Hahaha. I think it's wonderful that you wrote that article. I was just about to write an article about the Principle Hope myself and then got sidetracked by the AI Conference that just took place in Germany - I am especially happy that you brought up the Hope and Duty question again, since I had forgotten who that quote was from and wanted to ask you on our next phonecall.
And since I also believe in being absolutely unapologetically cheese I will also add this strip on the topic of hope and adjacent to the topic of this post.
I’ve been depressed the past few days and I found reading this very therapeutic. Thank you for sharing. "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" rings true as always.
Thank you for doing what you do , and for writing about it. I don't have a sense of whether my approach to moving onward has a philosophical label or famous person's name who thought to write it down first. Maybe your readers can tell me in the comments. I'm also a very upbeat, smiley person so people often get confused that I can talk about my misery with a grin. What I do have a sense of is that my approach never stops changing. There is no one approach because the world never stops changing. The approach IS to never stop changing.
We have strange cultures that encourage & reinforce the notion that one day we can just stop and be content if we do X,Y,Z perfectly. But that is incompatible with how I perceive reality. Every day we wake up, the world we knew yesterday is gone and it is our burden to adjust to the fine tuning. The longer we spend saying goodbye to yesterday, the harder it becomes to be part of today. As the ocean of humanity churns with death and birth, destruction and creation, we flex and bend or we break. We build gimbals for all the elements of our lives that keep us steady enough to withstand the next change. But we must also be prepared to tear them all down. To be directionless for a time while the gimbals are rebuilt to counter the new waves, while also acknowledging that being directionless is not the same as being lifeless or meaningless. It is a temporary state as all other states.
I think a lot about these questions, for what it’s worth. I’ve had some extremely tough times in the past few years, extremely. To add to your aphorisms, or to put my own spin on them, I have the following:
1. You can’t always get what you want, or even what you need, but you can always live according to your own values and that’s more of a comfort than you think it’s gonna be.
2. There’s nothing wrong with just being a mammal on this planet. The same things comfort us as comfort the other mammals: warmth, shelter, physical closeness, the sight of beauty. There’s nothing wrong and taking comfort in those things.
3. From Spinoza: “No deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue the tears, sobs, fear, and the like, which are signs of infirmity of spirit; on the contrary, the greater the pleasure wherewith we are affected, the greater the perfection whereto we pass; in other words, the more must we necessarily partake of the divine nature. Therefore, to make use of what comes in our way, and to enjoy it as much as possible (not to the point of satiety, for that would not be enjoyment) is the part of a wise man.
I say it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour. For the human body is composed of very numerous parts, of diverse nature, which continually stand in need of fresh and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of performing all the actions, which follow from the necessity of its own nature; and, consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of understanding many things simultaneously.”
I should probably just write a post about this, rather than continuing in your comments!
This is a brilliant article and I wholeheartedly thank you for sharing it!
I don’t know whether I stay sane in this hellscape of a world that we live in but I’m certainly gifted with a naturally sunny disposition and the one thought that keeps me going is this (even if it’s delusion in the eyes of other people by the way!): “I was brought here to make a difference.”
There’s a lovely quote by Rumi that I’m fond of that goes: “If everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light.” And I think it’s a wonderful and true sentiment that I carry around with me everywhere I go.
Despite the suffering and horror around, why shouldn’t I try to bring a smile to people’s faces? Why shouldn’t I laugh and help where I can? I genuinely believe, with my heart of hearts, that human nature is good, that people are intrinsically altruistic and want to help.
So if that’s the case, why are we in hell? (And this is where I lose a lot of people.) Because the Chief Commander is in charge of this realm and the chief commander goes by many names: Lucifer, Yaldabaoth the Demi-urge, the fallen angels, the Nephilim, etc. We are trapped within structures that incentivize negative behaviors because that’s the nature of this realm! We come here to learn how to navigate limitation, to learn how to live despite insurmountable obstacles being placed in our way.
And, fundamentally, as you rightly claim in the article, we are here to navigate between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of nihilism to chart a course towards the hopeful seas of protopia, by engaging in wise activism.
I believe that’s what it’s all about and that’s what keeps me (ever so slightly) sane in this insane world.
