When BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) said "you can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it ok. you need to be better" and "all we have are the connections we make" and "I really should've thought about the view from halfway down" and "sometimes you have to take responsibility for your own happiness" and "you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, you turn yourself around, THAT'S what it's all about" and "things have to get worse before they can get better" and "in real life, the big gesture isn't enough, you need to be consistent" and "if we hadn't met each other until now, we wouldn't be the people we are now" and, my personal favourite, "every day it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it every day, that's the hard part, but it does get easier".
Idk, oppression just makes a lot more sense when you start looking at them from an evolutionary perspective
"Why does racism exist?" People prioritize their genetics, skin color is one of the easiest ways to recognize a difference in genetics.
"Why do people torture small animals?" It reminds them of hunting instinct, a reminder that their genetics are good.
"Why does homophobia exist?" A non-reproducing member can be a burden to your future genetics.
"Why do men hate women?" Patriarchy is an incredibly efficient method of spreading the male genome.
"Why are disabled people hated?" Because they are seen as a genetic hindrance to the group.
I don't think people like to think about things like this because we've shunned the idea that humans are biological for so, so long. There must always be some principled, rational reason why the oppressor would act this way, they say to themselves. We've invented entire religions, ideologies, schools of thought, cultures, all around the concept that we are separate from the nucleic acid in our cells. But it's all a massive cope to the fact.
So long as people continue to wallow around in their books and pages of 'theories' on why oppression exists, it will continue to exist. So long as people attempt to protest oppression on a basis of ideology, it will continue to exist. Activism in the traditional sense is largely worthless unless the environment is already favorable for change. Otherwise you are fighting an uphill battle.
The only hope is to attempt to make our biology irrelevant. Somewhat ironic I guess, as that's what we've been trying to do for the past hundred thousand years. But this time we actually have a little bit of hope.
There's a reason that so many civil rights and social justice movements came after the industrial revolution. Technology can negate biology, at least by a little bit. It's worth trying at least, to continue to advance and advance in hopes that there's a small chance that we could escape it all, at least for a while.
Or maybe we'll fuck up and create a trillion machines that can suffer or whatever, who knows.
You can't stop evil because at a fundamental level we need material resources and it is far more efficient to get it from others than it is to get it ourselves. The basis of suffering and oppression is based in the functioning of the unequal distribution of matter and energy and the fact that we are omnivorous heterotrophs. Male evil adds another layer of evil because they are both viruses and omnivores and trying to fix one into being good is like trying to find a way to build a bike using a nuclear bomb. It just doesn't make logical sense because they are built for exploitation and destruction.
I am deeply wounded by my birth and not all that impressed with the medicine.
I cannot understand the miracle of creation. Everything escapes me. Animal kind has been entranced by a demonic incantation and it possesses mothers to bring a little child to a place where unforgivable things happen to little children all the time and everywhere. Are the rainbows and puppies and whatever beautiful things life has to offer SO fucking important that a new pair of eyes had to be CREATED to goggle at them? With the risk that unspeakable acts of violence and degradation will be enacted upon them?
Should have hanged myself with the umbilical cord. If only I had known. For the bliss of never-being, I would have traded everything. But I couldn't save myself from being pulled into this putrid place. Not a soul has that power.
Why did I have to wake up now? I have only one life. One body. What made my family think "now is the time"?
They saw a planet swarming with cancer and pedophiles, and thought "eh, good enough". They saw the thralls of the working class cry out their parts in this death rattle orchestra, and thought "what more could our child possibly want?" They saw our bodies slowly but surely betraying us, crumbling apart in thousand little deaths, until the day the loss of internal equilibrium does one in and yields up all hope and meaning, and thought "yes, those are quite fit to house our child". Because apparently I am the most 'precious thing in the universe' yet not precious enough to deserve better - not precious enough to be spared from the horrors of a universe that cares for me none.
