What's your philosophy on Life?

[goosekevin]

I am trying to figure it out
At 17 I think I'm already too pessimistic in my approach

[dubkitty]

create as much art and general creativeness as you can think up... all else is just to help you do so... or has to be overcome for getting in your way.

the other part of my philosophy of life:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJzZDMyGG6U[/youtube]

[D.o.S.]

Drop Hammers.

[Grrface]

My philosophy? Life is too short to spend it miserable. Enjoy life and don't be an asshole. I'm a pretty easy going guy.

[Dr. Sherman Sticks M.D.]

"ihave no philosophy of life. i have life itself"

[Deltaphoenix]

Without purpose, why even exist?
I think the hard part was actually growing up and realizing that there is a 99.99999999% that what I do, will go for the most part, unnoticed by the world at large. After grandchildren or great-grandchildren, the tales of Dustin will fade, unless I do something insane like becoming a serial killer. Then maybe for awhile longer I could stay in people's collective memory as a monster like Jack the Ripper.
Therefore, I need an immediate purpose. I have really enjoyed raising money for the local Humane Society, me and 5 other people raised $3200 from 2 events. We are setting up a new source of monthly income for the Humane Society too. I just talked to the Director and now I am going to intern there doing marketing/event planning/social media for them. Sweet! So maybe I am putting myself on the path to working for non-profits, it feels good and purposeful.
I also choose to enjoy life, whatever the meaning is because I have also been miserable. I have been a homeless, thieving junky. I have worshipped what I put in my veins but that left me empty and almost dead.
So, I just am, life just is.
I choose to try to work on bettering myself, giving to the world instead of taking, to reach out a hand when I can. So at the least, life is an opportunity for me to change, to be who I want to be. To have meaningful relationships, and enjoy making some music/art along the way.

[Dr. Sherman Sticks M.D.]

^this dude gets it.

[jfrey]

NSFW: show

"Belief is the death of intelligence."
- Robert Anton Wilson

"I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves."
- Christopher Hitchens

"If there are two opposing ideas, it is not always true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is possible that one person is simply wrong."
- Richard Dawkins

"What man is a man who does not make the world better?"
- Kingdom of Heaven

"The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others."
- Ayn Rand

"Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright... Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong."
- Kingdom of Heaven

"I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough. That I can't know enough. That I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way."
- Christopher Hitchens

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

"I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively - or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show - or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart - only by someones head."
- Richard Halley, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

"For my money, the best humanitarians don't coddle us. They challenge us — sometimes aggressively. To be our best selves. They confront us with our stupidities, our pretences, our self-delusions and deceptions. Not with the agenda of diminishing us, bringing us into line, herding us into some grubby little flock. But in fact the opposite — shaking us out of our complacency, our groupthink, our self-indulgence and pig-ignorance."
- Theremin Trees

"People who don't want you to think are never your friend."
- Theremin Trees

"Duty before friendship. Thought before feeling. Justice before compassion."
- C. J. Cherryh

"Deserve victory."
- Terry Goodkind

"Even the greatest of heroes and men are less than what they might have been."
- David Farland, Worldbinder

"The more you know who you are and what you want the less you let things upset you."
- Lost in Translation

"When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True Story."
- Barney Stinson

“I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs.”
- Johann Hari

“There is just no way that you can politely suggest to somebody that they have devoted their life to a folly. But sometimes you have to say that. And, you can say: 'Pardon me sir or madam, not meaning any disrespect, but has it occurred to you, that you have wasted your life?'”
- Daniel Dennett

"Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent."
- Ayn Rand

"Trying hard is only a means to an end. If you become proud of the effort itself, you're mistaking the means for the end."
- Baka and Test

"the source of the chivalrous idea, is pride aspiring to beauty, and formalized pride gives rise to a conception of honour, which is the pole of noble life."
- Johan Huizinga

