Friends don't serve you. If you are looking for something in return from them, reciprocally, say entertainment, you might be bringing your own stipulations to your relationships which are doomed to fail. Being a true friend requires getting outside exchange value. Shine like the sun (or be as receptive as a black hole), in either case it isn't about reciprocity. An individuated person has friends but won't partake in the inevitable downfall of the relationship where tabs are kept. Self-respect precedes friendship. If self-respect depends on other people, you're thralled to them, you'll never have the right relationship with yourself, and there's probably insecurity all around (a shaky ground for all relations).

It goes to show how important philosophy is even in this modern day and age. But the current worldview sees philosophy as a joke I am afraid. — Thinking

Essentially, tech-driven science has developed to the point it can't be decoupled from philosophy in general, where tech-science occludes unmixed reason (science isn't reasonable with its all or nothing physicalism). Philosophy answers to nothing but reason, a priori, whereas modern "thought" has shifted all the way over to empirical data as the only source of truth, a posteriori. Intelligent people don't share the same limitations as computers/algorithms; e.g., a elementary philosopher does exactly what a computer simulation can't do: form thoughts, ideas, concepts, meaning, understanding, judgments, etc..(he doesn't merely collocate data or find patterns in heaps of data, meta analysis, he synthesizes a catena of new, as yet nonexistent, concepts). Then it appears the solution isn't only more philosophy, but philosophy removed from STEM. The difference between synthesis and analysis is the difference between a timeless philosopher and a modern scientist, respectively.

Leaving out the mental plane, or nonphysical aspect of reality is a great mistake... What can happen but the mental plane runs to seed in proportion to the exploitation of the material? While through STEM (science, technics, engineering, and mathematics) the gaze is turned outward, the inward is in decay. It can't help but be noticed that machine learning has replaced any interest in the phenomena of what would have existed whether or not us humans had. This when only us, the thinking animal, actually has the ability to think, ideate, conceptualize, understand, make meaning, etc. One of the main shortcomings of tech-science: it has no concern for the actual. For whatever reason an emphasis on prediction and repetition have replaced understanding, nothing really repeats inasmuch as the time of an experiment is always different, thus is the space (we're constrained by spacetime in mysterious ways we may never have a grasp on). When, by the beloved peer-review, one scientist attempts to replicate an experiment of another, what he attempts is impossible because he can't take up the same space as other scientists and therefore, is confounded by unrelated spacetime. Science is the most personal activity. It seems in the modern world, scientists have it backwards in seeking to be backed by second-hand information. Truth is first-hand...no one can know it for you. With this in mind, it's clear enough science is going in the wrong direction with so much emphasis on social conformity in peer-review. The Asch Conformity Experiment explained this a long time ago. The unrelenting need for "objectivity" has led scientists to defer to machines as having the ability to circumvent the ground of existence: which is that we ARE NOT separate from the universe: an observation of the world can't be made without your mind being a part of it (machines can't make observations, that takes meaning through conceptualization, very personal).

You are positing a... something... between your idea and your hand, and then have the temerity to call it a reality? Looks like brillig to me. — Banno

Does the sophistry never end on this forum?

The rest is indiscernible from waffle. — Banno

Nope. I said prior to experience...there is non experience. Not waffle. Experience of ideas occurs before that of anything empirical.

How are you using "idealism" and "realism" here? — Banno

If I have a thought of making a fist with my hand...a fist of my hand then occurs in a reality mutual to the thought and the fist being made.

Dreams are ideas...physical reality is obviously influenced, maybe even created by ideas. — Anthony


That strikes me as quite backwards. Dreams are influenced by the physical world. — Banno

Babies live in a dream world of pure ideation/dreams, yet emerge into conscious awareness. Babies dream....adults cease to dream because they know physical reality requires an intimate relationship in order to survive. A priori before a posteriori as a matter of course. Matter is dumb...no information...senses are dumb...no information...only unintelligent feedback. Whatever is meaning, intelligence, understanding was prior to the content of the understood.

This world is real, in contrast to dream worlds. — Banno

Simply, idealism does communicate with realism. Dreams are ideas...physical reality is obviously influenced, maybe even created by ideas. Why is there something rather than nothing? Ideas I'd say.