I am stranded in the middle of a stygian ocean. My ship is sinking. Blackness reaches out, in all directions, as far as the eye can see, into the endless sky without stars, into the restless waves of the dark waters, and beyond to infinity. Maybe, behind the horizon, beyond where my ship can carry me, there is an island where no child has to bleed. Place where no one's fullness is depended on someone else's emptiness. But I will never get to know.
life is so tedious. everything that’s good for you either sucks, needs constant repetition and takes up way too much time in your day, meanwhile everything that’s nice and comfy slowly kills your health and body. you will stink if you don’t shower, you need to go to the toilet repeatedly throughout the day, make sure to brush your teeth thoroughly morning and night - plus the flossing otherwise you might develop periodontal disease!, you need all these nutrients and it’s gonna be absorbed into the body best through food, but wait a minute, don’t eat too many calories or you will gain fat, don’t eat too much fat or you might give yourself heart issues, don’t eat too many carbs if you don’t wanna be bloated, are you getting enough protein? oh no? well lemme make sure you lose muscle mass, and that’s eventually gonna affect your bone density, are you getting enough water? good, now go piss AGAIN, sleep sleep sleep oh wonderful sleep but never possible when i want it the most, junk food and staying up way late is nice but it worsens your brain and organ health, oh you hate socialising? too had, you know being social is a good way to prevent dementia! i could go on.
i’m so tired of it all. how anyone could be as wretchedly selfish as to doom another person to such existence just because you want to experience the “joys of parenthood”. go fuck yourself. life is a curse, a constant job that people need to keep up with outside the job the earns them an actual living. what a piece of shit existence.
the issue with growing up in the 2000s and 2010s was like there was this really big push toward "accepting your weirdness" overall but they meant like idk wearing mismatched socks or something not being tangibly beyond the norm in any way shape or form
also I don't think parents "these days" are uniquely terrible, I just think neglect is showing up in new ways as technology progresses. today's ipad kid would've been wandering around in a ditch alone all day and night before. parents not wanting to have to deal with children is not a new phenomenon.
The prevention of suffering is meaningless. Even if you don't believe the universe is infinite, you know that time is. Life will always exist again and the couple hundred fruit flies you stopped from existing in this iteration won't even make a mark compared to the suffering that's to come. Focus on yourself. You have no obligation to others.
I agree with the general statement but I don't think that it's completely worthless to help. Humans (and other animals) are not evolved to look at problems at a grand universal scale. But we do, and our brains are big enough to realize the cosmic horror of it all. I don't believe that any obligation exists for anyone, that's just religious talk. But I think it's a decently wise use of time to at least try to better the conditions of a few animals, human or not. If nothing else we do truly matters then why not make the choice to better others' lives, at least for a short time?
I think we’re using “matters” in different ways. I’m trying to talk about objective value, not subjective preference. By objective value, I mean value that exists independently of anyone’s feelings, instincts, desires, social rules, or personal values. I’m not denying that people can subjectively value helping others.
To answer your question "if nothing we do matters why not use that time to do better?" The answer is in the question, because it doesn't matter. Which makes it equally as valid to help as it is to do nothing or even hurt. Me? I don't live my life based on objective values. I don't think anyone does. I subjectively value my happiness, others happiness, suffering reduction, all to varying arbitrary degrees. I will help others because it makes me and them feel good but I think that thinking it "matters" (has objective value) isn't correct.
When I think about dying, everyone who had memories of me dying, the internet losing all records of me, the Sun exploding, the Earth being vaporized, the universe dying and restarting or whatever happens billions of years from now. I can't see how me being nice to people was an objectively wise use of time. It would just depend on what I valued.
If I valued experiencing as much as possible before death, then I might think trying to fuck a dolphin was a wise use of my time. But in the end, it's all erased, as if it essentially never happened.
I'm having trouble thinking.im writing too much.
I don’t know if I can prove that erasure makes something meaningless. I think what I really believe is that objective meaning would require permanence or some final cosmic significance. Since everything human beings do is temporary and eventually erased, I don’t see how anything we do can objectively matter. But I recognize that this depends on defining “mattering” in terms of permanence, and I’m not sure I can prove that definition.
The prevention of suffering is meaningless. Even if you don't believe the universe is infinite, you know that time is. Life will always exist again and the couple hundred fruit flies you stopped from existing in this iteration won't even make a mark compared to the suffering that's to come. Focus on yourself. You have no obligation to others.
