Finding Purpose/Meaning in Life

So this post is more philosophical than political but I figured this is important question to pose to Holla Forums b/c left-wing ideologies tend to be materialistic atheistic or at least much more compatible with that type of view than theism or some type of monism. My question is how do you guys find meaning in life without belief in a higher being and purpose? Why bother living if the only thing we have to live for is nihilism/overthrowing porky/abolishing civilization/other leftist end goals? I have been mulling on this a lot lately and it makes me feel like as if I've hit a dead end in my life.

read the ego and its own fam. that is the only meaning in life.

Read this it explains everything you need to know.

Comunity

Don't listen to these people.

this but unironically

Why?

Don't listen to these people.

I don't believe that the universe was made for us, we were made for the universe; the former is the approach taken my the majority of religions esp. the Abrahamic ones, and seems clearly just the realisation of human narcissism. It's seems the equivalent to a sentient puddle of water thinking itself important because the ground is shaped perfectly to its mass, rather than realising it is actually the other way round (mass of puddle forming to indentation in ground). Basically, fuck that jazz. I've been at points in my life into meditation, and have had what basically might have been described as religious experiences during this. However, I realised over time it was equivable to the experiences in psych drugs, i.e. just an illusion some using the mechanics of my brain and not some genuine out-of-body communion with the spirit world. That's not to dismiss meditation btw, it's been proven to increase concentration and information retention in a way few other things do (for dat sweet sweet theory).
So the supernatural has failed me. Turning to art, I think it's of more that I practise art and it's essentially my only viable trade. But despite this I've come to some pretty nihilistic conclusions about art. I've been faced with the conclusion that art relies entirely with so!e level of distortion of reality and what we'd describe as objective, art as opposed to sober analysis offers us only insights into the structures of how the human mind and society works - that's obviously not worthless, but it gives us little by way of achieving transcendental meaning life. Also if you think about why art evolved, literally why humans are able to create art in a way no other creatures we've found can, then it's linked in with the developmental stages of language and the propensity to existential self awareness. Essentially, artistic ability signing hominids evolved when we gained the ability to rationalise our own mortality and override our survival drives, if we think too much about how meaningless our lives are, and eventually realise things such as how we exist basically for the survival of our individual genes and the inescapable heat death of the universe/entropy. This has lead me to believe (and I'm yet to see anything to disprove it) that art and the ability to create it is basically damage control to stop us from killing ourselves.
This is also informed by my futile attempts to escape INTO art from my life, believing in vain that there was something transcendental to be found in them; the late works of John Coltrane and Arthur Russell, Rothko and Dalì, Luis Bruñuel and Tarkovsky. For some context I was sexually abused by my mother, my father died when I was eleven and I attempted suicide at fourteen. Despite the aesthetic and human beauty of these works, they left me feeling empty because I was looking for the transcendental in them to make the pain in my life have some sort of meaning or be surmountable.
So art has failed me. A society chasing ghosts of th past in national identity, esoteric and primitivism failed me; neo-reactionaries are typified by their desire for radical change, but their change is always the infantalizing looking backwards or institutionalised stagnation. Anyway,the march of progress is going to happen anyway and these nationalists and Puritans will never be at the helm of it, it's in the hands of the cold mechanical nihilism of capitalism.
1/2

What's there to be gained by killing yourself? I don't see any reason why death would be any better. Might as well just live. You can always still kill yourself anyway if life really becomes totally miserable.

you might wanna look into vipassana meditation

I much prefer chanting.

Since you bring it up have you heard of Tsuji Jun? Interesting guy who attempted to reconcile egoism, epicureanism and Mahayana Buddhism. Sadly he starved himself to death and all his works are in Japanese.

can you fuck off? stop trying to turn Holla Forums into some fucking new age meditation forum and read the ego and its own. fuck off with your hippie bullshit you spooked faggit.

whatever floats your boat my friend
never heard of him
good luck reconciling egoism with a teaching that has anatta as a core doctrine
middle path eh?

polite sage because i don't wanna attract spergs that complain about a thread with "non-leftist" content.

I've once asked my psychatrist about the meaning of life. He said, the purpose of life, is to have fun.

was meant as a reply to

fuck off hippies

no need to sperg out.