Metacognition probably came from a self-awareness preexistent in dream worlds. Whether this is a property limited to humans, who could say.

Evil is a paradox. Yes, it exists...and it doesn't. Anywhere you find good, you find evil. That's why after casting the antichrist into a lake of fire and brimstone (mythological eschatonic sequence)..the whole of creation ends. Whatever you project into it is it. To cease projecting, though, and you may be onto something.

I see. Maybe I have "consensus reality" taking up a lot of real estate in my head toward the term "reality."

Real is decided by humans. Truth is not. The decision to live according to reality or truth is a big one indeed.

Appreciate the tenor we can learn from fiction as much or more than fact/data.

Don't gays have more testosterone than straights (including females)? There is a Jungian enantiodromia going on with homosexuals. It is as natural as birth control. Asexuality is the way out. Gay and heterosexuals are both unconscious about sex, or maybe too conscious...I don't know.

In essence the repeatability principle is that a single observation is dubious enough to require further corroboration as a confirmatory process. — TheMadFool

Then science doesn't study the actual...which is limited to one place and time ad infinitum. And how modern science (cognitive science) handles incomplete information is wrong. The only true objectivity includes the unconscious/unknown. Which introduces a paradox, inasmuch as saying anything about what is unknowable is fraudulent. What modern science is. Models are the new God...clap! That is to say, if you reject God but accept computer models...you are incontrovertibly nuts. Not that I think in terms of "God"...but rather in terms of incomplete information...which is eternal. Each new moment in time is nothing like the previous, which is clearer when considering space...obviously one space is capable of executing events another space does not. But what with spacetime...it starts to become lucid the difference between what scientists are interested in and the actual.

Understanding is pretty much always in retrospect. The importance of prediction is lost on me.

A healthy and awake baby is just as conscious as a distinguished PhD performing surgery. Right? — Outlander

Not quite. A healthy baby has delta brain waves. Same as a healthy adult has while asleep.

Feedback/forward between two events observed by a conscious awareness (i.e., not necessarily an observation by cognition or an agency). Then, because an artifice invented by a specie in the unknown expanse of universe, known as a mechanical clock, obeys no feedback from any non local environment...or any environment not acknowledged by a single specie...couldn't possibly be the truth of what is time. Time is nonlocal, and local. Not either or. "To be is to be perceived."

Whatever you say, cap'n

So you deny your own agency in order to follow what you take to be the natural law. In doing so you are dishonest to yourself, denying that you have a choice while in the very act of choosing.
— Banno

No, but it may be I think of agency as more inclusive than anything remotely mindful of an algorithm, or AI/machine based models of mental plane of existence. There is agency and event. Even if we have our agency perfectly defined, leaving nothing to chance or intuition, it is still informed by the ongoing event or informational environment, which itself is informed by incomplete information (at least the limitations of your agency would, in honesty, have to admit it is incomplete information). So the concept of God or nature, what have you, shows up again in incomplete information or the wholly other.

Taking the concept of agency too far risks mistaking self and other in oneself and the other (in the most abstract sense of supreme systemic network, or nature, anima mundi), resulting in interloping of personal space, frigidity, and monotone values. The limits of agency are what needs to be sketched out in an honest fashion. Would instinct be informed by nature? If not, then what would it be?

Anyway, as I see it the limitations of an individual are the limitations of mankind. We can't mistake what is and has been known by our species for all there is to know. The Abstract will always be a limitation no matter the ascension of someone or everyone. Agency is informed by abstraction. Extra-human, precisely.

The purpose of life: The erasure of any and all forms of behaviorism which have been operative in my life.

That which is nescient of nature's example is evil. What isn't biomimetic would be evil. Not that we should copy nature's activity, but we should accept its delimitation without substituting our own.

E.g. - nature is creator and destroyer. It decides how long a species will exist. Humans are aware of death, our gift and curse. Instead of resisting death, we should accept it. Otherwise a malign and insidious evil will arise as a displacement of and substitution for death.

