Mine:
- Learn a second language and keep up with the language your parents speak. You will regret being a brat about not wanting to speak this language especially as your family members pass.
- The only opinions about you that really matter are from the people you respect and who respect you back
- Being a kind humble person, who leads their political convictions with curiosity and not self righteousness is important. As that one person said: “I am no hero and neither are you.”
- Don’t throw out your old media (mix cds, tapes, records, photos, zinee, etc) because you think they’re embarrassing. They either will not be embarrassing later or they will become expensive and you can tell them for mad bucks.
This life has no meaning. Absolutely none. Do what you enjoy. You don’t need a “purpose,” grind culture is toxic and will only lead to burnout. Slow down and listen to the birds sing.
What’s your advice for younger folks? Nihilism!
If you take nihilism far enough, you loop back around to absurdism instead. And that’s where things go from “why bother? Nothing matters so what is the point” to “why not? Nothing matters so I might as well enjoy life.”
Optimistic Nihilism, is quite a good philosophical framework.
But I would recommend a mixture of optimistic nihilism and stoicism.
If nothing has any inherent meaning, the things you chose to be meaningful are as valid as any other choice.
do you think that you should do what you enjoy at the expense of another person? like (in an extreme example) to harm/assault/ hurt someone because you enjoy it?
I don’t know why you are being downvoted. This is an excellent question. Personally, no, but that’s because I feel empathy towards other people and enjoy cooperation/community.
However, imagine if you were born without empathy or even enjoyed hurting others. Does that make you a bad person? Our society would certainly see it that way. You would be ostracized/incarcerated for not being the same as others because you enjoy hurting people. But does that make your existence wrong? I don’t think so. To be honest I don’t think there is such a thing as wrong and right, just selfish and selfless behaviors.
All this to say, I would say no and certainly don’t condone it, but if you ask someone else they may say yes. Who is to say that either one of us is right?
Ah…, the conundrums of subjective morality.
there is infact good and bad actions. and there is a meaning to life.
I think hedonism is important, but it comes at a cost. The candle the burns twice as bright and all that. At the same time if you never fuck around, you’ll never find out.
I think far too often young people go through life thinking they already know who they are, instead of treating life as an opportunity to find out who they are. They become calcified, ossified in their beliefs about their own identity, a constant and repeated telling themselves of who they are in an effort to believe these things.
An alternative approach is to try to break down who you are, repeatedly and continuously. To try new things, to change the situation. Leave a city without warning and move somewhere you don’t know the language. Abandon your belongings, your phone, your identity and start over. Change the situation entirely. Begin to understand what is you and what is the world. If you move from place to place, and you find yourself always confronted by the same types of people, maybe you are seeing a reflection of something you are bringing with you from place to place.
There is a very western identity of “knowing” who you are while simultaneously having done no exploration of who that person might be. I find it very curious.