I wish I could be your friend but I hate myself and I don't think I can control my mental state as much as I thought. I was doing great, fighting, but now I'm doing bad. Looking for comfort and reassurance. Every relationship is transactional, I need so much, and I have nothing to give you. I'm insecure, I'd be scared you were going to leave. You can't help what you want, you could pretend for a bit but it'd all come to the surface eventually and you'd confirm what I already knew. Too much. Too sad. Too boring. Life is too scary sometimes and idk what the fuck I'm doing. Don't fall for this. I'm lonely but I don't want to talk to you.
i do wish someone would love me or like me for me rather than my ability to go along with them, idek what that means but i wish i was loved
Oh dear, I feel ya.
Sorry I'm gonna go off on a tangent...
The web of social interactions is so exhausting to navigate and honestly completely incomprehensible at times. I don't want to emotionally invest in something so ephemeral and illusory.
I feel, there is this ravine impossible to close, between me and others, and between everyone. I wish I could reach the other side, so I could touch someone's inner most being and share with them a true love beyond bargains and performances. I want to merge souls basically lol.
But what would such a thing even look like?
Is there something beyond the transactions, or are we really just nothing more than bargains and performances?
I don't want to be loved if it means being put on trial. For someone to mentally scale all the times I have been annoying and boring against the times I have brought pleasure? Ew!
And all those times I did something kind or funny or embarrassing, and all those stupid things I've said…were they really me? Who is she? What is that thing? "Gah, I didn't truly mean any of the things I said! Can you forget everything about me so we can start all over?" I feel like every day I try to be myself and I'm doing a really bad job. Like my true self cannot be communicated because it doesn't translate to words or actions. To coagulate phantom shadows into something tangible…something that can be loved…something is always lost in the process. Maybe that phantom doesn't even exist. I can never truly be known.
This is insanely embarrassing but sometimes I daydream about being courted by a vampire, who'd love me for my blood forever and always, and I could just sit back and relax - never having to worry about performing ever again.
Is true love possible? Maybe it is! Who the hell knows!
I hope you find what you are seeking for, dear stranger <3
Maybe my most deranged post yet. Grab the popcorn.
I'm going fucking insane.
Why prolong the end of the world?
No, seriously, can someone tell me what is the point of all this?
People cry about the declining insect populations and how sad it is that they don't hear thousands of flies exploding to death against their car windshields anymore.
Why do they cry? What is so sad about extinction?
Is extinction sad for the animals? Certainly not. I doubt bug angels are weeping in bug purgatory that they never got to be splattered.
Did you know spiders inject their prey with enzymes that break down the tissues and then slurp up the dissolved innards? Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be a bug? To be digested alive? Have you ever even given it a thought?
Do bugs suffer? Of course they do. The very notion that they have no subjective experience of pain, because they have different brain structures from us, is suspect because - as stated by Asher A. Soryl, Andrew J. Moore, Philip J. Seddon & Mike R. King - accepting that sentience is an evolved trait resulting from the same selective pressures that drive the evolution of other trait within an organism, it is not clear that multiple configurations of neurons could not perform the same functions in relation to mental states in other animals. Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) state: The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those found in vertebrates. Exclusion of invertebrates with central nervous systems from bioethics and science policy is not justified by the current state of the evidence. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. Invertebrate brains comprise upwards of 99% of the brains that exist on Earth. Cognitive theorists have begun to appreciate the intellectual rewards of studying invertebrate cognition and sentience. It is time that ethicists and policy makers do the same. According to Asher Soryl - Ph.D candidate researching the proposed discipline Welfare Biology at the University of Otago Bioethics Centre - even if we assume that there is only a 0.01 likelihood that terrestrial arthropods have a mental welfare, and if they do, that their moral standing is only 0.01 compared to the full moral standing of a regular mammal or bird the case for considering terrestrial arthropods is upwards of ten thousand times more than the case for considering mammals and birds. Snoozing on the pressing questions regarding their welfare is a recipe for moral catastrophe.
And it's not just bugs; It's the rodents and the fowl and the fish and the amphibians and the reptiles. The overwhelming majority of the animals of the overwhelming majority of species appear to have significant suffering but little (or no) happiness in their lives. They live painful lives and die painful deaths. Atlantic cod can lay from a few thousand to several million eggs. It entails that each time these animals reproduce, 6337.7529 years consisting of nothing but suffering is experienced. If this continues over an average human lifespan, the number of years of pure suffering generated would be 380,265.174. All this for a very specific species in a very specific area. And the rest of animal kind ain't much better. All animals reproduce in excess of the carrying capacity of their environments. Even the 'luckiest one', let's say, a wildebeest - who wasn't spawn camped by a cackle of hyenas while still inside the amniotic sac - doesn't have much to celebrate. Did you know predators often start to eat their prey from genital and anal regions? Like yea he got eaten alive balls first (maybe don't click this one), but at least he got to like. eat grass. yippee.