Well, first of all, a great deal of our personalities are determined by our genetic makeup, not with what we believe about the world. So you can thank fate (or God, or random chance) for a large part your cheerful disposition. But as regards our view of the world, I think it’s just as possible to conclude the world is miraculous and wonderful as it is callous and cruel. My own view (which tends towards the former) comes from recognizing how unlikely my own existence is. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago, life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, Homo sapiens a couple hundred thousand years ago, and then a shitload of generations and evolutionary changes to produce one homo sapien (me) writing an electronic note to another homo sapien (you) about how to live rightly in the world. Kind of blows one’s mind, I think.
In short, it’s a miracle that we even exist at all and have the opportunity to contemplate our world and our future. So that’s one source of my own optimism. I’ll just add that, as a recovering addict, I have the advantage of realizing how harmful it can be to dwell too much in the past or the future. In recovery we learn to focus on the present and deal what what’s right in front of us. So, although I enjoy your speculation about the future, I think your most valuable contributions are what you observe and write about our current moment.
Thank you for this wonderful essay...It comes just at the perfect time for me, as I was perilously close to a concrete like despair that impeded all activism...Your 2nd aphorism resonates the best for me, "I don't believe in hope, but I do believe in duty"...With gratitude, I will keep on keeping on...
If I were asked what strategies I employ to stay sane in this moment, I would point to my unshakeable belief in the evolution of a natural (as against artificial) consciousness at least as superior to the consciousness of homo sapiens than the latter is to that of the next primate. But what has this to do with all those horrors?
Imagining that you alone exist, and that you are all-powerful and all-knowing — you can create any world you like, and you can know anything about any world you have created. Now ask yourself: Could you have the joy of winning a victory? The joy of overcoming a challenge, a difficulty, an obstacle, an opposition? Could you experience the delight we experience at a discovery? Or simply the pleasure of a pleasant surprise? You could not. To make all of this possible, you need to impose limitations on your omnipotence and your omniscience.
Whenever you create a world, you do this by entering into relations with yourself. You can’t have the multiplicity of a world without becoming many, and you can’t become many without entering into relations with yourself. In your original status, you are conscious of being each of the many beings you have created by entering into relations with yourself, and you experience the world you have created from the perspectives of all these beings. But presently you want to experience the aforementioned joys. And since you do nothing in half measures, what you do is you turn yourself inside out, completely and without reservations. All your self-relations, instead of being internal to yourself, are now external to yourself.
When your self-relations are internal to yourself, you are directly conscious of them, just as you are of your identity with the many beings between which they obtain. When your self-relations are external to yourself, you are locked up as it were, Houdini-like, in each of these beings. You are conscious of nothing except, perhaps, a mysterious urge to recover, eventually, your omnipotence and omniscience. The only relations in existence are then the spatial relations that obtain between an apparent multiplicity of relata, which physicists often describe as the “ultimate constituents of matter.” By involving yourself and your powers into a multitude of particles, you have set the stage for your adventure of evolution.
Grab the popcorn and enjoy the show, or join the fight for an amazing future.
This was pretty poignant since I just spent the day at a Baha'i conference, who are pretty much the most hopeful and optimistic religious group you'll ever meet. Their whole religion is about hope, as are all religions when you look at their poetry and core teachings instead of the way they tend to be practiced.
Since making myself believe in the supernatural is impossible, and techno-optimism is only slightly more grounded in reality, I've resorted to developing a sense of "rational omnibenevolence" using a pantheistic definition of god in order to get the psychological benefits that come with the belief that "god is good" without the need for supernatural pretenses that cause cognitive dissonance. This is one of the main topics I write about in my Substack.
The UPenn Positive Psychology department developed a theory called "Primal World Beliefs" that provides an empirical framework for understanding how and why this works.
Their website outlines the theory and has a great survey you can take that measures how "good" you think the universe is according to 26 different metrics.
Activism is great and it definitely helps to feel like you are at least helping move humanity in the right direction. But, cultivating the "good world belief" is the best way to have hope and happiness. Every religion will tell you that. If you look at the long arc of history in a "Stephen Pinker before he went anti-woke" kind of way, you can still see this as one of the best times to be alive. With just a few tweaks in the right places, we can get it back on track. We're not as far gone as things appear.
I didn’t know about your personal experience although I have enjoyed your work. You may… like (?)/find commonality in this very beautiful and sad documentary about the documentary-maker’s experience of being ghosted by her husband: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0834084 - it is unthinkable that people are actually capable of this but it seems some of them definitely are
Hahaha. I think it's wonderful that you wrote that article. I was just about to write an article about the Principle Hope myself and then got sidetracked by the AI Conference that just took place in Germany - I am especially happy that you brought up the Hope and Duty question again, since I had forgotten who that quote was from and wanted to ask you on our next phonecall.
