it has been for a few thousand years if not more. I gave the obvious-standard scientific proof, but there have been, of course, many philosophical battles over the course of time. I am sure that both sides "don't even see where there is a debate".

My problems with this:
a) the seeming randomness is subatomic, has little or no effect on the aggregate
b) do we have any proof that the seeming randomness at the quantum theory level of the universe behaving in a highly irratic manner isn't just our lack of understanding of what comes behind these dynamics that we can't see? If there is I suppose it would be our first observance ever of such alien teleology.
c) Regardless of what happens at the quantum level, in time no particle can both exist and not exist really. Even the most seemingly random event has a fixed coordinate in time and space and, being that we live in a causal universe on most levels, we still have not observed any events where the same particle happens simultaneously in two places (or to make it perhaps a little easier for a macroexample - for there to both be a mountain and a plane in the same patch of land and not a kinda-sorta-both).


See, I tend to see Buddhism as the ultimate of all pessimisms - ie. they believe that you have to work very hard and live (by good luck or happenstance) the right lives along an evolutionary path to earn the right to not exist. I'd argue that we have more signs of it just taking one.


Well, here's the problem you get into - we're playing in the territory where human language starts to fail anyway. By being seemingly artful (which - one of my own personal weaknesses - I don't know how to shut it off) it seems like the only way I can really 'draw a picture' and represent an idea that I have for what it is. Ironing it out any less or just presenting the skeleton or rough-draft of the idea and having the rest open to guesswork seems like it invites way too much error. I've noticed overall for so many years that my whole way of thinking and feeling is something that very few people can relate to and it seems like because of that I'm forced to either a) be artful, b) have a complex thought only partially understood and have to fend off allegations simply because I didn't clarify or c) just bite my tongue and keep my thoughts to myself. Its really a lose-lose-lose scenario.



The only reason why I'd still pursue it is, even if I'm completely wrong on this I want to know it and want to know the specifics of why. I'd like to find a definition of free will that satisfies my inquiry to be correct but, I literally don't have the ability anymore to just jump on board with an ideology because it feels better - it has to fundamentally fit reality better and make more sense. The further I go in life it seems the harder it is to come by truths which are that iron-clad.