Asklemmy

Some sort of humanist atheism/existentialism? I guess...

As a teenager and young adult, I used to be very interested in cosmology and astrophysics, to the point I wanted to study it at uni. The vastness of the world and existence seemed like a beautiful enigma. I was also always interested in philosophy, which ended up more lasting than my interest in physics.

After growing older, the vastness of nature and existence seemed more and more haunting than beautiful. If there was something like a God, it had to be a mad idiot god. I actually kind of sympathised with Gnosticism and similar thoughts for a while, but I could not believe in a metaphysical, perfect entity waiting even further behind everything. I could not believe in some sort of salvation, that could just come to us by giving up on materiality. It seemed like an empty self-delusion. Similarly, I respect Buddhism a lot, and think there is a lot of good ideas within it, but it's ultimate life-nonaffirming philosophies and focus on avoidance of suffering did not resonate with me.

Looking at the history of our planet, our universe, and humanity, it seemed clear to me, that existence just stumbles along. We are a "mistake" in a vastness of empty, dumb, boring clouds of hydrogen and dust, nuclear furnaces and holes in reality, devoid of meaning. Life felt more and more to me, like a great rebellion against a vast, seemingly all-encompassing nothingness. No aliens in sight either, that could relieve us of our burden. Just humanity, as the one lifeform so far known to us, that at least has the potential to not fall into the traps of self-annihilation and lifelessnes that permeates our past and present. Just humanity with the responsibility of getting our shit together or life eventually being just reincorporated into the vast, dumb nothing of the "idiot god", so to speak.

All the mistakes of humans felt to me more and more like just extensions of the same stupidity that is also manifest in all of nature. And our struggle against it, feels like a sort of "sacred duty". Those loaded words to illustrate, that I'd think of myself as actually having strong faith in a weird way, even though it is not rooted in the supernatural as such.

It's also evident to me, this faith has at least partially persisted for me as an anchor for myself. I have not been suicidal ever since I felt that way, even though for most of my life I have been struggling with trauma and a variety of mental health disorders, and have been suicidal before. I could not think of that anymore, suffering seemed almost meaningless to me, now, and it feels better to endure it than to give in to the vast nothingness without a fight, without trying to create as much good as possible in this small contingent miracle that is life, that has been brought forth by so much struggle and so many seemingly impossible coincidences, chance and "mistakes".

I have a big aversion against beliefs that put faith into higher powers, be it nature or God or some sort of transdimensional aliens or whatever. I try to analyse beliefs like that not with disdain, though, but as results of how we are caught in the world we are, in our circumstances, and how life itself has had to "trick" existence itself into allowing life to exist, by follwing its rules but also emergently transcending them, creating something new from it, that is more than the sum of its parts.

Politically and philosophically it lead me to Marxism and Hegel respectively. Marxism with it's focus on changing our material foundations and dynamics, in order for us to be able to develop our humanity and be able to act more rational in the grand scheme lends itself well to it. Hegel, with looking at the development of ideas and humanity dialectically, developing something until it reaches the limit of its own contradictions also appealed to me.

Sorry for the wall of text, the question caught me in a somber mood and caused me to monologue.