Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

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I can’t give you the very specifics of my own experiences but I would like to remind you that there have been 14 Dalai Lamas on this planet.

Life is very short if you live it the traditional way. By the time you realize what is what (or, what you came here to learn in this life) it feels like there is little time left to enjoy it.

But a lot of this comes down to self-awareness and whether or not it interests you. There are many actively religious places on this Earth (India, Nepal, Bali(!)) who will happily laugh at you for saying we live only once.

And as for me. I distinctly remember when I was five years old, I used to think we could only have one life and my parents used to think that way too. And then you wake up to the reality and you realize that life isn’t finite. But imagine if it was? How different would the experience be on this planet?

But how do you know the idea that soothes these worries about the end are just hallucinations of this cognition of ours hallucinating in order to keep us going, surviving, multiplying and preventing us from jumping over the next bridge? Just like the bees are just a way to cope and deal with this grave grave pain.

You've landed on the (non-)paradox of the meaning of life. The meaning is that there is no meaning, which means the meaning is whatever you make of it. The axiomatic truths upon which you base your life, your worldview, your understanding of reality are yours to define. What happens next is up to you and how you contend with your worldview vis a vis your perceptual experiences.

You can accept certain conditions on the world as given, but you can never know they're correct. You can decide on the meaning (and sense) of your perceptions and interpretations, and since that's all you can do, you might as well lean into it. Accept your (non-)fate and all will be clear to you(r habitual and critical understandings of the world).

This perspective is broadly described as nihilism. There's different ways to express such a philosophy, depending primarily on how collectivistic vs individualistic you ultimately decide to be.

I somewhat agree with what you wrote, though that doesn't sound like nihilism to me. Perhaps philosphers use the term differently. To me, I just hold the realistic view; the reality is that I experience my reality. Nothing more, nothing less. And I get to be clever with the "realistic" word choice too!

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