All modern civilizations of these days lives same, thinks same, searching for same... — handalf

Quite. Informal and formal social controls are part of the reason why. Fear of being left out is an example of an informal socially engineered prison of mind. Technologies like internet (most info. coming from online provenances), smartphones, and social media platforms have eroded the average person's ability to think for themselves. Oversocialization is causing mass appeal to popular mind, narrowing social character, causing individual conformity to public opinion, and, alas, social decay. Social synergy occurs when people are different, with more eldritch, weird individuals (outsiders in a tight social structure; normal in a lax structure) than with the group being made up of all like-minded automatons (another area where technic totalitarianism creates filter bubbles, echo chambers, general loss of primeval freedom, etc.); loss of synergy, when public opinion has undue influence and people are thinking the same =social decay. Oversocializaton comes at the cost of individual freedom and peculiar synergies which occur only between primally free individuals.

Much of the virus public opinion was generated by appeal to computer model projections. Yet another example of technology's role in informal social control/engineering. It is cause for concern if people don't learn from this that computer models are often very far afield from the actual territory, for one, and even if they weren't, you are still entitled to a dissenting opinion (such as loss of life is worth shunning totalitarianism).

Formal social controls reside within institutionalized violence (physical force) of militarized police and armed forces; if we took their behavior as an example, violence in society would greatly increase. When you don't want to think in the prescribed way...you will be kicked out of the mental prison into a physical one. Choosing between a mental and physical prison is your choice. Thankfully, the (thought) police, though getting ever closer through technology as an absolute (which renders the ambit of nonphysical idealism closer to an observable multiplex of thingdom, as it were), still have yet to enforce obedience to a infallibly predictable automaton social character.

Definitly no the correct is our brain is under pressure of culture delusion — handalf

Definition of 'socialization' by Durkheim: "the process by which an individual, born with behavioral potentialities of enormously wide range, is led to develop actual behavior which is confined to the narrower range of what is acceptable for him by the group standards."

The keyword is behavioral. We ought not be so easily controlled as we are by operant and classical social conditioning. Whatever culture isn't associated with informal or formal socio-behavioral control could be genuine. Otherwise, it's hard for me to believe anything intelligent, honest, or revolutionary results of culture. Culture repeats itself, selects those in the group who mimic it, rejects those who don't; it is conventional. Imitation is not intelligence. People who think and do things that aren't sanctioned by social control are usually condemned, distrusted, or at least disliked.

I am genuinely trying to enquire about a difficult and unfalsifiable subsection of metaphysics — JacobPhilosophy

When pondering the meaning of life...using the criterion of falsifiability is misplaced. Neither you nor I can say why we exist. There is always incomplete information to any model you take. The assumption of equating your life with a scientific, or technocratic experiment is a very big one. Man did not give rise to man. We have budded from a substrate far beyond our reckoning. If we don't have free-will, it doesn't mean you're programmed by something else either. There are unknowns...many, many unknowns.

No argument. Innate immunity is the real badass though, guided by smart decision making (avoiding urban sprawl/overcrowded milieu- such as any and all cities -as a lifestyle choice). The likelihood of getting mental and physical disease is increased manifold in the city. If you have intelligent immunity and are self-reliant enough to feed yourself, and semi-socially isolated (sensible in an increasingly sick human system), you have a better shot of health in general; so saith an admitted loner. Not that I'm opposed to vaccines or antibiotics, though, especially if you have microbes eating the amino acids in an open wound; antibiotic resistance can make an infection worse...but yeah, they've obviously helped overall. Sugar works in open wounds, gives the little beasts a saccharide fix instead of flesh.

Thanks. So kind. I will practice social distancing ...from you...for instantaneous improvement in mental health.

There's been a little over 1000 deaths in the US, 25,000 globally. More people probably die from sneezures (sneeze seizures).

It's as though people came to understand only yesterday the concept of getting sick. Weak people die from getting sick, fit people don't. It's natural selection (not anthropogenic selection). Heart disease and cancer, diseases of modernity, are more of a plague than contagious disease; why no propaganda for them, or doctors (iatrogenic illness) being the third leading cause of death? I'd rather die from a natural cause than undue stress related to mechanical lifestyle of technoindustrialism (the most prodigious killer of all time).

Don't forget, when this blows over, to deeply criticize the aspects of group behavior which made you contribute to a 66 page thread on Coronavirus, and not one on(Coronavirus) Mass Hysteria.

