Saul van der Walt - Pessimisticities, Nihilisms, & Politics!

Pessimisticities,

Nihilisms, &

Politics!

by

Saul van der Walt

Copyright 2020, Saul van der Walt.
All rights reserved, fair use and other limitations and exceptions to copyright respected.

ISBN (Paperback): 9798680705421

Dedicated to the semblance of a livable life in this world and no other

If you hit your name enough times with a plank, it tends to build resistance.

Once, in the forest, an older humanity thought it had caught a little answer, but when they brought it back to show the others, it melted in their hands, for it was too late, the thought of an answer lead to the question of whether it was the One. This brought to life the thought of innovation, then possession, and the biggest demon of all, identity.

Standing apart and feeling the world despite yourself, is not a move toward authenticity, authenticity is for actors who want to feel confident in their acting. No, it is a way of coming to terms with what you are in the world by grasping the smallness, fragility, transience, and hollowness of yourself as a kind of dancing cannibalistic fire, just like any other system that somehow eats and shits.

Whys everything got to be so existential, youre already here arent you? And already on your way too. Its all happening anyway, just find some way to deal with not being ok.

You cannot expect anything, no one and nothing owes you a thing, and if you want, neither do you owe anything back. Though, as you know, the world is held together by fragile chains made out of promises. The choice is a personal one, it is between decline and compromise. Neither option is obvious; both have their appeal.

How to endure life? Suffer for a good while, in a way that consumes your whole life, then escape that suffering and live contented under the incredible lightness of your days, floating with negative weight of all the things you no longer suffer.

Learn to want nothing, and you will be happy for a good minute, then you will ask why you still suffer. It is honestly better if you still have it in you to conjure up desires and point them at things more or less in reach.

The world was built by the dead, for the dead. Whats the lesson? Live without concern for the dead and youll be free. It may be hell, it may even rake in anarchy, but it wont be slavery, and there will be an end, hopefully sooner rather than a later time when its too painful and things have progressed to a point beyond any meaningful intervention.

We are all already dead, what is all this fuss about memory, eternity, and end times? Even if lives or memories went on forever, it still would not change the way it feels, if anything, it will lessen it. Forgetting is the key to good memory, perfect memory is pure corruption. That said, forgetting halfway is no good, either forget the sharp edges and repetition entirely, or face becoming privy to a cyclic hell that hurts because you know about it, like a shy beast who punishes those who dares to stare at it. This is why there is so much focus on the immediate, anything less does not wash away fast enough, anything too far away becomes haunting and exaggerated, it breaks down when you get too close or think too much. If you must live, find a sweet spot of just the right amount of remembering, but please do not hold on too tightly.

Happiness: The serenity and mental comforts one has cultivated after internalizing the inescapable state of ones arbitrary transcendental fuckedness.

As one concept mongering species with enough ambition to burn a planet for its dreams and desires, we have mind enough to know better, to know that it really doesnt end well, and so too to perhaps call quits on a broken game on our own terms, before blind consequence does it for us with force.

As a kind of negentropic entity, its rather humorous for you to be saying pessimism is subjective, because thats like an ice cube claiming it has found stability at room temperature and under no significant pressure. Maybe youre moving too fast to appreciate the fact that youre dying. Were all actively decaying all the time, we cant repair fast enough to keep pace, and even if we could, theres an absolute limit to how far you can stretch it, the universe has an end, and like all matter, so does this planet. Everything is consistently getting worse, even if it looks like its getting better, its just trading the when of depletion, because what you use up now, you cant use later. Sure, death makes so it doesnt matter to you, thats fine, but it matters to everything that carries on and is not you.

Again, theres a trade-off here, do you see it? Its based on idealism vs death and satisfaction vs time-preference. The future is built on promises, but the agents of now hold the cards. If we eat it all now, and make no promises, then its a fun exit. If we save and suffer the diet of being as a species or continuous happening with the intention of holding out indefinitely, then countless beings have to suffer and die and repeat this cycle with ever lessening resources. However, if some sort of peak efficiency is found, then it will be an event worth mourning, because it means the suffering of existence can be stretched out to the universes breaking point, which would be the ultimate testament to our stupidity and lust for pointless suffering. The ultimate death cult would be one pushing and celebrating a will of life strong enough to stick it out until matter itself cant bear it any longer. Perhaps every specie and civilization, like every life, is bound to be lived through in the shadow of its end.

The goodness of many good things in life ultimately consists in the bliss of endings and letting go, like with accomplishments and maturation, or in putting distance between yourself and present moment with the usual feelings haunting it, as in the case with drugs, orgasms, coffee, or even chocolate. It means goodness and pleasure comes from experiencing and savoring the ecstatic schisms of minor deaths, little by little, a byte or three at a time. There is a reason the most beautiful feelings and images are those of letting go, and no, it is not nice.

Death is an orgasm that lasts forever, only you are not there to enjoy it, and this is what makes it most enjoyable.

If you are somewhat horrible, then that pain will replicate, but if you are horrible enough, the pain will revolt against you through those closest to you.

Pain takes you places, it shapes who you are, and what youre capable of becoming, and who youre capable of becoming it with, it unifies and polarizes, it takes away and it carves paths, it can be an identity, or something to run from, it has a million faces, but what matters is how you deal with it and let others deal with you.

It is better to commit strongly than to leave behind a wishy-washy trail of painful confusion.

The feeling of fear comes from an imagined split in the future, there is a safe way that is compromised by some event, change, or alterity. Then there is the way it will be after that safe future has been disrupted and compromised, this builds up tension, because there is a refusal to accept what might happen. Who fears nothing? The dead and those, like the dead, who have little to lose. What is the biggest thing you could lose? A future, either entirely, or just the one you wanted. What is at the center of everything you go through? A consistent battle to maintain the integrity of a self with desires and self-descriptions it wants validated in the eyes of those who matter to it. What is so important about integrity and the future? Nothing. What is all the intensity about then? The fear that you might disappear; it is lifes revolt against death churning inside you like a relentless puppet master; it is of you but not you.

What is actually of you? Nothing. All the way down it is the agony of lucidity, the desire for permanence, chasing you into tensions, schisms, and contortions bent on all kinds of mark-making and self-definition as a means of building and maintaining a wall that keeps the lopsided recursive process that you are from recognizing itself as such, and thereby falling into an abyss of endless unraveling. Those who know this, in practice, cannot believe it, the same way one could understand what something like determinism means, but fail to truly feel it and see it playing out in yourself and other people. Selves are fluid concepts informing how we behave; they are a strangely inward facing piece of technology that is, by analogy, the differentiating factor between a computer that computes and one that acts.