It's a fucking Ragnarök out there.
Life is mostly dying. Torturous dying. Why should such lives be lived? They should not. If a human baby would know such a short and painful life, we would abort the thing before they draw their first breath. Flush the slink down the toilet and say "it is only merciful". I'm telling you all, the whole animal kingdom is deserving of mercy. Why should anyone be condemned to live a life of absurd torment? Because it's the life they are expected to have? But what justification is there in thinking, that the life a creature is expected to have is therefore good by default? Could it not be, that a creature kind has been cursed with life that is wholly wretched? Nature is nothing but a mechanism that pushes genes into the future; there is no reason to believe that the lives a blind and mindless mechanism produces are automatically worth living.
People claim that reducing wild animal suffering is not possible, but plausible estimate is that the average person on Earth prevents ~1.4 * 10^7 insect-years by their environmental impact each year. So we already have. By accident.
Is nature good? If a system isn't good for those who live within it, then who is it good for? Who are you fighting for?
Yes no shit we need nature to maintain mankind. But doesn't it seem absurd to anyone, that quintillion sentient creatures should live in perpetual cloning-shredding-machine, for the sake of these ridiculous apes, who good portion of the time, use those natural resources only to spread further misery amongst themselves? There are approximately 1.4 billion insects for every person on Earth. And the average human lumbering about isn't even all that happy. I wake up 6:30 and prepare myself for servitude for our bourgeois overlords. I take a shower and wash away the sweat and bacterial gunk culminated all over my decaying body, thinking thoughts that lead to nowhere. And when I brush my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and see pair of dead eyes staring, how could I seriously think that my vapid existence is worth all the torture it takes to maintain it? How could anyone? I already talked about how life itself is the Omelas, except way worse; billions of children tortured to death in filth and in darkness for every fuckass Bob.
Is anyone else disturbed by this? No? Just me? Ok.
What is the solution? IS there a solution?
Tumblrinas out here hallucinating the revolution is happening soon - that people will overthrow capitalism and establish some solarpunk hippie commune where people live "in harmony with nature" aww! Reblogging some shit like "maybe a system where for some thrive, many have to suffer is a bad system". What do you girlies think nature IS? Mother nature is a cruel bitch that feeds itself by cannibalizing its weakest babies. I can't stand this pseudo-spiritual hippie wankerism. If even the best world people can come up with (already propaganda by the Big Cheery) only benefits 0.0000001% of it's inhabitants, then a better world is not possible.
Quality of the experiences of sentient creatures is the only coherent reason to care about life, Earth or anything at all. "Nature lovers" say they care about earthlings. If you really cared about earthlings, you'd nuke the world and then nuke it some more.
worst part of being an adult is how often youre forced to nag. you Have to be annoying or youre never getting anything done. which is unfortunate considering how common it is to teach kids to never nag and be annoying ever
a professional i am paying money doesnt show up w zero communication and IM the one who has to feel guilty for having to call him and ask whats going on. because when i was a little kid i would get yelled at for nagging. joke world
nikki breaks my heart so bad because in the brief moments we see her before the wish kicks in, she's so cool and funny, clearly kindhearted, very driven about her future (telling bear about how she was going to quit her job to focus on her writing), and also very sure of herself as a person. ive seen people describe this movie as "mean-spirited" and I think thats so apt because it was a 2 hour long tragedy of the torture of this innocent girl, taking away everything she's ever had, including her own sense of self, putting her through unimaginable horrors, and leaving her with nothing except the three dead bodies of her friends, with the one who she trusted most being the one who did this to her. nothing for her to look for hope in, because she has nothing before her except a lifetime in prison or in an institution. it would be one thing if the movie ended on a note like weapons, where everything was over and there would hopefully be recovery somewhere down the line, but here, not only was the evil not committed by a random stranger but her closest friend, but she doesn't get any chance at recovery either. so goddamn tragic. on that note, if anyone can come up with some sort of fix-it for nikki please link it to me because I will be crying about this girl forever.