Did you reply to mine intentionally? If so I don't think you've properly read it.

its simple user, just start praying to god like the normies. unless you are a true autheist, then otherwise, you are like me and are perpetually unsaved when it comes to this topic. i dont think there is a god and live my life accordingly. i guess its just not a concern, ive never had that need for 'deeper meaning'.

the closest ive come is a deep desire for love with a woman, and possibly having a family. but ive never had this weird supernatural urge to have a sky daddy to pray too. i think there is a lot to fight and live for in this world.

maybe some other anons could explain to me what purpose religion serves for them? I guess i dont get it and its just powerless and useless to me.

plus, i get the feeling if i ever was religioous, it would only be so i could influence normies to become more materialist/realist than anything. maybe im a bit more of a psycho or socio than i think, idk.

what do you guys think?

and also i might add here that when it comes to religion im more likely to become an occultist type (you know, "surpreme cosmic energy" or some other spooky shit). i dont know what it would be but it would be SUPER edgy shit, so i dunno. im probably better off being an atheist just so i dont make myself look like a retard. when i was a teenager i was pretty into satanism and stuff, but i only liked the imagery bc i was an edgy black metal kid.

my lack of religion sometimes causes me to feel like humans are irredeemible. but there's plenty of times in my life where i've felt the complete opposite, an overwhelming love for being alive and love for those around me. i think getting over pacificism has made me more empathetic and concerned about the general public welfare. seeing people get away with violent wreckless bs has made me more affirmative with stuff like self defense. so idk… i feel like religion breeds this kind of 'turn the other cheek' bs and it comes from a very idealist perspective. that has been a huge hurdle for me when it comes to shit like praying and going to church. not for me, but to each his own i guess.

satanists always seemed to really enjoy taking the piss out of these types, so thats why i always got a comedic high out of it. its like, in a way, your facing "god" and "death" head on and laughing at the odds. edgy contrarian etc…

2/3

So why live on? It basically doesn't matter what we do in our life times, we are doomed to have it all reduced to sort as our brains rot away in the soil. It basically doesn't matter what LIFE itself and all culture and technology shall be sacrificed at the altar of entropy and obliterated by the end of time itself. It's the universe as Sisyphus, only ever rolling the ball up to have it cascade back down into the abyss of unrealisation.
And yet… One of of the most pertinent things I was ever told about a nihilistic outlook on life is that of all the meaningless things in the universe, from that charade and spectacle of human interaction to the moronic, pointless vast emptiness of the cosmos - the MOST meaningless of all is the human perceptIon of this meaninglessness. The human emptiness and 'nausea' of being confronted with a meaingless universe is _the incestuous procreation of nothing to create nothing, the obsession of meaninglessness to yield nothing but a degenerated from of the same_.*
"Indifference is futile and your detachment means nothing".
We have to accept ourselves not as passive, detached observers to the world around us, but fundamentally as humans, fundamentally as mortal beings and who suffer. We must also confront human nature, as pretending we are blank slates and passive observers is itself another illusion.
This gets into the heart of the issue and what stops me from killing myself, which is more than words to me as attested by the surgical scars on my wrists.
I choose to look at the time in hand left on the world through the paradigm of humanism. It is only within this paradigm that the suffering of individual humans, and the aleviation of this, is placed at the forefront. This is in tandem with long term goals of creating a humanist society based on Libertarian Socialism.
I'm going to trunculate my reasoning for this, cause I could rant for pages. I just Ashanti get !y ideas out in the hope they help.
I'm facing reality from a humanist perspective, we have to recognise that human beings are social animals, and we run away from interacting from other humans in the aforementioned ways (aesthetics and culture, transcendence and a deity) as they are hyper-stimulant forms of human interaction and at the end of the day leave us even more unsatisfied.

What you're looking for is rural, Eastern Christian mysticism. Have fun on your heretical pilgrimage.

Why don't you channel your chi elsewhere brah, what the fuck is wrong with you?

im not looking for anything man. i'm non-religious and probably always will be. i was raised catholic nad ehhhhh it is pretty dumb

sure, ive meditated, and it does have value and has been proven to, but buddhism and minimalism as philosophies and religions in gneeral can get completely phukked. i just keep this view to myself because i know how off putting it still is to be an atheist and openly shit on people's unproven beliefs in public. but truly religion seems retarded to me and just a waste of time.

eastern shit like buddhism tries to convince you life is suffering and getting rid of shit is 'good'… i hate this stuff and i hate how westerners have bought into it just because some pacifist monk faggot told them to. it is sooo stupid, and i laugh at how gullible liberals are into believing this shit. they aren't harming anybody, thats great, but they piss me off with how self righteous they believe themselves to be. they shit on christians and abrahamic religions under some notion that they are 'scientific' and not one of 'those religious crazies' but still to any atheist they are just as spooked as muslims.