The primary generative order of the human system (aka - an outsized organization) is mania and hysteria, suggestion, conformity, hypnotic induction of popular mind...interminable belief in what doesn't exist, often spurred by appeal to authority (in our time, mainly science: CDC, WHO, NIH, etc.) or argumentum ad populum. It doesn't appear it will ever change.

Also, as usual, technological determinism has a central place in causing or augmenting disaster. Transportation tech. is a vector as much as the protein coating of the viral DNA itself. Insinuation of panic, and its family of irrationality percolating through the primal horde, can be blamed on telecom.

"You can get sick...You can get sick." Shout it from the rooftops.

Oh, didn't have an argument. Just thoughts. I believe in sharing a mind, not drawing conclusions beforehand. If I post again in your thread, it will follow your lead.

It helps to ask simple, general questions like "what is the purpose of work?" Leisure? In an age where work really isn't related to survival any more than it is entertainment...there are a slew of perplexities to churn up the muck if we really have an interest in understanding these things at the root. I don't take for granted many things which others seem to.

I see much of it as an unnecessarily negative diatribe — Frank Apisa

Well, negativity/depression is an appropriate response to observation of a "sinking ship"; attachment to negativity or positivity can be equally deranging to the psyche, there is a reason for each. A good example is depression anent the changing climate. Apparently there are those who think it inappropriate to be depressed while the weather around them changes drastically each season from the norm (it rains all winter now where I live...used to be snow...drives me f'n nuts); how it isn't depressing could only be that one never goes outside. Getting into the depths of what causes climate change (or excessive work for the market society, in this case) might even require a little depressive realism to gauge what is actually going on.

Anyway, I may try to share a mind here on the line of debunking the myth of "earning/making a living." It looks to be a point of departure. Clearly this saying is an analog. What's it an analog of? What is made? What is earned? Living could never occur if there weren't a power antecedent to what our species claims to be a provider of through its systems, standards and inventions.

We're all subject to different spaces, but an invention of man makes us all believe (falsely) we're subject to the same time. I've thought the invention of the mechanical clock true evil before, and stand by it. In other words, objective reality wouldn't exist without this subversion of the truth of separate times for separate individuals.

Your source: self-information.

Correlations between MRI, fMRI, or other brain scans and mental states (subjective reports) are accepted in the scientific community. Never could figure this out. If the empirical method were to apply, there would be no accepting of subjective reports and nothing could be said about communication between scans and mental states...you'd be left with the scan on one hand and the mental state on the other...never kissing. Thoughts and inner states aren't subject to science, which is why it should ignore them and consider them anecdotal and beyond the study of neuroscience. Anywhere there's an awesome technology, it seems to blind all coherence of rationale with its dazzling light; and neuroscientists tend to forget the scientific method when correlating subjective reports with brain scans. From the perspective of a proper coherently anal (and dogmatic, one-sided) scientific method...an MRI shows the brain lighting up in certain areas and that's where it ends b/c that's where the "objective" evidence ends... Basically, those who study the mind through brain scans have been violating the empirical method while they flourish with their indulgence in beloved technology. The scans are really nothing more than a map of the territory, at best; for some reason, neuroscientists have gone on to mistake the scans for the territory.

Psychology is more philosophy than science. William James was the first psychologist, before that he was a philosopher; there wasn't advanced technology in his day. It would be important to note that the inability of science to get at the mind by no means means there isn't a mind. Psychology, especially the combo of psychoanalysis with psychedelics (mind manifesting chemicals), is probably the best approach we have to studying the nonphysical domain of mind, it doesn't matter if its scientific or not. Filtering all of existence through empirical method severely deranges understanding of the abstract picture entire. There's simply no need to apply the filter of science to the part of existence which is nonphysical. In my view all is energy (E=mc2), and energy is more like mind than matter. If matter truly existed, my imagination can't conceive of it as changing...the fields of energy we know are defined by their protean nature.

A lot of talk here covering the physical side of planetary conditions, very little covering that all begins in the nonphysical conditions, the mind (anent human behaviors disrupting planet's attempt to sustain itself and its life). Behaviors don't come out of nowhere, they originate in the nonphysical. Isn't climate change, a problem manifest in the physical, originating in the nonphysical? To what extent is human accelerated climate change caused by ignorance of its nonphysical origins?

