Maybe it’s not simply a reduction in duration but more
like kind of a cleaner “soundstage” so to speak, where emotional “sounds” ring and decay in a simpler, purer, less distorted or overdriven way.
Like taking away the kind of frazzledness you would associate with stress, inner city pressure, burnout etc—so it’s like going for a hike in some mountains, camping by a lake, waking up early and feeling like everything kind of flows more easily, or at least that would be the ideal when you imagine such a hike. If you stub your toe you scream but quickly come to your senses, so you don’t dwell unnecessarily, but it’s not like sitting around a campfire would be less joyful. A calm mind seems to be a good state for joy and empathy. Also it does seem reasonable to say that the default mood
towards other people, without any “acute” emotions going on, is a peaceful, relaxed, curious affection—so maybe kind of cleaning up the emotional noise leaves you with a natural good mood.
I have never meditated but I do have a lot of work for my startup (especially run ing out of money). I have been wearing dozens of hats for years and have accomplished a lot. I need to improve delegating — if it was properly capitalized.
Thus, I seem to have formed an addiction to screens and seem to have constantly a state of mild anxiety about what work I will have to do next. If I wasn’t ambitious I could scale back, but we are almost at the inflection point so now is no time to turn back.
My anger etc. (unless I am sleep derived) is minimal even without meditation. Very rarely do I “lose it” and even then it’s rational and with plenty of self deprecation and conflict resolution attempts which the other person has to reject for something to escalate.
I’m a while past my 20s and I’m not married and don’t have kids yet. I feel I am behind in some ways. The past few years of 6 days a week work from home (with normal hanging out w friends etc.) have left me in a curious state.
Here is my question. I feel pretty apathetic when I’m out, like I’ve already done everything. Camped, hiked, been on rooftops, been in comedy clubs, saw concerts, saw plays. Like it’s more of the same. The best thing for me emotionally is jiving with people who are easygoing and have a good sense of humor. Then it’s not where you are but who you’re with.
But I still have this overall sense of “nothing matters”. Like even you have a good time with friends, you’re just on a conveyor belt getting one day closer to the time of death. Sure you can distract yourself with nice conversation on the way but that’s all. No matter how much you accomplish, or do, once you’re not around to see it, it’s in a way totally pointless. I wonder all the time about what consciousness is and study theory of mind and Abrahamic religions. I try to understand what it means and why I am ok with not having been around before a certain year. Now that I am here I find the idea demotivating that one day it will somehow be just like a fictional universe that we are not able to experience. Existence itself is, to me, related to some conscious and possibly intelligent observers.
I have gone as far as I can work wise. If I had been doing the same thing day in and day out I would have long ago thrown in the towel and found something else to find meaning in, but my work has reached millions of people and I continue to build a snowball year after year. I realize everything about my life is pretty optimized for my work — I have cut out a commute, I don’t do various prayers and rituals that Jews do daily etc. I just can’t seem to bring myself to do many repetitive things every day unless I know exactly why I am doing them. But I am told by most orthodox Jews they are like meditation.
Billions of people live in communities. They uphold traditions those communities have trained them from a young age to do. They accept them. I grew up in individualist USA, live on my own, have no siblings, and have yet to start a family. This has caused this melancholy all the time. I can feel emotions in the moment but when I calm down I am aware it’s all meaningless. And I’ve done most things so the emotions are kinda dulled as well.
Sure I can take up a new hobby or busy myself with some other thing. I did those too (and of course they tended to be “productive”). Last summer I built a tent w furniture, for my local Jewish community, and I painted a giant mural w friends by the side of a highway. Things I had never done before. They were fun but now they are in the past.
And so we beat on, boats agains the current... borne ceaselessly into the next day.
Thoughts? Advice? I don’t think I am depressed, I am just always aware of the futility of it all. Perhaps I should read Ecclesiastes or Seneca.
You can take up some interesting challenge. Since you are convinced of your thoughts:
1) Maybe you can come up with good explanation and logical step so that you can convince say 50% of the people with your thought. Don’t assume if someone is not convinced that they don’t get it. The advantage is either you will spread the knowledge or if there is any flaw in the logic you may find it.
