BoGoWo wrote:Hmm;
this thread is beginning to matter!
In line with Cav's offering, i think the fact that absolutely nothing in this universe actually matters 'at all', is the ideal starting point for inventing (dare i say 'creating') a 'web of importance' on which we as humanity, can hang our lives, and give them meaning!
Well my wife gives me lists of things to do, that she says Do Matter & I keep Meaning to do them. But..............and here lies the rub, I lose the lists , regularly.
OK OAK;
it doesn't matter.
Thanks Bo ----- sanity returns
She Who Must Be Obeyed . . . Rider Haggard was obviously a married man . . .
Things matter
Things do matter. But it is psychologically convenient in struggles to pretend the struggle doesn't matter much, because if you think something matters much, that can make you nervous and less sane. For instance, I'm sure Captain Smith made himself a more affable less nervous dinner guest by pretending that ice bergs don't matter much. Similarly, with the plane that crashed off the coast of Canada a few years ago, the pilot could have tried to land the plane right away after seeing smoke, but he decided to circle around once first (don't remember why, maybe to dump fuel, can't recall). The trick is to not allow yourself to be nervous about ordinary stuff, but don't stop your nervousness by wrongly pretending that things are less dangerous than they are.
In fact, there is a tendency to view every problem as though failure means getting your hindquarters screwed. Realizing this is not the case enables you to possess a philosophically more auspicious and even temperament. Many of the Eastern religions seem to emphasize this--Brahmanic Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, for instance, all seem to appreciate the necessity of quelling desire and of not striving for things excessively. Probably part of the appeal of such is the aforementioned coolness that emanates from such a belief system.
That said, one must ask oneself why people have evolved to tend to strive so much if such striving in most matters is disadvantageously excessive. The answer is that it is quite important to view getting your hindquarters screwed as more disadvantageous than society or the emotions polluted by such abuse are likely to realize. The simplest and correct explanation for paranoia is that there is something you should at times be paranoid about, viz., sexual abuse. Thus, a better way of being cool is to realize not that there is nothing worth being anxious about, but that one should only be anxious about matters related to sexual abuse.
Similar remarks apply to setting goals. Better in the ordinary (not related to sexual abuse) matters of life to take more of a one-day-at-a-time approach to life than is typical, as opposed to setting goals. Enthusiasm, for instance, is appropriate if you want something or someone and you feel like someone could possibly sexually abuse (i.e., sodomize) you to keep you from having it, but is basically not appropriate otherwise.
There is something of an opposite phenomenon, also. That is, if you feel beaten, the emotions and your drive tend to shut down. That's because sexual abuse (being IMO a chemical addiction) affects and pollutes the emotions, so the only thing to do if you can not escape such abuse is just to turn the emotions off, entering something of a zombie state with no drive at all, hoping that eventually you will be rescued. And the emotional difficulty of correctly recognizing sexual abuse (it polluting the emotions directly) has caused people to have a very inclusive emotional definition of sexual abuse. Needless to say, zombieness is an insane and undesirable state unless you really are dominated by sexual abuse. This state is rather opposite to enthusiasm, and perhaps some of the popular praise of enthusiasm is really just well-meaning criticism of this zombie-like defeatist state.
As an aside, it seems to me that enthusiasm is especially overrated nowadays--e.g., in the old movies, stars like Humphrey Bogart were cool, but now they tend on the contrary to be universally enthusiastic. It strikes me that enthusiasm is probably the one anti-abuse emotion that nowadays is overpraised as regards ordinary matters. I guess it is because managers have inordinate influence, and they constantly praise enthusiasm to get their workers to work harder (when the workers wear themselves out, they can just fire them, or if they drop dead prematurely from stress, they can just hire a replacement).
How does it matter if you die? Your dead. It's fun and keeps your life busy when you have empathy and things care, but it ends in death. If you don't do it that way, it ends in death.
step.....; all of a sudden, i wasn't reading the same post any more; something happened along the way; did i encounter something hidden here; an agenda, or perhaps a litter of newborn kittens............?
