What is Life

Life is a stage of death in many levels of mind

But it doesn't matter

But what is matter

What is

What

Just read Sartre’s “Nausea” and I absolutely loved it. The story and characters aren’t particularly captivating, but I have never read a book that evokes such a specific emotional and existential reaction.

Does anyone else relate to the feeling of wanting to experience the ‘nausea’? As in you want to be able to feel time as it truly is and not as a distorted concept thought of in restrospect. The narrator experienced existence as it really is and not just how day-to-day life and habit presents existence. Idk it just made me wierdly envious

Anyone have any recs for other narrative novels that evoke such a visceral and interesting feeling? I’m just getting into existentialist literature and I’ve also enjoyed Stoner, The Stranger, and The Fall, but none as much as “Nausea”.

Where do your thoughts reside when they have been neither acted upon nor expressed? Where is the unexecuted stored: the unwritten, the unspoken, the merely contemplated?

Why is it so uncomfortable to carry these unrealized thoughts within us? Could this discomfort be related to the [Zeigarnik effect ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect?wprov=sfla1)and the [Ovsiankina effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect?wprov=sfla1): our tendency to remember interrupted tasks and to return to unfinished ones?

Perhaps we can only truly understand what we have thought by externalizing it to some degree. A thought that remains entirely internal may stay strangely indeterminate, never fully becoming an object even for its own thinker.

In this sense, Podkolyosin in Gogol's Marriage may not be fleeing from the bride at all. Perhaps he is simply unable to resist testing, through action, the sudden idea of escape that has appeared in his mind.

But why should unfinished thoughts exert such pressure?

Could this be an inherited remnant of primordial gathering strategies? A gatherer needed free hands in order to continue gathering. If the hands remained occupied, their ability to acquire new resources would be partially paralyzed, reducing their chances of survival.

Perhaps unfinished intentions occupy our cognitive "hands" in a similar way. Unperformed thoughts, unrealized decisions, unexpressed words all continue to demand mental resources, making us feel burdened not because they are important in themselves, but because they reduce our capacity to gather something new.

Maybe the discomfort of incompleteness is not merely psychological. Perhaps it is the echo of an ancient adaptive mechanism: before picking up something new, one first had to free one's hands.

Why is Camus' essay collection called Nuptials? I've never understood the title.

I recently found myself in the same predicament as Sylvia Plath's character in The Bell Jar. I was determined to find a way out and wrote this essay exploring how existentialism provides a promising response.

Been swept away by Sartre's philosophy the last few weeks. I'm trying to find holes in his idea of radical freedom and creating our own meaning. Every rebuttal to it essentially reduces to bad faith arguments. Am I missing something?

Currently reading this book and it brings up existentialism and I love how detailed it is about speech from real scenarios.

Does anyone else read books like this?

Human beings are born into a state they did not choose and are condemned for a crime they did not commit.

This reminds me of Sartre's idea that we are "condemned to be free" — thrown into existence without our consent, yet held fully responsible for who we become.

Have you ever felt like you were paying for something you never did?

Je viens de publier un article détaillé à ce sujet, intitulé La tyrannie de l'eidos et du chiffre, où je retrace la généalogie de ce qu'on pourrait appeler "la formalisation du monde" — cette volonté très ancienne de détacher la forme de la matière pour rendre le monde calculable et prévisible. 

Voici le cœur de ma réflexion que j'aimerais soumettre à vos regards existentialistes :

L'essor de l'IA et de la virtualisation n'est pas tant une victoire du matérialisme, mais plutôt l'aboutissement d'un idéalisme formaliste qui remonte à Platon (la supériorité des Idées pures sur le monde sensible) et à Descartes (la réduction du monde à des équations).

Mais ce qui me frappe d'un point de vue purement existentialiste et phénoménologique, c'est la dimension "anesthésique" de cette transition : nous utilisons le langage, la mise en récit et aujourd'hui les algorithmes comme des boucliers contre le chaos, la douleur et la vulnérabilité de notre incarnation physique (ce que Husserl et Merleau-Ponty appellent le Leib ou le corps propre). 

• L'étiquetage affectif (affect labeling) : Les neurosciences montrent que poser un mot sur une émotion (dire "je suis en colère") calme instantanément l'activité de l'amygdale. C'est une sorte de "morphine linguistique" : en conceptualisant notre vécu, nous nous coupons de l'intensité brute et douloureuse de notre chair pour trouver refuge dans le confort du langage.
• L'IA comme platonisme ultime : En déléguant nos décisions, nos rencontres, nos trajets et même nos pensées à des algorithmes, nous choisissons le confort stérile de la simulation plutôt que la vulnérabilité créatrice et parfois douloureuse de notre présence au monde.