There is an outer ecology, but also an inner ecology of mind. The inner climate has to be in a snarl (if it is we that are indeed accelerating climate change, and don't drop out, or somehow stop contributing at the individual level) before the outer climate is brought to a snarl. One precedes the other. Going along with the status quo, which is destroying the environment and inviting global climate issues, is to conform to a system caused by ignorance of the inner ecology. This is a central concern.

Where is the self-limiting factor in the human system? People have to deal with economic pressures, paying the bills in the future which never arrives. Is it this kind of collective fantasy, magical thinking, or mental time travel which lies at the heart of the mess? Socio-economic concerns rest on a pseudo-foundation, a pseudo-environment. The climate knows nothing of this figment at the center of every human relationship. Yet consequences take place in the reality common to everything that walks, slithers, flies, oozes or crawls on the surface of the legitimate environment. Collective idealism has superseded individual idealism; collective idealism is a dominating fantasy that on the individual level is healthy, and necessary part of ecology of mind (thinking freely for oneself).

In a very veridical sense, anyone that claims to be a realist (depending on his lifestyle), is lying to himself. Why? A socially, scientifically, technologically, or economically constructed world is not the world. If the dominant species on a planet puts these fundamentalisms before what actually exists...of course havoc will be unleashed on the environment and you get the tortured earth we see today. Our habits aligned with these fundamentalisms is a patent conduit of planetary destruction...quite unreal. If you smoke, you know its a bad habit and quitting is absolutely necessary for your health. Whatever it is that keeps us from dissociating with what destroys the environment is an unreflecting addiction/habit like smoking.

When you think freely for yourself, one concept you may come across is one that appears wholly absent to modern society: appropriateness. Another one: necessity. Ie., there's a reason entertainment has become so ecumenical to a modern life...it distracts attention from focusing on what is really necessary, or what you're really doing most the time. But is this much entertainment appropriate? Is being productive or entertaining yourself necessary or appropriate if it's during the eschaton? There may come a time when every action to save the planet harms it. In this case, it is appropriate to stop being productive, to stop taking action (which goes against social conditioning: we are taught to achieve, to make an impact, to behave... not to be metacognitive). I've had the long standing belief our species was meant to veg way more than it does; after all, what makes us different as a species is metacognition, the sort of awareness which doesn't involve extensive outward travel or concern beyond a certain point. Humans, in a way, have developed a psychological illness, a mass-hysteria that is a variant of Tourette tics. You have to move for the sake of movement, you just can't help it. But how much movement is appropriate, necessary? How do you know this?

The best way to survive is to survive in as large a functioning community as possible - — Bitter Crank

Maybe. In the modern world of science-tech unquestioned faith, culture is possibly tending toward delusional sociocentrism...people are seemingly oblivious to the human rights violations being committed against personal privacy.. Transhumanists and people who think there is something special about the modern era with its slightly desultory science/tech-determinism, believe so as a kind of promissory physical savior for humankind ( perhaps neuralink will save those who have the implant, lol) have fairly naively attributed fictive images about working together.

It's true hunter-gatherers have worked together from the start. And this is where standardization began also...whoever failed in their part bringing down the game was probably sacrificed. Which points to a problem not directly related to the thread...having more to do with what can go wrong when people subscribe to survival of a group: neuroses, anger, hatred, violence. Only the individual survives or dies.

Ultimately, what will be valuable is nonphysical, untradable non things....skills. And yes, it starts with primitive survival skills all the way up to modern engineering skills. It's impossible to predict what you will have access to materially to feed you flesh and stay warm.

This being the case, you have to assume you'll have access what sun and earth provides (however, the sun may be behind a permanent and dense cloud) and nothing else. A solar still works well in precipitating water from your own urine if you have no other way of getting it. To the extent one knows no bushcraft whatever and is completely dependent on the market, he is akin to a neonate. He may not be a child in the human, pseudo-environment...but in the only environment, he is. Note: this isn't to offend anyone here, I also am lacking in ability to take care of myself in the one environment, and as such am like a babe. For me though, it doesn't feel right not knowing how to care for myself. Learning all from making cordage, pots, fire, and water, to putting together circuits may be on the bucket list. Not the bucket list that involves more infantile consumption...a list that has the drift of satisfying that primal need of self-governance and autonomy, a satisfaction which leads away from the loop of neurotic dependence on a fabricated system; though we are always dependent on the environment for survival...our species has come to see it fit to spread the one environment with its own idealistic overlay, a fabricated, fictive, pseudo- environment. This is why the more man succeeds, the more he pollutes. Instead of saying the GDP has gone up, why not say pollution has gone up? Pollution = success; pollution of clear understanding leads to pollution of the organism-environment. Stimuli from a fictive environment have repercussions in the only one.