Also: Thanks for the shout out. :)
And to adequately credit the original source of this:
https://www.asofterworld.com/clean/lurid.jpg
And since I also believe in being absolutely unapologetically cheese I will also add this strip on the topic of hope and adjacent to the topic of this post.
https://www.asofterworld.com/clean/slingshots.jpg
I’ve been depressed the past few days and I found reading this very therapeutic. Thank you for sharing. "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" rings true as always.
Thank you for doing what you do , and for writing about it. I don't have a sense of whether my approach to moving onward has a philosophical label or famous person's name who thought to write it down first. Maybe your readers can tell me in the comments. I'm also a very upbeat, smiley person so people often get confused that I can talk about my misery with a grin. What I do have a sense of is that my approach never stops changing. There is no one approach because the world never stops changing. The approach IS to never stop changing.
We have strange cultures that encourage & reinforce the notion that one day we can just stop and be content if we do X,Y,Z perfectly. But that is incompatible with how I perceive reality. Every day we wake up, the world we knew yesterday is gone and it is our burden to adjust to the fine tuning. The longer we spend saying goodbye to yesterday, the harder it becomes to be part of today. As the ocean of humanity churns with death and birth, destruction and creation, we flex and bend or we break. We build gimbals for all the elements of our lives that keep us steady enough to withstand the next change. But we must also be prepared to tear them all down. To be directionless for a time while the gimbals are rebuilt to counter the new waves, while also acknowledging that being directionless is not the same as being lifeless or meaningless. It is a temporary state as all other states.
I think a lot about these questions, for what it’s worth. I’ve had some extremely tough times in the past few years, extremely. To add to your aphorisms, or to put my own spin on them, I have the following:
1. You can’t always get what you want, or even what you need, but you can always live according to your own values and that’s more of a comfort than you think it’s gonna be.
2. There’s nothing wrong with just being a mammal on this planet. The same things comfort us as comfort the other mammals: warmth, shelter, physical closeness, the sight of beauty. There’s nothing wrong and taking comfort in those things.
3. From Spinoza: “No deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue the tears, sobs, fear, and the like, which are signs of infirmity of spirit; on the contrary, the greater the pleasure wherewith we are affected, the greater the perfection whereto we pass; in other words, the more must we necessarily partake of the divine nature. Therefore, to make use of what comes in our way, and to enjoy it as much as possible (not to the point of satiety, for that would not be enjoyment) is the part of a wise man.
I say it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour. For the human body is composed of very numerous parts, of diverse nature, which continually stand in need of fresh and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of performing all the actions, which follow from the necessity of its own nature; and, consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of understanding many things simultaneously.”
I should probably just write a post about this, rather than continuing in your comments!
This is a brilliant article and I wholeheartedly thank you for sharing it!
I don’t know whether I stay sane in this hellscape of a world that we live in but I’m certainly gifted with a naturally sunny disposition and the one thought that keeps me going is this (even if it’s delusion in the eyes of other people by the way!): “I was brought here to make a difference.”
There’s a lovely quote by Rumi that I’m fond of that goes: “If everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light.” And I think it’s a wonderful and true sentiment that I carry around with me everywhere I go.
Despite the suffering and horror around, why shouldn’t I try to bring a smile to people’s faces? Why shouldn’t I laugh and help where I can? I genuinely believe, with my heart of hearts, that human nature is good, that people are intrinsically altruistic and want to help.
So if that’s the case, why are we in hell? (And this is where I lose a lot of people.) Because the Chief Commander is in charge of this realm and the chief commander goes by many names: Lucifer, Yaldabaoth the Demi-urge, the fallen angels, the Nephilim, etc. We are trapped within structures that incentivize negative behaviors because that’s the nature of this realm! We come here to learn how to navigate limitation, to learn how to live despite insurmountable obstacles being placed in our way.
And, fundamentally, as you rightly claim in the article, we are here to navigate between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of nihilism to chart a course towards the hopeful seas of protopia, by engaging in wise activism.
I believe that’s what it’s all about and that’s what keeps me (ever so slightly) sane in this insane world.
Well, first of all, a great deal of our personalities are determined by our genetic makeup, not with what we believe about the world. So you can thank fate (or God, or random chance) for a large part your cheerful disposition. But as regards our view of the world, I think it’s just as possible to conclude the world is miraculous and wonderful as it is callous and cruel. My own view (which tends towards the former) comes from recognizing how unlikely my own existence is. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago, life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, Homo sapiens a couple hundred thousand years ago, and then a shitload of generations and evolutionary changes to produce one homo sapien (me) writing an electronic note to another homo sapien (you) about how to live rightly in the world. Kind of blows one’s mind, I think.
