Focus on what is good, what is right. Focus on what you love, what links your "self" with others and with the world. This will make you feel better, whereas trying to simply gratify your Self will make you feel empty. Many religions understand this and retain an emphasis against self-focus.
Liberalism gets us to chase after the embellishment of our individualized identity. This is a trap. The universe is made up of things coming together and cooperating to form a higher or more complex level of being. The tendency toward each other is an eternal truth. This is why communism will win.
I hope you're understanding that the closer you look at "I" and "me", the harder it is to make sense of these things. The self is one of many things where the closer you peer at it, the hazier the concept becomes, and you can only define it easily with a simplistic, almost childlike understanding of it. Much like "happiness", "peace", or "leadership".
Most of what you've described is maybe half of an existential crisis I had not too long ago. I won't share the other half. But I am very much at peace with the idea that I am part of a massive continuity, and that just as my individual neurons are part of the consciousness that my brain has, so too am I part of something bigger.
It's uncomfortable that we require time to experience things, yet time alters us. Time itself involves all kinds of paradoxes. My best answer to it is that rather than death being a sleep, instead life is analogous to a dream. Sorta like the Dreamtime concept that Aborigines have.
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There is somewhat of a solution, but it involves dismantling your concept of self and individuality.
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Focus on what is good, what is right. Focus on what you love, what links your "self" with others and with the world. This will make you feel better, whereas trying to simply gratify your Self will make you feel empty. Many religions understand this and retain an emphasis against self-focus.
Liberalism gets us to chase after the embellishment of our individualized identity. This is a trap. The universe is made up of things coming together and cooperating to form a higher or more complex level of being. The tendency toward each other is an eternal truth. This is why communism will win.
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I hope you're understanding that the closer you look at "I" and "me", the harder it is to make sense of these things. The self is one of many things where the closer you peer at it, the hazier the concept becomes, and you can only define it easily with a simplistic, almost childlike understanding of it. Much like "happiness", "peace", or "leadership".
Most of what you've described is maybe half of an existential crisis I had not too long ago. I won't share the other half. But I am very much at peace with the idea that I am part of a massive continuity, and that just as my individual neurons are part of the consciousness that my brain has, so too am I part of something bigger.
It's uncomfortable that we require time to experience things, yet time alters us. Time itself involves all kinds of paradoxes. My best answer to it is that rather than death being a sleep, instead life is analogous to a dream. Sorta like the Dreamtime concept that Aborigines have.
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jokes on you. I have anxiety and because of that, I already spent hours this week angsting over this exact philosophical quandary.
(warning people is cool tho, jokes aside.)
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