I'm not doing too well comrades. I think I'm becoming an alcoholic to cope. I can go into the details if you want. There's no meaning to life, we suffer then we die and our consciousness is extinguished forever.
Any books you'd recommend to help with this? I like to read
Seconding the Myth of Sisyphus, but also Camus' other works like The Fall and and The Stranger, and The Plague.
For something a little bit lighter, I like Slaughterhouse-V or Catch-22, basically anything that explores the inherent absurdity of human existence.
My own existential crisis back in the day hinged in large part on the failure of metaphysicalism realism to enunciate a coherent, intelligible picture of the way the world actually works, so if that's the case with you you might also look at (neo)pragmatist and instrumentalist philosophies. When you let go of the notion that things should make sense, their failure to loses a lot of bite.
Do you have any recommended works of neo-pragmastist and instrumentalist philosophy? I'm unfamiliar with those areas of philosophy.
I'm deeply ambivalent about Kuhn and Feyerabend, but I enjoy a Lakatos.
Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is really good, although he'll get a ton of flack for being a liberal idealist round these parts, though mostly from people who haven't read him I imagine.
I also really like Feyerabend, but I wouldn't place him in either group directly, although there is a strong current of pragmatism that underlies Against Method and Conquest of Abundance.
Basically, if you're looking at following my direct path, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what I read first and the more radical readings of that lead very quickly to an abandonment of any sort of realist framework, from which Rorty and Feyerabend are good jumping off points.
Dewey was also a prolific writer who coined instrumentalism and had a ton of good (if liberal) takes on education and politics, but he had so much good stuff I don't even know if the top of my head were I'd start with him.