Morsels for the Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic, and Otherwise Declining

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Morsels for the Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic, and Otherwise Declining Page 5

by Saul van der Walt


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  Grief looks like a pitiful vanity to those who have never had what was lost.

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  A Morality absolute and true, either as in: a platonic or transcendental score-keeper, or, as some faultless or universal heuristic or framework, does not exist. Those who still strive for a rationally water-proof morality all run up to paradoxes, uncodifyabilities, error theories, and catastrophic hypotheticals like the situation with benevolent utilitarian world-enders, and troubles with circularities and platonic unrealities. Just so, every sociocultural situation has its own interpretation on what is virtuous, just, or taboo, and what, is and is not a must; not all of this can be brought together and reconciled, something, or more realistically, someone always ends up giving in. All of our phantasms of divinity are slowly dissolving and rotting away into history and abstraction, so traditional moral systems aren’t much good. The world is messy, people get hurt, not always for a reason, or at least a decent one, it’s stupid, it all feels wrong and unjust, and that’s life.

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  Make no mistake, there are depraved monstrosities living in us all, some of us just manage them better.

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  To lack a clear sense of meaning in life is by no means the failure of an individual, for truly, how can you expect them to grasp at what is not there, or expect them to be sufficiently satisfied with the transient straw dogs and distractions they have hobbled together to fill this void?

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  All the times we have walked up to the walls of finitude and banged on them, as hard as we could, hoping, desperately hoping, that something on the other side bangs back.

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  A love without words is one without any sense or understanding.

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  It is perfectly alright to settle, but don’t chance settling for anything less than livable.

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  A collection of sorrows forever bound in text, the creation of a dark relic.

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  It’s easier to believe it’s all right and to fall apart later, than it is to talk them over until you know the truth and spare yourself the time and horror.

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  You can either waste time modestly in a kind of asceticism or poverty all day everyday, or, you can work your ass off to waste it much more comfortably in the few hours of the day that belong to you.

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  And when you’ve your savings and your work is done, and your games and commitments are all played out, then what will you do but piss away time?

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  There is no value-free rational way to get from “people are dead” to “someone ought to confess and be punished”.

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  Of course, it’s not wrong that they set the poor animal on fire, for most everyone it just hurts to witness it and feel it, and be unable to change or communicate that for those who are doing it or who simply do not or are unable to share the sentiment. Empathy hurts, and morality is in many ways, just an abstract way of formalizing common feelings so that no one has to keep having the same stupid arguments over and over again. It’s something that made living in large groups possible, but unfortunately it breaks down when it is no longer acceptable to accept often arbitrary or group mediated disgusts and feelings as (transcendent) reasons, which might be split off from those very feelings and aversions, so the rules that are drawn from that becomes a kind of metaphysics unto itself, or when all will to order is shown to be just another bias of living, one which is as unnecessary as any other value or mythical given.

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  There is nothing wrong with doing nothing, anyone who says it ain’t so is up to no good.

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  A set of names are not an explanation, and named name-collections in a graph are not a theory.

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  Do not fight with your children, love them and listen to them until the both of you understand.

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  The horror of forced aliveness, infinitely worse than forced deadness.

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  It’s not so much that the brain keeps falling out with keeping an open mind, it’s more that other people take advantage of that and shove all kinds of harmful and disgusting nonsense in there.

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  Death is a cannon that shoots you instantly to the end of time where it’s too late for you, too late for anyone.

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  Things happen and nothing you feel will ever make them unhappen, but, what you feel, or rather, don’t feel can at least make it so it doesn’t matter, which is closer to the truth, it really doesn’t.

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  All morality is exclusionary, not just the ones you don’t like, because in determining what is wrong or right, someone has to exhibit it and someone else has to reject it. So please, no hand holding universal love and communion, no kumbaya nonsense, you cannot lump or subsume everyone and everything into a body of total self-hood, because if it’s not utterly homogenizing and deindividuating, then it’s properly utopian and schizophrenic. If there is such a thing as a moral truth, then someone, if not everyone at some level, is going to come out being sore losers. No one’s tribe is the only and right tribe, the true ethical community doesn’t exist, ethics don’t exist, what exists is people who want things that they can’t have, and as long as finitude is not solved it all comes back to that, to the problem of ownership and mutexing limited shared resources.