"Hope… I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor – that’s not my business – I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish… Soldiers – don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you – who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers – don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty. In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written ” the kingdom of God is within man ” – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people. You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let’s use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers – in the name of democracy, let us all unite!"
- Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
- Mark Twain

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
- Mark Twain

"Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong."
- Leo Buscaglia

"To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone."
- Ayn Rand

"I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire."
- Ayn Rand

"Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?"
- Sam Harris

"Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship."
- Sam Harris

‎"Honor is self-esteem made visible in action."
- Ayn Rand

"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."
- Sam Harris

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
- Christopher Hitchens

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."
- Christopher Hitchens

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."
- Ayn Rand

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
- Ayn Rand

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia

"Your life is your own. Rise up and live it."
- Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen

"If you care about yourself, you should care about learning - even learning simple things. You come to have pride in yourself only by accomplishing things, even from fixing some old stairs...Others can't grant you self-respect, even others who care about you. You have to earn self-respect yourself."
- Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen

"Sometimes, making the wrong choice is better than making no choice. You have the courage to go forward, that is rare. A person who stands at the fork, unable to pick, will never get anywhere."
- Terry Goodkind, Wizard's First Rule

"Love is a passion for life shared with another person. You fall in love with a person who you think is wonderful. It's your deepest appreciation of the value of that individual, and that individual is a reflection of what you value most in life. Love, for sound reasons, can be one of life's greatest rewards."
- Terry Goodkind, Chainfire

"Think of the solution, not the problem."
- Terry Goodkind

‎"In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other. That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art."
- Ayn Rand

"If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception."
- Ayn Rand

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another."
- Ayn Rand

"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."
- Oscar Wilde

‎"Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
- Ayn Rand

"Luck is statistics taken personally."
- Penn Jillette

"Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life."
- Ayn Rand

"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism."
- Norman Vincent Peale

"Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts."
- George S. Clason

"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure."
- Thomas Edison

"What you are will show in what you do."
- Thomas Edison

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them."
- Albert Einstein

"By remaining exactly the same today as you were yesterday, you are guaranteeing that tomorrow will be no better than today."
- Daniel Lapin

"It's easy to make decisions when you know what your values are."
- Roy Disney

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual."
- Ayn Rand

"If you'll do now what other people won't, you'll do later what other people can't."
- Larry Burkett

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Such things as the following, a man must do if he respect himself: He must pay his debts with all the promptness within his power, not purchasing that for which he is unable to pay. He must take care of his family that they may think and speak well of him. "He must make a will of record that, in case the Gods call him, proper and honorable division of his property be accomplished. He must have compassion upon those who are injured and smitten by misfortune and aid them within reasonable limits. He must do deeds of thoughtfulness to those dear to him."
- George S. Clason

"Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all."
- Christopher Hitchens

"The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks."
- Christopher Hitchens

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
- Horace Mann

"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today."
- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

"Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"He who does not oppose evil... commands it to be done."
- Leonardo da Vinci

[Casavettes]

Sometimes I feel like us human beings are a virus or cancer that should've been put out of our misery a long time ago.
And while I generally feel like life is pretty meaningless, I can't help but think that doesn't hold completely true. Especially when you see people say after that statement, "thankfully not everyone is like that."

My optimistic self says to put out any positive energy I have into whatever I'm doing and it will have an effect on the "bigger" picture.
It's basically like this... A couple of years ago I was involved in a head on collision that completely destroyed my car. I was leaving a party and I would say, if I left the house 10 seconds earlier or later this may not have happened.
So when I put things into that perspective, it makes me think maybe life isn't just this meaningless adventure.

I have forged great friendships and relationships by last minute deciding to go out with some friends or stopping somewhere for a bite to eat. You never know, but the longer I question it the more I want to end it.

[snipelfritz]

"If there are two opposing ideas, it is not always true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is possible that one person is simply wrong."
- Richard Dawkins

"The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others."
- Ayn Rand

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual."
- Ayn Rand

Dawkins is a hate-monger.

