Nothing you do is ever going to matter

[nomis101uk]

Why are there so many miserable posts on this forum? Like 'Whats the point in life?', 'Do gays go to hell?', 'Do you ever get thoughts about death?', 'My nipples make me sad'. Maybe it would be more helpful to take these questions to a counselor.

Also the title of this post is just factually wrong. Its more correct to say that you're not likely to do anything that matters. Even that is highly debatable given how interdependant human society is on every level. So lets say: You're unlikely to do anything of unusual significance in life. If you can't live with that, go do charity work. Go to Africa. Help out at an animal refuge. Enter politics. Its not that hard to make a difference. Most people just don't bother.

 

[p3t3r]

tep that is exactly how i feel about the world, none of it matters. so what not have a good time and why worry about the small things? none of it is gonna matter anyways

 

[SofaEater]

I like to think of it this way

why should I give two shits about the future, no matter what, nothing I do will impact them to an extreme degree.

And, as long as it affects people of today, and a few generations along the line, then yea me.

 

[spartan231490]

No-one likes to admit it, a lot of people secretly thinks their sweet idea will one day be turned into an awesome game or that book you've been working on for years will suddenly take off, but the world will never know you've existed.

Does this depress people, or make them feel like they should just focus on enjoying the world and not trying to change it? Do you think I'm totally wrong and YOU are the exception that will echo through the generations.

Personally, i don't like this idea; which is strange because I have no belief in the afterlife so my impact on the future will be completely unknown to me anyway.

Some people do succeed, look at Christopher Paolini, or that guy who joined the Philadelphia eagles and now has a movie. People change the world every day, it's just that the number of people who do is much less than the number of people who don't. That said, even the most average person in the world leaves an impact on the world by changing the people around him. And because those people go and change the people they meet, it is an ever expanding impact that eventually reaches the entire world. Still, it's not the great huge earth-shattering change that most hope for, but it's something.

 

[Plurralbles]

The most famous of the ancients were always haunted by the thought of not leaving their mark; Caesar lamenting that he was older than Alexander and hadn't done nearly as much, for example.

I'm not too worried about it. I have a 200 year goal. Do something that people other than my descendents will care about still in 2300, no matter what it is but afterwards not worry. I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to echo for generations, but I will reverberate a little.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

That's not necessarily true. The future is uncertain. No one knows what's going to happen. I'm sure no one who's currently a historical great was born knowing they were going to be so.
I doubt Columbus was born knowing he would go down in history for discovering a new continent (for Europe anyway), or Edison was born knowing that one day he'd invent the light bulb and be forever remembered for it. These people no doubt had the same insecurities about whether their lives meant anything as we do.
Whether or not your going become great and remembered for all time (or as long as humanity's around anyway) is a matter of chance and effort. If you sit on your ass and do nothing, then you can bet your ass you're not going to amount to anything and be forgotten; but if you get off your ass and do things then there's a much greater chance that you'll do something worthy of being remembered.

 

[Delock]

Interactionist plus butterfly effect theory equals I'm perfectly ok.

To break that down, I subscribe to the belief that society is created through the interactions between members, that includes assigning meaning to symbols (which is larger than most people think, as symbols also includes words themselves. Notice how the definitions of certain words have changed over time), modification of norms and values (ex. tattoos are now much more widely accepted in today's society when it would have caused you to be ostracized), and more.

In addition I also believe in a butterfly effect of actions that works in conjunction to this system so that a single action you do or fail to do will affect countless others in society through series of interactions or lack of interactions. These may cancel out others actions, or help amplify them, or even change the direction of the result from the action. Why? Because interacting with others will inevitably effect their thoughts, emotions, and schedule, which will influence their future interactions.

In other words, while I won't stand out, I, just like you, am an integral part of current society, for if I interact differently, the future would be different. Maybe it will only be a small change, or maybe it will have an unimaginable impact on society many years from now. It's impossible to tell, as the impact can only be measured at the end of time.

Hell, my actions' results don't stop after humans. Take for example the theory of global warming and imagine that I'm contributing to it. This actually helps speeds along a proposed cycle in which would bring in a new ice age, which would end up reshaping the world with the glaciers, providing new bodies of water and mountains, which will change the lives of whatever lives on to see them.

All this boils down to one thing: there's no telling what your actions will produce, but something will happen because of you, like it or not. There's no point worrying about though, as no one can tell you if it is right or wrong.

 

[llubtoille]

that's pretty much my life mantra,
It goes both ways also, if I do bad things it doesn't matter, if I do good things it doesn't matter.
at the end of the day, you die and your PoV ends with that.

 

[KiKiweaky]

Ye but no harm in trying either is there?

On the plus side my older brother is a winner I can sponge off him

 

[Nouw]

Keep thinking that but when my name is permanently remembered by a book, game or movie I'll say "Hell Yeah."

If you let that thought get to you, it will become fact not fiction. Not trying is worse than doing nothing.

Heck every single action effects someone or something somehow. Even if it's not that meaningful everyone has some impact. Honestly though I don't really care about that, the only thing that really matters is if you enjoy life - which I do without giving a damn about making a difference

Damn straight, everything affects everything. The other day there was a thread about how if Hitler hadn't done what he had done, some of us wouldn't even be alive.

Hell just posting this up affects something and that could make a chain-reaction of awesome!

 

[Yureina]

I don't think about it. I worry about myself, and what affects the present me. The idea that "nothing matters" is only something that I'd get to in moments of extreme depression. Even then... not so much. What's important to *me* is what matters, and that is all I need to focus on, ultimately.