A lone wolf would have many advantages in surviving. Advantages that would be as though he didn't exist to others. He could live with no trace, taking what he needed when he needed it and then merging with shadow. And if they were a renaissance person, they could secretly build up more of what was need to survive alone. Really, upon reflection, it seems obvious this would be the one case (doomsday) where everyone is out for themselves, and only individuals can survive....no one survives for the individual. Interpersonal conflict would most likely increase to a pitch that few really got along. In this case, the more benevolent human being would keep to himself avoid the ineluctable internecine skirmishes. Your friends and enemies would be interchangeable over short periods of time. All this is hard to imagine in today's media and tech driven pseudo-environment. Or maybe it wouldn't. All the foulness, in terms of sadism, you see in comments in online social platforms would become manifest in the one and only environment.

"Whatever you try to avoid becomes the very basis of your consciousness." - Sadghuru

Avoidance of negativity, then, fills one with negativity (gunpowder kegs). Sadly, the most dysfunctional defense mechanism, denial, is central to the positivity movement (how so many could be unaware of this is and index of mob psychology having taken over).

It would be just as imbalanced always trying to establish positivity, toxic actually (so there's toxic positivity and toxic negativity). Beware of mistaking ego or self for the full extent of consciousness. Identification with positivity does not mean you are positive; if one's self-ideal is positive it does not mean he is (by the bye, self-ideal is a delusional image which leads to mania). There is what you are and nothing else; of course the portions of the psyche you can include in awareness changes, but what you really are is much more expansive than awareness of one or two pixels of the complete picture.

No one is so perfect as to be happy all the time, if they say so, they are identified with ego to a large extent, and may have little inward awareness (eg. the friends of a self-proclaimed positivist may not see him as being very positive even though he preaches positivity). Ego says, "I'm positive" meanwhile, in the subconscious swirls anger, hate, and violence. Inner awareness has to find the defilements that refuse repose and keep light shone on them; and there are no actions to take in doing away with restlessness...it has to be negated by negating all action. Once all action (and reward seeking behavior) is negated...awareness, and much more of it remains.

If nobody takes anything else from reading this post, take this: stop thinking in terms of negativity and start thinking in terms of anger, hatred, and violence. Diminish anger, hate, and violence and you will have found whatever "negativity" means left behind, rest assured.

We all suffer. It doesn't mean we have to suffer with anger, hate, restlessness, hostility, and ultimately, violence. Suffer peaceably. It's hard to cultivate passivity in modernity. There are so many things we can do nothing about. We are taught to be achievers, raised on the restless Spirit of Conquest. What do you do about the unconquerable? Of course we are insinuated with violence never even realizing it. If we work hard enough and achieve enough...nothing is impossible...right? A recipe for disaster.

Existential dread may also be how we know we exist. It being at the center of the human condition.

Because you know you'll die.

In today's society, you get a job, make some money, and go out and buy baskets and food and you then turn your stove on in your kitchen and cook the food. — Hanover

This is clear.

The angle I'm taking is that prepping is more than prepping and hobbies are more than hobbies. On the individual level, we can test the waters when it's really important, and we can run the water all the way out...then see what happens and adjust accordingly. Collective organizations don't allow for this, but institutions end in death only for those individual participants that have been living precariously dependent on them. One little blackout (California) and psychological armor comes off, having burned you red hot in the process. With enthusiastic learning, far more than a hobby, you can fail(no such thing) on purpose to see the boundaries entire of what you're dependent on. So it's ontological undertones such as these which mean more than any kind of sequential-based "prepping" idea.