En gros, pour fuir l'angoisse de l'informe et de la souffrance humaine, nous transformons notre existence en une syntaxe universelle et optimisée. Nous préférons ne plus souffrir, quitte à ne plus être tout à fait vivants (incarnés).

D'où mes questions pour la communauté :

1. Est-ce que l'optimisation technologique et l'IA ne sont pas la forme ultime de la "mauvaise foi" sartrienne ?En nous objectivant à travers des profils, des scores et des flux algorithmiques, ne fuyons-nous pas l'angoisse de notre liberté absolue et de notre contingence ?
2. Comment préserver ce "reste non formalisable" (notre intuition, notre douleur brute, notre présence charnelle) dans une société qui exige constamment que tout soit numérisé, étiqueté et optimisé ?
3. Peut-on encore vivre une existence "authentique" (au sens heideggerien ou sartrien) si notre premier réflexe face au vide ou à la souffrance est de nous réfugier derrière l'écran d'un modèle de langage ou d'une application ?

Pour ceux qui veulent creuser la généalogie historique de cette idée (de l'ontologie de Platon et la Kabbale jusqu'à la psycho-analyse de Lacan et Turing), vous pouvez lire mon analyse complète ici : La tyrannie de l'eidos et du chiffre.

Curieux d'avoir vos retours, notamment si vous avez des lectures phénoménologiques ou existentialistes à conseiller sur cette tension entre le virtuel (la forme pure) et la chair (le sensible) !

we were committed and made a choice
it was said this is how it should
we just loved the show, found ourselves in the haze

we were thrilled and joyous
it went as far as it could
we duplicated in many worlds, in so many ways

we hid ourselves behind our voice
it was perhaps solely for our own good
we were told to seek for perfection, strive for the praise

we were mesmerized by the noise
it was all forgotten as we thought it would
we were demythologized to be merely theologized, lost in the maze

there was no noise, to the dreamy eye
no eternal voice, nothing to imply
how to still be joyous, but to deeply deny
not here to make a choice, purely to ask why

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm trying to figure out whether I'm onto something or just reinventing an existing philosophical idea.

It started with existentialism. I kept thinking about how almost everything we do seems to come back to not knowing. We don't know who we are completely, we don't know why we're here, we don't know what consciousness is, we don't know what happens after death. Even science, philosophy, and mathematics seem to begin with someone looking at something and going, "What the hell is this?"

Most of the psychology I've read treats uncertainty as something we try to reduce, tolerate, or cope with.

But what if that's looking at it backwards?

What if uncertainty isn't the fundamental thing?

What if the more fundamental condition is that consciousness itself can never become complete?

By "incomplete," I don't mean we're ignorant or that we'll never learn anything. I mean that consciousness can never reach a final point where it fully understands itself or reality. Every answer creates new questions. Every discovery expands the horizon instead of closing it.

If that's true, then curiosity, science, philosophy, art, meaning-making—even our tendency to constantly reinterpret ourselves—aren't just reactions to missing information. They're natural expressions of a consciousness that is never finished.

I'm not saying this is true. I'm trying to figure out whether this is already a well-known position or whether there's something genuinely different here.

Does this overlap with any existing philosopher or psychological theory that I'm missing? And more importantly, where do you think this idea falls apart?

It connects to what existentialists call authentic choice. Sartre’s argument that dividing life into what’s expected and what’s meaningful, and treating that as a fixed tension, is itself a form of bad faith. She’s making a similar point from the inside of a lived life rather than from philosophy, that the division dissolves when you’re genuinely oriented toward something real.

Her argument: the question isn’t whether your job is meaningful in some grand sense. It’s whether you’re doing it from a place of inner direction and whether it relieves rather than adds to suffering in the world. She said she’s worked as a waitress, in a bakery, run major programmes and led institutional change. The practice is the same in all of it. You work on yourself to be more compassionate and then you find ways to bring that into whatever you’re doing.

I don’t know if I fully agree. The constraints on choosing meaning over security aren’t equally distributed and she had a lot of freedom in her choices that many people don’t. But the frame she offered, that the inner work is primary and the outer work follows from it, is at least worth examining. Curious whether people here think the choice is really false or whether that’s easier to say from the other side of having made it.

So.. about the whole „I am not my ego. I am not my thoughts. I am not my body. I am just the observer. There is no 'I'. I am the experience itself.“ - theory. Which is also often described as the universe experiencing itself.