 

[TWRule]

So what?

At what level does success begin?

I feel like a broken record bringing up Absurdism so often. So I'll pretend I didn't.

You should bring it up. No one in my generation seems to have any conception of it unless they are a philosophy major like myself (even though I know a lot of people had to read some related literature in high school and brushed it off).

Well, I'm a bit worried about embarrassing myself in front of a philosophy major. So I guess I'll just post two links of relevance to the OP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

I tend to ascribe to the absurdist views myself. I find the pointless, almost inexplicable ideas in line with how I see the universe.

However, you're the expert, so I'd be interested to see what you had to say.

I'd hardly call myself an expert on this particular philosophical movement; at least not more so than anyone else who has engaged some material by Camus and/or Kierkegaard.

But to boil it down for those unfamiliar with it; it essentially asks the question: "what ought to be the measure of human existence (particularly an individual human being)? Is a human being given definition through their situation, or how they act within that situation?"

So given our situation in this world (being thrown into this world not by choice, lacking any apparent meaning/purpose for ourselves, limited to our finite bodies and what they can do under "natural laws" surrounded by strange foreign entities, etc.) - do we simply succumb to nihilism or insanity?

An absurdist would say no. We ought to struggle against "fate", death, our situation - more properly, we ought to ultimately transcend the vicissitudes of the world, live well, and search for meaning in spite of possibly being doomed to inevitably meet the same fate.

This, among several other works by Camus, illustrates the idea more eloquently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Sisyphus

 

[Ace of Spades]

Why is it that whether you 'matter' is always measured in longevity these days? Just because no one will remember my name or what I've done after I die doesn't mean that none of it mattered. I've made a lot of people smile, and I'm making a life for myself right where I am, and touching the lives of those around me. Perhaps you think that nothing I do will ever matter, but that's entirely dependent on your perspective, which varies drastically from person to person, and by my definition, I matter. You matter. In some small way, we all matter.

 

[guntotingtomcat]

What if you have children? And they have children? And them aswell, etc?

With the act of creating life, you can start a lineage. That's neither irrelevant, or unimpressive. There could potentially be millions of people in the future who could not have existed if not for you.

If you can't have children, then you could donate organs. Give blood. If you save or prolong even one life, your existence was worth it, as far as I'm concerned.

Just making yourself happy though? Isn't that what murderer's do? Enjoy themselves without considering the feelings of others?

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

On the one hand, given enough time, probably nobody will be "remembered" in a conventional sense.

On the other hand, your existence will always have an impact. Everything you do affects the universe and none of that can ever really be "undone". It might be a small amount, but it's effectively impossible to not affect the universe.

Now if you want the REAL "nothing you do is ever going to matter" mindfuck: if you believe in a mechanistic universe (meaning a deterministic universe), your choices are illusions. When you "choose" something, you're just doing the only thing you can do, because the atoms that constitute your body behave mechanistically, giving rise to mechanistic biology. When you say "Well, I could have chosen to walk through that door instead a few minutes ago", you're not making a choice in the way we tend to think. If you went back and all of the conditions, external to you and internal to you, were the same, of course you'd go through the same door. So then, does it "not matter" what you choose because there are no "choices" in the conventional sense? Can we even ask that question given that you behave mechanistically and have no option to not make "choices" of this sort?

 

[CarpathianMuffin]

I've come to accept that I influence a lot of people, whether I know it or not. Something about inadvertently starting a Christmas tie trend among the student body this past holiday season might have something to do with it.
In any case, I know that I won't make that big a difference in the world. But for those around me, I make all the difference in the world. /lolcorny
'Sides, I like staying reserved.

 

[TWRule]

I'd hardly call myself an expert on this particular philosophical movement; at least not more so than anyone else who has engaged some material by Camus and/or Kierkegaard.

But to boil it down for those unfamiliar with it; it essentially asks the question: "what ought to be the measure of human existence (particularly an individual human being)? Is a human being given definition through their situation, or how they act within that situation?"

So given our situation in this world (being thrown into this world not by choice, lacking any apparent meaning/purpose for ourselves, limited to our finite bodies and what they can do under "natural laws" surrounded by strange foreign entities, etc.) - do we simply succumb to nihilism or insanity?

An absurdist would say no. We ought to struggle against "fate", death, our situation - more properly, we ought to ultimately transcend the vicissitudes of the world, live well, and search for meaning in spite of possibly being doomed to inevitably meet the same fate.

This, among several other works by Camus, illustrates the idea more eloquently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Sisyphus

That was an incredible read. I'll try to track down a translated version of that book. I'm not just saying that either, I'm genuinely grateful.

All I have left to say on the matter is that Videogame players seem to be innately/susceptible to Absurdist views. The vast majority of games rely on the "why not", "the thrill is in the hunt and not the capture" or the "because its fun" mentality.

I'd argue that TF2 is an absurdist game. Everything you do is erased instantly, it is all painfully obviously pointless and yet it is all designed to be played for funs sake.

Don't mention it. And I agree that the philosophical ground is probably quite fertile in the gaming generation for concepts such as this. It's a shame that so few come to know of them. It seems like few are willing to take a serious interest in philosophy until they are into their independent years (well into college at least), even though I'm sure everyone asks themselves such questions at some point.

 

[thylasos]

So... the unbearable lightness of being? It depends how your approach it, really.

Positive existentialism, anyone?