The truth involves incomplete information, then it's really a matter of living in truth or the psuedo and needlessly uncertain environments we have come to live resulting in multiple nodes which can collapse instead of only a few if we live grounded in truth rather than one small facet of it, i.e, the money economy you speak of. Money is like God, no? But is it God, is it an absolute? Is technological determinism an absolute? If an non theist claims not to believe in God, but lives a life mediated through a socially constructed medium (made up, pure idealism), surely there's a hair's difference between what is mentally and socially constructed and a God-like determinant. God could be said to have been born of collective belief, too, no? So a secular humanist still believes in a God-like conceptual framework, actually. And the needless complexity collateral to a belief in what doesn't exist (or acceptance of a grain of truth, while believing there is no incomplete information) leads to social and psychological strife the same way in any such case, whether it be the money of a money economy, the God of superstition and supernatural (empyrean rewards await sacrifice to the system), or the materialism of science and technics (some literally believe it's possible to upload your self into a program or genetically engineer away disease and death). I'm afraid getting with the program is mutually exclusive with learning from life. You could say animal magnetism of social approval has replaced learning in many ways.

For me, the human system is the source of misery, not life. It's not so much being world weary, I identify with what lasts (Earth, and its cycles), it's more to do with the unaccountable way that since the advent of agriculture, there's still people dying of starvation. What are the bad, non reasons for this? There's always been a desire for immortality, and it seems the further this bandwagon (mainly driven by tech and science obsession, but also religion, economics, any and all fundamentalism) goes along, the deeper we get into what can only be described as a sterile and lifeless, virtual reality that denies death and life to the extent the one reality is lost.

Once our parents were seen as omniscient, unlimited, but when we learned they too would die along with the maggoty, dead squirrel on the road...we would need to develop a character to fit into undying, unlimited institutions of culture; this need to identify with something immortal has shown up in repetitive ways in organized (secular) religion, money economies, and most dominantly in our times, tech. and science determinism (through tech and science, by damned we will conquer death once and for all). Jesus died so you won't have to. AI lives so you don't have to. Indigents exist as pavement (miniature Jesuses) for the earthly paradise of the elite (who think they are immortal, at least for having made their mark). Once you're disillusioned by psychological, character armor and the culture which shores up psychological armor ...indeed, one becomes weary of his specie's interminable runaway attempts to deny death. In not accepting suffering and death, a full life can't be lived, a life of joi de vivre remains out of reach, tantalizing only.

The main symptom I see as we go further down this rat hole of make-believe, psuedo-reality: people are getting stuck in emotional development and, in safetyism culture where no one can allow themselves to feel vulnerable, are crusty as children (a kind of pedomorphosis), alexithymia run rampant, adults getting addicted to video games since they can't tell the difference between vital needs and video games. Parents are spying on their teenagers, unable to tell they themselves have been eviscerated by the anti-privacy movement, mass-surveillance catastrophe, so they go on and treat their kids according to their own dead unawareness.

You won't last. The seconds are ticking away. You won't have much time in the end to enjoy the leavings resultant of a partitioned, departmentalized life. People go on vacations. People retire. What are they vacating? Retiring from? What has been separated from what? Back to the question this thread is based on. If we've made it to the place where kids are taught mantras like work-life balance...the corollary is you aren't a fully vital being when you aren't on vacation or retired. Thus, people haven't the vitality - they've had the requisite shift of agency into death instinct - to understand what they're even doing. Unnerving.

Schopenhauer1, I think many people are sleepwalking . If you think it's better with no life, fear not, for there isn't any. Everyone is awake and asleep in exactly the same way, which has a canceling effect on conscious awareness. Everyone must obey the same rules, standards, procedures, techniques, codes, computer programs, and protocols... their agency is eventually excised by this. If a system of rules can operate itself...what need for living, conscious beings? If the AI and automation really gets going, it will be clear people would rather not be alive, inasmuch as they will allow the AI to replace all the work of living. Then the pain will go away, you can sit on an actual beach or more likely a virtual reality one, and waste away into oblivion. You can die in this video game, but not die...so strange.

Survivalism in modern society has nothing to do with basket weaving, tracking and hunting prey, or starting campfires. — Hanover

Explain.

Technology toward reality or technology toward technological reality ? The differences which make a difference between the two are quite relevant.