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  You are summoned by nature, like a puppet to dance in the name of expenditure and endless decay — also sometimes as other people’s entertainment.

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  The world does not owe you anything, nor you the world, and but so also, nowhere does it stand that you owe yourself the world either.

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  The only thing worse than a shitty gift, is one that took someone’s everything to afford.

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  When a good old reframing doesn’t make it any less shit.

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  You are moving along through your world, and by chance, accidentally step on someone who is fixated on a pebble, they are immediately angered and you apologize, and then you realize that they are a kind of half-person not entirely here, they have forgone all but knowledge of the pebble which is their world, their truth, what is there to give to someone like that? Perhaps just an invitation, probably much to their dislike, merely saying that: “there is indeed a world beyond pebbles and it beckons to thee friend, if thou should care to look up, if only for a moment.” I don’t know. Oh glory, and what if I am the one to whom pebble is all? On the other hand, maybe being mesmerized by something as insignificant and benign as a pebble is a profound blessing not to be disturbed, considering all the inanity and inhumanity that lies beyond it.

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  And curse the day you can no longer sink into yourself.

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  There was a time when you could live with abundant resources as a hunter-gatherer, now, the game is so complex that a great many of us cannot even get started without years of expensive learning and training. Unless you have a grand inheritance, when you grow up and go out into the world, you do not have a house to stay in, a place to go, you have to slave for the bare essentials. People will chase you away if you make a home for yourself in nature, because that is someone else’s land. In some places, the line between a life of hardship and a chance at a comfortable existence is one mark on a test that determines whether they can or can’t apply to compete against thousands for a spot in a higher learning institution, which itself can offer no guarantees, that if qualified, they are bound for gainful employment. Then go and compare the struggle to pay the rent on a 1-bedroom big-city apartment with the slow, spacious, and relatively easygoing lifestyle of some poor farmers tending to rice paddies. It is insane.

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  Fighting finitude with abundance just leaves you nauseous.

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  What will the star man think, when, instead of blowing our minds, some of us, perhaps great hordes of us, run into his arms like a child runs from a monster?

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  We are all rational up until someone questions someone else’s rationality.

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  Among the troubles with growing and changing is that at some point you will stop being who you were and you will leave people behind, or keep them close but a different kind of close that will never be what it was, or there will simply be a complete falling out. But strength to you if you have reached a point where the platitudes have all turned hollow and there is very little left now still to share, seeing as, through the radical disenchantment, life has acquired the absence of certain sentiments and usual patterns, because, the lack of enjoyment aside, there is no way you can convince yourself anymore that there is anything worthwhile in going through the motions, in clapping hands at wheels and balls and papers and babies and badges and rings and gardens and parties and buffets and funerals and hikes and games...

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  Your stuff is no different from dead stuff, there is no vital force or essence binding all life.

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  The only thing more painful than an arduous and pointless journey is an arduous journey to get back to the point from where you have fallen in the first place.

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  Finitude is the fact that: even if a blossoming romantic love, or the most beautiful moment there has ever been, could last an eternity it would not only not be enough, but it would become a kind of hell unto itself, for we, as tourists and wanderers in the house of time, grow weary of things much too fast than is tenable and good for a life eternal.

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  What sounds like a scam? Suffering as the price you pay so you can feel good forever.

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  Sad is an obituary they tried to write a little longer than it could really go.

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  The universe is a suicide happening really really slowly.

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  Humans are such a stupid way for chemicals to combine.

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  Rather a nominalist than to suffer under arbitrarily platonic nonsenses, like guilt.

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  It’s ok to go overboard sometimes, it’s not always the words themselves that’s at issue, it’s the pretentious naiveté and deliberateness which irritates peoples. If you rehearse well and intersperse, then it can work out fine. But even so, it’s real easy to lose it and let sentences slip out like some melodramatic glitter dusted makeshift cucumber dildo, not good. Then you’re ruined, you’ve lost it in their eyes.

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  A thorough sprinkle of churlish thoughts each day, will help to keep that wretched base creature under sway, and hidden, far far away (where it can be milked for its acidic nectar).

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  As a virtue, hope is a kind of giving up on the present.