I can’t wrap my mind about following: Why am „I“ in THIS exact body right now? How does this singular spark of experience „decide“ to be in this body at this specific time? I don’t believe in „deciding“ or free will, which makes it even harder for me to stop spiralling about it. When I was five years old, I asked my mother why I am who I am and how I know I'm not dreaming.
Also, if there is no such thing as time, and everything is happening everywhere all at once, I must have already been through an infinite amount of experiences. I just can't remember them because there is no such thing as memory outside of this body.
And following that thought: shouldn't this life I am experiencing right now already be forgotten? Why am I stuck in this specific life, at this exact time, out of all eternity?

Since we have a name for the word "nothing" does that give it existence on some platform? Is acknowledgement enough to give it existence? If so, will nothing never be nothing?

I've spent some time learning modern philosophy and trying to solve metaphysics in some way. Recently, I've been discussing the existence of God (I'm an atheist) with my Reddit friend and was involved in a kind of brainstorm state. So it has changed my view on skepticism and the art of making words from thoughts. As the essence of this change, I came up with some aphorisms (as I see them). They are much inspired by the style of Nietzsche's thinking and writing. I'd like you guys to critique and rate them one by one if you find them interesting. It'll help me a lot

Also, I must mention that I'm a Russian speaker, so there may be some mistakes in translation which will probably lead to "missounding" and losing some of the effect.

Life begins when every echo of a thought is followed by an exclamation mark!

Aphorisms that exclaim, affirm, lash. And at last, aphorisms that overflow — overflowing from souls full to the brim, brimming over with life.

1. A deity is, in truth, a convenient device for describing reality — mythical in origin. At their leisure, people sought to fulfill their drive toward rationalization through an existing cultural phenomenon: God. Now God is dead. The shadows, too, shall die!
   
2. I am convinced that metaphysical positions should be evaluated solely from the standpoint of their historical and cultural presuppositions and consequences. Then the day after tomorrow shall dawn!
   
3. Intuitionism is a pitiful attempt to pass off personal conviction as certainty. And yet it is precisely such confident thoughts that pave the graveyard of human knowledge. Make way for the hesitant!
   
4. I prefer Hume as a weapon of skepticism against the "rational" that passes itself off as universal!
   
5. The active part of humanity must create value out of itself, must be the source of the inner value of knowledge and will — even though the "active part" is simply the evolutionarily effective part, and the values being created are simply a rhetorical device for thinking!
   
6. Your convictions correspond to reality? — preferably. Reality corresponds to your convictions? — not necessarily!
   
7. I have noticed that Nietzscheans are mostly mere bearers of Nietzsche's thought — not even incubators. His thought does not come to life within them; rather, it degenerates, finding its final refuge. They are philosophers, but not objects of philosophy. Nietzsche struck philosophy with the lightning of an exclamation mark; they merely reread, illumined by the dim glow of nightlights!

So that's it. Most of them are rather raw, but I want you to pay some extra attention to 3 and 8. You must remember that they were born from a discussion and are not exactly poetic. Thank you for your time and maybe thoughts!

How do you reconcile the fundamental truth of being free no matter what our circumstances are with the tragedy of our lives, where we are forced to sell our most valuable resources, time and energy, for peanuts?

Wrote this down after a hard workout, thought of the idea in the middle of it. Also pulled from Albert Camus with the Sisyphus reference. Feel free to discuss:

What’s the point in living if I’m not dying one day at a time? It’s not really life if I don’t come face to face with what feels like death. Now I’m not saying be reckless with your precious life, which you only get one chance at; I’m saying make it all count. Find your limits. Then go past them. Honestly, what is living but your life rapidly speeding toward inevitable death? That’s a pretty bleak reality, but it’s still our reality. If I’m not dying everyday then my life isn’t being lived to the absolute maximum. Whatever I choose, I’m still slowly dying everyday. Now, I have the choice to spend my life scrolling my phone on the couch or out on a run in the 90 degree heat. Either way I’m still living my life, and in reality dying, every minute closer to real death. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. I am Sisyphus, but you need not imagine my joy — the grind, these small deaths that I die every day — they make me all the more alive. I appreciate fullness of life even more, and these sacrifices make me complete. I know the end, which is death, but I choose life through dying continually, so that I will never be with those timid souls too weak to test themselves or spend their allotted time on this earth in a way unfitting their true potential as a living human being. I have seen and felt and tasted defeat, and am stronger for it — have lived in more fullness of joy because of it. And in the end, I will rest, knowing that I made my death worth it by crowning it with my life.