In short, it’s a miracle that we even exist at all and have the opportunity to contemplate our world and our future. So that’s one source of my own optimism. I’ll just add that, as a recovering addict, I have the advantage of realizing how harmful it can be to dwell too much in the past or the future. In recovery we learn to focus on the present and deal what what’s right in front of us. So, although I enjoy your speculation about the future, I think your most valuable contributions are what you observe and write about our current moment.
Thank you for this wonderful essay...It comes just at the perfect time for me, as I was perilously close to a concrete like despair that impeded all activism...Your 2nd aphorism resonates the best for me, "I don't believe in hope, but I do believe in duty"...With gratitude, I will keep on keeping on...
If I were asked what strategies I employ to stay sane in this moment, I would point to my unshakeable belief in the evolution of a natural (as against artificial) consciousness at least as superior to the consciousness of homo sapiens than the latter is to that of the next primate. But what has this to do with all those horrors?
Imagining that you alone exist, and that you are all-powerful and all-knowing — you can create any world you like, and you can know anything about any world you have created. Now ask yourself: Could you have the joy of winning a victory? The joy of overcoming a challenge, a difficulty, an obstacle, an opposition? Could you experience the delight we experience at a discovery? Or simply the pleasure of a pleasant surprise? You could not. To make all of this possible, you need to impose limitations on your omnipotence and your omniscience.
Whenever you create a world, you do this by entering into relations with yourself. You can’t have the multiplicity of a world without becoming many, and you can’t become many without entering into relations with yourself. In your original status, you are conscious of being each of the many beings you have created by entering into relations with yourself, and you experience the world you have created from the perspectives of all these beings. But presently you want to experience the aforementioned joys. And since you do nothing in half measures, what you do is you turn yourself inside out, completely and without reservations. All your self-relations, instead of being internal to yourself, are now external to yourself.
When your self-relations are internal to yourself, you are directly conscious of them, just as you are of your identity with the many beings between which they obtain. When your self-relations are external to yourself, you are locked up as it were, Houdini-like, in each of these beings. You are conscious of nothing except, perhaps, a mysterious urge to recover, eventually, your omnipotence and omniscience. The only relations in existence are then the spatial relations that obtain between an apparent multiplicity of relata, which physicists often describe as the “ultimate constituents of matter.” By involving yourself and your powers into a multitude of particles, you have set the stage for your adventure of evolution.
Grab the popcorn and enjoy the show, or join the fight for an amazing future.
For more: https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/ignorance-a-bug-or-a-feature
This was pretty poignant since I just spent the day at a Baha'i conference, who are pretty much the most hopeful and optimistic religious group you'll ever meet. Their whole religion is about hope, as are all religions when you look at their poetry and core teachings instead of the way they tend to be practiced.
Since making myself believe in the supernatural is impossible, and techno-optimism is only slightly more grounded in reality, I've resorted to developing a sense of "rational omnibenevolence" using a pantheistic definition of god in order to get the psychological benefits that come with the belief that "god is good" without the need for supernatural pretenses that cause cognitive dissonance. This is one of the main topics I write about in my Substack.
https://fractalguy.substack.com/p/the-god-concept
The UPenn Positive Psychology department developed a theory called "Primal World Beliefs" that provides an empirical framework for understanding how and why this works.
https://fractalguy.substack.com/p/primal-world-beliefs
Their website outlines the theory and has a great survey you can take that measures how "good" you think the universe is according to 26 different metrics.
https://myprimals.com
Activism is great and it definitely helps to feel like you are at least helping move humanity in the right direction. But, cultivating the "good world belief" is the best way to have hope and happiness. Every religion will tell you that. If you look at the long arc of history in a "Stephen Pinker before he went anti-woke" kind of way, you can still see this as one of the best times to be alive. With just a few tweaks in the right places, we can get it back on track. We're not as far gone as things appear.
I didn’t know about your personal experience although I have enjoyed your work. You may… like (?)/find commonality in this very beautiful and sad documentary about the documentary-maker’s experience of being ghosted by her husband: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0834084 - it is unthinkable that people are actually capable of this but it seems some of them definitely are
Looks like that link is broken but it’s on Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/mZoADgehjrCraQPhq5