2) Another challenge to make life interesting: Can the word “meaningless” have any meaning without comparing with “meaningful”? Do the word “meaningless” and “meaningful” always exist in pair or can the word “meaningless” exist independently? A simpler example is like saying everyone is “selfish” because everyone does what “they want”. Does the word “selfish” has much value if it is defined that way ? If we define something as “tautology” there may not be a need for that word. If we can define in a way “selfless” and “selfish” both can exist only then the word “selfish” has more value in conveying something. One advantage of defining selfish where no selfless human can exist is you can confuse a “selfless” person into believing that he/she is “selfish”. If you define a selfless as a person whose happiness depends on other person happiness than you can define selfless and selfish. I am still looking for a better way to explain what I mean.
3) At an abstract level everything can be simplified. Things become interesting at detailed level. How do various thing interact and results into something. This may look interesting if you like problem solving for the sake of problem solving. There are many interesting problems to solve like how to come up with a “thought process” such that everyone is always happy. Can we teach that thought process?
It's a hard feeling I'm experiencing from time to time, and seems to be a common human theme (it does sound similar to a mid-life crisis). Moreover, it seems to be a phase in (Vipasanna) meditators who dive in deep into the meditation. All of your life it's been about sensory and hedonistic pleasures, up until the point where you start realizing that they are repetitive, non-satisfactory, empty. The first noble truth of Buddha.
What helped for me was a refresher of the evolution theory (Dutch book so no point recommending I guess), which suggests that you are here simply because you are here. There is no grand goal, no epic mission to fulfill, no gods to please. You are here because your parents were optimized for reproduction and raising children, who existed because their parents were etc. While this might seem depressing at first, I experience it to be very enlightening, as nothing indeed matters at all indeed. Things are what they are, nothing more, and thinking about whether it matters or not is hurting yourself (as it gets you into empty/unpleasant mind settings).
I think the proceeding stage of both that attitude and meditators in a "local minimum of realization" is that you start sitting back more, just observing. Enjoy the sound of the leaves during your hike, and instantly forgetting that when the sun hits you and you starting observing the heat. When the thought of "noting matters" hits you just observe the thought instead of letting it take you, it's bound to go away again anyways. It's a very basic way of handling the world, but extremely satisfying in a way that sensory pleasures aren't.
On an intellectual level, it helped to read a wide variety of philosophy & religions from people who seemed to have mastered the "art of living" (if you can call it such a thing). A rabbi predicating hate is a completely different one from a rabbi predicating love and kindness, even if they teach the same scripts. Below the surface, they all point towards the same "thing" that is in line with what I tried to explain above.
I hope it's in some way useful. Sorry if it's kind of vague, it's a concept that is hard to put into words :)
Couple of books that helped me:
- The unthethered soul
- Core books of taoism (lieh-tzy, chaung tzu, lao tzu)
- Yoga sutras
- Buddhism (sutra's and thich nhat hanh in example)
- Stoicism (marcus aurelius, seneca)
> which suggests that you are here simply because you are here. There is no grand goal, no epic mission to fulfill, no gods to please. You are here because your parents were optimized for reproduction and raising children, who existed because their parents were etc.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also outlines the same idea, and tries to explain how we got that way. Read it when I was a lot younger, but the concept has stayed with me.
I recommend the book Feeling Good by David Burns. What you are describing sounds like low-level depression and this book has many techniques that might help to self-correct.
Here's the thing. I can correct this, but it won't change the facts. It will just make me ignore the reality, and get more into hanging out with people and distract from the very things Ecclesiastes and Seneca write about.
It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind. I haven’t read the suggested book, not Ecclesiastes not Seneca, but I can tell you that there is a way to find peace and happiness without ignoring reality / distraction from a nihilistic truth.
You can be on the boat, day after day, and enjoy the feeling of wind in your hair, feel childlike irritation and curiosity at the sunburn forming, jump in the cool water before climbing back in, all without losing sight of the inevitable.
