Existential Recurrence & Purpose

This is a post I’ve rewritten over and over again. I’ve thought about making this shorter but I feel the length is necessary for understanding this.

This post serves two purposes for me:

1. As a complete record of the process, thus this is going to be a long & thorough post (perhaps the longest single post I’ve written).
2. As a self reminder for reasons I’ll explain at the end.

In keeping with this theme I’ll be referencing things I’ve written about before, so I can understand if you want to skip this. I’m sick of this recurring as well.

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First off, something I forgot to add to an earlier post which also applies here.

The wish for death can be exacerbated by a long accumulation of painful moments, memories & associations where all viable alternatives have failed. This tiring slog can be made more hopeless when you are unable to properly communicate the suffering to another caring soul. Even when you can, no amount of understanding with the wrong people can truly solve such predicaments. The process may even lead to self alienation.

It can be caused by their inability to find a compelling solution to their existential horror, or their own cyclic frame of thinking. Sometimes it’s both. It’s hard to consolidate the later when you’re stuck with the first.

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My life has lost clarity.

I’ve become too painfully aware of my own recurring actions & results, all of which have seemingly lead to stagnation. I don’t know what alternative action to take, & to continue as I have is just insanity. It’s broken me.

I stopped because there was no point to it – only to dive deep into a marginally different recurrence.

See, I know that being disciplined about my wishes & balancing my needs are key to living a good life, but why should I? Why should I affirm my life & continue through guaranteed suffering? To what point & purpose am I living for?

2016 Retrospective

Whelp, this took way too long. This is not a review of world events in 2016; just my own reflection on what I’ve been learning & how that’s affected me.

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2016 has been a year of further complex realizations. Before I’d been musing on how my own thoughts & actions can effect myself & others. Since moving to my current flat, my thoughts have broadened to systems & ideologies that may affect us all.

I’ve been learning concepts related to socio-politics & philosophy, as well as figures & movements within these topics. I’ve gained some familiarity with concepts like Post-Modernism, Socialism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, Cultural Hegemony, & Hyperrealism; even Veganism. I’ve gained some familiarity with names like Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Focault, Kierkegaard, Camus, & Hegel; plus some modern names like Chomsky & Zizek. These topics & names have provided a lot of insight & new ideas that I would love to see more media & stories explore (I’ve gained a new found appreciation for the ones that do). It helps that over half my flatmates study &/or have an avid interest in these topics & are quite happy to talk about them.

Side note: a flatmate actually compared my thinking to Hegel’s philosophies. It’s weird having your personal philosophy supposedly match a philosopher you were completely unaware of just months ago.

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Yet, I’m still quite clueless as ever. I’ve been introduced to these terms & given a basic idea of what most of them are about, yet I feel I don’t have a true understanding of them.

If anything, what I’ve learned has a tendency to throw me off. About every month or two I seem to learn something that makes me question my assumptions & “what I should do”; all in the backdrop of a wider world & global system that I’ve known to be messed up, yet I keep discovering new perspectives that make it apparently bleaker then I thought. I’ve come to learn that the best information may very well be the knowledge & questions that deconstruct & challenge your foundations.