For me its weird because I've always been interested in religion. I am obsessed with it and in some ways I feel at times it is destroying my life.

Not to mention that they are deeply reactionary.

Why kill yourself? Living and doing shit allows you to put your mark on the world even if its pointless in the end.

Helping good people and pissing porky off is meaning enough for my life.

3/3

I'm too fucking tired to write it this out properly and I'm not at a keyboard so it's a pain to type.
I'll probably return to this at some pointing the future and write it out properly, but if OP was being sincere then here's my advice in birch basic terms.
What to do: connect with other people it's what humans were designed to do, develop alturism and selfless urges because living for your ego is a pointless waste of life (i.e. Stirner). Meditate in a secular way, exercise read theory way well don't look for anything more than a distraction in most entertainment and religion, it can only really be useful in what it says about how humans percieve the world. Accept mortality and use it as a boon.
Why leftism (or for me libertarian socialism): it value people and their suffering perennially. Peak pragmatism. Right "Libertarianism" is the freedom to be isolated from other humans and dominate/ be most likely dominated i.e. A wasted hedonistic life. Authoritarian Right is founded on some form of the Dominant other (God for theocracy, the "race" and leader for facism) i.e. A wasted life as a ignorant slave.
It's ridiculous to say that to be leftist is to live for nihilism/overthrowing porky/abolishing civilization once a revolution takes place. We live for the emancipation of oppressed groups and for people to freely connect with each other, as humans, without the barriers of hierarchy or domination or race/class/gender/sexuality difference. "Focus your energy nothing destroying the old, but building the new" paraphrasing Socrates. Humanism humanism humamism.
You are sure as fuck better on the left than anywhere else comrade.
I hope this helped in some way or another.

That's some really solid advice.

T-thanks comrade.

Damn that's a nice quote, maybe people are better off slaves to their own principles. But how do you choose good principles?
Sometimes I think about spooked knights who fought for God and a king, and I wonder if they lived right. Were they happy acting without sense?

I feel that irredeemable feeling sometimes. I think if there's a god, and there is a hell, we are all getting at least a once over haha. I don't really know why I live either, right now I'm just content that living is better than dying, so life is pretty good no matter what. But that's an assumption, I guess I just believe there's no point in dying sooner, when I'll just die later anyways. If I'm missing out on something awesome, it'll probably be their in 30 years right?

i'm the same man, its ok in admitting that too. for some reason, the more religious people i've met are troubled by the fact that my 'philosophy' for being alive is so simple, or at least, that there isn't more to it. i once struggled with depression really bad and you oculd say i fantasized killing myself multiple times as a teenager.

ive gotten older and ive moved to the self medicatino stage, still get pretty depressed from time to time, i just think ive gotten much better at coping with it though.

i am just figuring as long as i dont do anything stupid im only harming myself, and not really bad either. i think im no different tahn a majority of people. i liked to drink, and at some point i could end up indulging in soft drugs.

and thats kind of where im so different than alot of religious people. for some reason, these things are bad. i dont get and i never will. its just another form of their self righteousness. they think abstaining from alcohol and drugs (and sometimes even sex, a basic damn function) makes them 'better' when there's been numerous people throughout history that were outright geniuses, and had messy personal lives.

i guess im not defending those who have problems, just trying to point out that the moral righetousness some of them wield is false and does more harm than good to people in the long run.

oh for sure, without a doubt i would say. you guys ever notice how 'minimalism' and shit like buddhism has become more popular since capitalism has increasingly fucked over the first world? I feel like this is a perfect example of what nietzsche attacked as slave morality.

instead of collectively bargaining for better living standards, people are practicing 'minimalism', becoming pacifistic buddhists and exercising extreme forms of frugality like living in a fan.

i know someone who does all this kind of stuff and basically idolizes this kind of ascetic lifestyle like its something all humans should strive for.

i find it totally anti-Marxist and a totally liberal bourgeois phenomenon.

like, idk, just how you can embrace that mindset when the 1% are amassing more wealth, you can't help but question why these philosophies are being pushed so hard when people just start questioning the entire system. maybe its just me talking tho idk

jesus christ. apparently i reddit'd this to fuck. i am so sorry guys i am such a fucking faggot