Eric Weinstein in The Portal suggested that ethnic religion is a way to ground the present concern for far future and past generations, thus ancestor worship and generational wealth etc. Pretty interesting. I'm also from an individualist culture and also one where both religion and family ties are passé. I find myself fascinated by those things. The podcast also discussed how "Jewish atheist" is a sensible identity because Judaism is an extended family that tends to appreciate discussion and philosophy.
For a while I was near to settling in as a "Buddhist," I recited vows and so on, but I walked away from that identity and those collectives for various reasons. Actually I think a lot of Western Buddhism comes from trying to find a solution to meaning-related breakdowns in our societies, which is why it grew as part of the general counterculture of the '60s, etc.
Considered as a way of dealing with meaning crisis, breathing meditation looks like a pragmatic and direct technique. It just decreases anxiety in the body through stillness, deep breathing, and various calming stuff (incense, bells, serene architecture, etc). Like a really good sauna without all the sweating. If this doesn't solve the question of ultimate meaning then at least it directly improves your daily experience of life. It's designed to deal with existential confusion by showing thought in general to be ephemeral and nonessential. You pay attention to what your experience is like aside from the discursive, ruminative, extraneous thinking processes, and so loosen your attachments to those processes, which leaves more cognitive space for the senses, activity, participation, the "present moment."
This would be hard to justify from a meaning-searching rational perspective because it's basically an impulse to turn down the volume on rational search for grand meanings beyond the current experience. But it feels good and wholesome, like exercise or sauna.
David Chapman talks about "meaningness" as the structures and drives and satisfactions that occur despite our mortality, despite knowledge of mortality, in basic reality rather than ultimate reality (well, leaving place for imagination, devotion, even faith), without need or hope for eternity or final justification. This kind of meaning is hard to escape.
Maybe family, community, ritual, religion provide abundant and straightforward daily meaningness. Work, too, kind of. Maybe it's also good to diversify your meaningness portfolio. If one day you suddenly doubt your church, say, you might just want to focus on the gym for a while.
> "I feel pretty apathetic when I’m out, like I’ve already done everything. Camped, hiked, been on rooftops, been in comedy clubs, saw concerts, saw plays. Like it’s more of the same. The best thing for me emotionally is jiving with people who are easygoing and have a good sense of humor. Then it’s not where you are but who you’re with."
As far as I can tell it's okay to be somewhat apathetic. Hiking is just walking around on a trail eating nuts and complaining about mosquitoes or whatever. You might find a nice spot to sit and have coffee. It's a decent way to spend time. Maybe this is an easier way to think about it than as an "experience" that has to be meaningful or somehow outlive itself.
Actually in my experience hiking is very similar to meditation in that the presence of thought and language becomes somehow annoying after a while. I've resorted to saying mantras over and over while walking because I just get tired of my thoughts. They kind of ruin the view sometimes. If you're out for longer then you naturally get quieter, especially for example your thoughts about work might fade away. There's these rhythmic bodily activities and a certain exhaustion and vivid presence. And the purity of nature. So it's quite a lot like a meditation retreat.
Sorry that there's no overarching point to this long comment... I'm up too late!
I started meditating when I was a young teen, and am 40 now. I go through periods where I don't do it as much, but I've been off and on meditating for quite awhile. Not so much 'mindfulness' meditation as has become the trend lately, but more of the 'empty of everything' style where you count breaths, etc. Fairly similar in results though it seems. Same avoiding of engaging with random thoughts that float by, which was probably the biggest thing I got out of it. Especially when I am stressed, it can become very difficult to sleep as my mind just won't shut down. Meditation helps with that.
I don't know if it is meditation or more my studying of philosophy (both in college and on my own time) that has led to my ability to control my emotions better. I would also say my emotions are ephemeral, but that's really because I understand them better. When they are justified, and helpful, I can nurture them and encourage them and indulge in them just fine. And if they're not, usually I can let them pass. There are exceptions, of course, for deep-seated things that I need more repeated attempts at suppression to change. Emotions are essentially a trained response, after all. Even if you intellectually know they're nonsensical, it has to be retrained.
I wonder has this affected the way you feel more positive emotions like happiness, joy? Or what about empathy?