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  “You are loved.”

  Hah! By who?

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  When all the world’s a stage, and you’re a shitty actor.

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  Of course, sure, criticize a pessimist by saying they have it cushier than most, but just think of the emptiness of so many aristocratic lives, perhaps that’s the space it takes to tackle the abyss head on.

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  Not every cry has its why.

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  When every way is the correct way, then your way, which is of course the correct “correct way”, is also absolutely fine, you just understand that it comes with a little price, a price you pay, but fear will become utterly unbearable one day.

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  And sure, yeah, you don’t need to learn a lot, but that’s assuming you don’t live much.

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  In the cold dark of living without being alive, one can still perform, always perform for another regardless.

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  Prfectin has _ to do w compl

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  No infrastructure should be completely monopolized, especially not one as basic as money. Fortunately, with digital currencies, we learned trust and regulation by states are no longer necessary for the operation of a currency.

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  A salaried philosopher is literally a rental wiseacre.

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  “Do not bite the hand that feeds you.”

  Why is there a hand feeding you?

  Are you a slave of some kind?

  Are the reasons for biting decent?

  If the reasons for biting are decent,

  well then: git’em, turn’em to nubs!!!

  ~

  A person first has to want change and know that it is possible before they can accept it, or start to move toward it by themselves, and mind you, if they are not impossibly immature or otherwise tough and stubborn, then it can still take some real dire straits, years and years of it, before it even becomes apparent to them that this shit is not working. And but so, even if you know what you are doing, you cannot simply go an impose change, you will create needless suffering if you force something to be what it cannot, and then more than that, with no definitive certainty can you know what is truly right for them and not merely just right, or rather, plain desirable for you. So, the thing you need to decide is just, whether or not life should go on for you, or that instead, holding on is more worth it than everything and everyone else in the world, knowing full well all that is passing you by, and how what flows gently along with it is what little days, months, or years remain of your life.

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  And may they never torment you with the threat of their final failure.

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  The immanent fear of losing those last frolicsome embers capable of rekindling an already burnt out love for this world.

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  Yes, of course the world doesn’t bend to me, but dammit, that doesn’t mean I need to get right bent backwards and out of shape for the sanctity of it.

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  You can’t be ethical and human at the same time, it’s not possible.

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  Two kinds of people, the loud people who do bold things, and the insect-like creatures living in the walls, the ones who keep the cogs turning and clocks ticking, and ultimately calculate and readjust the score as needed when the dust settles again, when the loud ones, the history makers die again, and when the damages are done, again.

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  Sad urban human, you’re not made for the wild anymore, and yet, you so often yearn for it. What have we lost friend, where are we now, where are we going?

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  Spiritually, we are all the citizens of Omelas; though, it seems leaving is not always an option, so we suffer with the child inside.

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  The wonder of knowing that you are a point at which over billion years of evolution collapses into one last grand moment of failure.

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  Abundant hyper-real indulgences, the fastest way to total anhedonia.

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  “Dopamine diets,” my god, what a terrible affliction.

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  Feudalism was better; at least in its barbarism it was honest. Now, there are unsolvable tensions, which have no public solutions, but at least if you can afford it you are allowed a mental breakdown and a therapist.

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  Just imagine it some 60 years from now, well, if there is a now still to look from, kids going through grandparents’ social media photos, all still just as crisp and cringe-worthy as the day they were posted. At least there was dignity when the world could still forget.

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  Who needs structure when you can vomit significance?

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  Childhood is a cheese-grater and the cheese is your soul and sanity.

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  “Respect” is a vicious and highly subjective tool used by fragile assholes for obedience and arbitrary nonsense they can’t justify. I’ll treat you decently like a human being, but if you want anything more, then earn it. But, if an honest kind of respect exists, then it is being open about what you do and do not mean to someone else, being open about what both want from one another, because respect is not authority, it’s not a master-slave dialectic, it is a kind of recognition and a space of openness,
one wherein life is possible for both parties and that so on their own terms and without degradation.

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  What do you do when the truth is unhealthy for you, go on a truth diet? Hah!

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  What you can’t handle now will come spewing out the seams later when it is least wanted, there is no healthy prepaid or pay-later way to deal with things, you have to work with it as it comes.

 

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