A gorillas existential crisis

On contrast & depression

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If you wish to feel comfortable, you should first seek discomfort.

If at all it could be said that there is a key to life, it is on simple thing: Contrast.

Contrast is the only way we can have good things, so we must endure the bad.

But what is most painful about depression is not the contrast between your worst and best days, it’s the indifference that is torturous. A prolonged indifference that can go on for days, weeks, months and even years. Or rather it is an indifference to the good things, the silver linings, the comforts. A sense of pointlessness overwhelming the senses.

Contrast is like oxygen to a stable ‘happy’ mind. But what if your brain just isn’t responding to that oxygen? What if, for prolonged periods of time the only contrast you have are in the different hues of bleak dreary, blacks and greys?

Yes it’s true that even bouts of depression don’t last forever, but it feels like forever. And they bouts last long past their due.

God is another noun for nature

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The absurdity of existence can’t be escaped. Whether a person believes in god, the Big Bang, a mixture of the two, or believes we were brought here by aliens, whatever you believe there is one thing we can surely all agree on, our existence is absurd.

Doesnt matter which way you paint it, it’s fucking absurd. I mean think about it. Either this is one big ‘accident’  or some ‘god’ created the earth and us. Aren’t both versions absaloutely, incredibly insane, when you really think about it?  And when I say insane, I don’t mean that both are wrong, but that if any of them are right it’s just…. absurd!

I’m more inclined to believing that this existence is random, that no conscious being has created us. That God is just a noun for nature, rather than some conscious being. So yes god is omnipotent, god is indeed everywhere at once.

You know how you humans often anthropomorphise animals? (I’m a gorilla. No the irony is not lost on me) That is essentially what this idea of god is, it’s an anthromorphized view of the entire world. It’s an anthromorphised explanation for natural events.

I like anthropomorphism, I enjoy engaging in it. But then I recognise this is just me projecting my own gorillamanity onto the other animals

Trying not to give a fuck

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Here is Mark Mansons article on not giving a fuck

Mark Manson apprently doesn’t give fucks, or rather has a fuck account and never spends more fucks than he has or is needed. I’ve spent so many fucks, you’d think i’d be in debt with no fucks left to give. But it seems unlike my bank account for money, the more fucks I give the more fucks I get….. Huh?  It seems the secret with fuck accounts, unlike bank accounts is to try to have less fucks, rather than gaining more fucks.

So the more fucks you have, the poorer you are. So have an account with few fucks but use those few fucks wisely. I’m guessing a fuck account with zero fucks, would be bad. Indifferent. I kind of wish i could be indifferent though. I want zero fucks in my account.

Fuck yea I want zero fucks. But now I give too much of a fuck about getting my fuck account to zero….

Ah fuck.

 

friday thoughts: on language

MattLeave a comment

Language is a virus.

Or healthy bacteria? Maybe.

Language can enslave you.

You could say writers are enslaved by language

or maybe language is a slave to us?

Language enslaves those who don’t try to control the narrative, perhaps

or perhaps writers are the biggest language slaves of them all.

 

it shouldn’t be understated that we need language, the kind I’m writing in now.

But does it compliment our body language

no. It seems it often contradicts it

unless we programme our minds to be in sync with our body language, somehow.

language and programming.

Programming is for language, or language is for programming?

 

consider a deaf blind man, his language is tactile

for its all he has, or maybe he’s freer for it

that isn’t to say I wish to be blind and deaf

god no, I can only salute those women and men

for I could never be without those senses

I dread to think

but I do consider that maybe in some ways

they’re freer than us

for they are programmed via tactile senses

and have you ever felt the grass under bare feet?

With all other senses awakened, this pleasure is surely dampened

 

 

The human tendency to extremes

MattLeave a comment

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It seems humans believe one of two things about human life, either

1. Humans are insignificant

2. Humans are the most significant species.

these can be framed in different arguments.

Humans are insignificant is an undervaluing of themselves as a species. They think it makes them sound ‘modest’ or ironically ‘enlightened’ ironic because to believe you’re enlightened is to believe your superior to everyone else therefore you sort of crown yourself as the significant one, it’s everyone else who is insignificant for noticing how insignificant they are.

Humans are the ‘more evolved’ (people who say ‘more evolved’ don’t understand evolutuion.) There is no ‘more evolved’ since this implies an eventual ‘perfect’ species. Evolution isn’t quite like those pictures of apes forming into humans in a row. Evolution doesn’t happen in step by step process quite like that, though the images are good at showing the similiarities and the gradual changes between one particular species into another. Anyway I digress,  to say Humans are the ‘more evolved’ or the most significant species is overvaluing humans as a species.

Both points of view seem to have difficulty seeing us as within the natural cycle itself. The insignificant line of thinking, that we don’t have much or any impact on the world, implied with this is that nature itself happens around us and we’re not a part of it. “That thing out there, thats natural forces, nothing to do with humans”

And to see us as the most significant species, erases the fact we act within nature and while we do have some impact on the world so does everything else in it, we have some significance but we’re not the most significant. We are within nature, not outside of nature. We don’t build outside of nature, we build within nature for better or for worse. but so do other animals.

We have significance in that we have great numbers of us and we’re multiplying, meaning we build more homes, cause more construction and with that destruction aswell.

Both points of view are a bit wrong and a bit right.

Humanity as a whole is significant, not in the sense that humans are important in a superior sense. We’re simply important in the life cycle and ecosystem that exists today. That doesn’t make us some brilliant magnificent species, it makes us the same as other species in that we simply play a role in the ecosystem. We can debate till the cows come home what is superior in the sense of which species can the most, which species has the best talent or whatever else you want to quanitfy. But all that aside we are simply like the other animals, we are fullfilling a role in the ecosystem.

You your individual self? You are insignificant. You as an individual would only become significant if the human race began to decline so much so that not many people were left and you were one of the very few left.

It is not humans that are insignificant, it is yourself.

Gorilla asks questions #8

MattLeave a comment

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If God exists because the world needed a creator, because nothing can come from nothing, then who or what created God?

And if God just ‘always was’ then doesn’t that contradict the above argument?

And if God was created by something then who created that something?

What if we can’t conceive of nothing, because there is no nothing? Or is there nothing and we’re not even something?

or is God nothing?

What?

 

Gorilla thinks about humans

MattLeave a comment

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Humans don’t always treat other animals too well, and they most certainly don’t always treat other humans too well.

But consider, if you saw an anomaly in another animal that rarely would you judge it and damn it to hell. You may think the animal is filthy, you may think they’re ugly, but you wouldn’t judge it as harshly as you would if it was a human. You’d just say that he or she is ‘one of a kind’ he or she is a ‘rarity’ in this species. But you won’t necessarily afford the same acceptance to another human with a similar or the same anomaly.

Ponder that for a moment.

It’s not just other non-human animals that you can learn from, you can also learn from how you treat animals.

There is a reason psychopaths commonly abuse animals. The care for no living thing on this planet, human or otherwise.

In religion you haven’t found modesty, you’ve found a pedestal.