Ayn Rand is iffy. On one hand she seems to be going for the right thing in her basic ideas of striving to achieve, but in the end I always get the feeling she's confusing "rights" with "the ability to get away with unabashed greed in the name of some contrived political philosophy." She doesn't seem to consider the possibility of individuals/minorities trampling the rights/happiness of other individuals/minorities or even the majority. Of course much of this is based on the way Ayn Rand has be reinterpreted today.

[D.o.S.]

That said, there's nothing inherently wrong with anything in any of those quotations. I generally view Ayn Rand's philosophy as fairly infantile, though.

If we're just tossing quotes, though:

[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. (...) The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. (...) The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.
-Terry Gilliam

[zRobertez]

I think what people should do with their lives is find something that they like to do more than anything else and just do that (or multiple things!). Find a way to make it your living and what people know you for but never lose track of why you keep with it. Not for money or because it's all there is to do but because it's fun. When people start to associate something fun with money, I feel like they can lose sight of their original goal.

And it doesn't have to be rock and roll and fuzz pedals. You might love to make hamburgers. Or go to museums. Or whatever. Anyone can be innovative with a task or activity or idea if they truly love it and put their self towards it.

If you don't do what YOU want to do, then you're wasting your time. (that's excluding times when you just have to work. Or you just have to finish school. I mean looking at your life as a hole. It's not possible to ONLY fuckbitchesmakemoney 100% of the time.)

[Fuzzy Picklez]

Live fast die hard?

[Achtane]

Well...
I don't care...
If I do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die-doooo

[ridingeternity]

Anyone else out there think life is utterly pointless?

I'm not sad or depressed I just think life is meaningless. I still enjoy my life and do my best to make sure everyone around me does but eventually, everything I do will (quite shortly) be forgotten and I'll cease to exist.

I think the problem with this whole 'nothing matters' view is that people take it to an extreme and do whatever the fuck they want with no regard for anyone around them which is totally fucked up.

Am I alone in thinking like this? What do you all think?


I want to hear everyone's life philosophy, I think at least I could learn a lot and gain some perspective hearing from other people.

Thinking life is utterly pointless is just a stage in a path. Life is only pointless if you are missing the point which is that you make your own point.

I think the whole nothing matters attitude stems from the overwhelming amount of directions we can choose to take in life these days. So many paths to choose from...but will you pick the right one? I think this fear can be at the root of most sentiments as the ones you describe above, when in fact it's really easy...focus all of yourself into what makes you happy.

It seems to me that the meaning in your life is to enjoy it and make it pleasant for those around you...this is proof that you don't 100% believe this is all meaningless...yes we all meet the same end, but there is another meaning in life. Acceptance of death. We live in an age where this is only addressed on a very elementary level when in many times past, you were forced to accept the reality and finality of death on multiple levels.

Another way I look at it is that we live in an age of ultimate convenience, which ultimately cheapens existence. The more you remove the human element from the processes that are necessary for human survival the more unfulfilled people begin to feel. I seek my solace in the little things like this, and apply it to nature of my own existence: music. Doing things yourself keeps things fun and advances your knowledge.

Look at it this way...everything has a meaning. If you...say...decide to self-record a song one day that is nothing really special to you...but someone hears it, loves it, and it spawns an alternate path that you can follow even further if you choose to, making actions along the way that even further add alternate paths within that alternate path that you are on...and then maybe one day two paths converge and you have spent so much time home recording and advancing yourself that you can professionally produce a great sounding album on your own. I use music as an example because it's common ground...but in a nutshell...the small things count, almost more than the big things...but both have their place. Don't worry about the giant ? at the end of life...millions lesser and greater in their perception of the state of reality have met the end just fine, but if you base the meaninglessness of life on the fact that supposedly nothing happens but rot after death your ride will be a lot less fun that it could potentially be.