I had that experience with David Foster Wallace and his commencement address. The first half was exciting intellectually and by the last half I realized it was a cry for help
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone.
:(
For me it was a combination of gaining true self-acceptance, recognising that there was the possibility of personal joy and fulfillment despite humanity being irredeemably lost, and starting to work toward long term goals.
Everyone's experience will be different, but by focusing on myself I found that I became someone who was never alone because I found a rich group of people who shared similar interests and cared about me. If you're feeling stuck in your own head I would genuinely recommend seeking professional help and think about trying Psilocybin as the mental shifts can be more profound than you might imagine. At least they were for me.
With another ten years of hindsight, it's pretty apparent
As far as I know he did his best to find an alternative to the antidepressants that he couldn't take any longer due to allergies and tried different therapies with no avail.
This seems to me it was a condition less linked to environmental stress-inducing factors and more of an internal condition.
Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Lamo that's what I was thinking
I'm fortunate that the author with my pessimism is Pratchett. Humans, a bunch of terrible little assholes that I love and treasure
Idk I wouldn't call Sir Pratchett as much a pessimist as I would an absurdist.
Anybody got any recommendations for more stuff like that? Something like this which I read quite recently was No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It's a bit less philosophical than most other books like this (stuff like The Stranger by Camus) but still a very gripping book.
I never thought I'd be asking for book suggestions on a greentext community, but why the hell not
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse was eye-opening and I remember reading as a profound experience. I know this sounds ridiculous but this book was the feeling you get when someone on a forum has the exact problem as you and explore it in depth.
Herman Hesse is drastically underrated in general IMO. so many great books. I enjoyed Siddharta and Glasperlenspiel (both in german).
I'm having trouble understanding Siddhartha but still having a good time reading it ;).
I'm not super privy to this new paradigm of spirituality he goes in depth into !
I too have read David Foster Wallace/Ernest Hemingway/Virginia Woolf
Music also. Cant begin to count all the great songs that have really resonated with me and then find out the artist overdosed or blew their brains out.
So there is this guy Christopher Johnson McCandless, AKA "Alexander Supertramp" and he wanted to survive amongst nature and spent like his entire life prepping to be able to do it. He was inspired by a bunch of authors who wrote about survivalism and the frontier. Him and Carl McCunn were both well read and educated.
They both stepped into the Canadian Wilderness, at different times and different places, and both died alone with their journals, no one to call to for help in their time of need. McCandless was a 67 lbs fresh corpse when they found him, he ate some "alpine nut" purple flower legumes with antimetabolites and started to feel too weak to forage. McCunn shot himself, simple as.
Mental Illness apparently expresses itself in very strange ways for some people. Avoid isolationism if you want to live.
Is McCandless the one from the book Into the Wild? Iirc he had a pretty sweet scholarship lined up, but fucked off without telling anyone so he could "live off the land" in Alaska
And importantly DIDN'T BRING A MAP.
Oh yeah, wasn't he also like only a km or two from a settlement or something like that?
I, too, have read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Immediately thought of this
> read a book
> author already deadwhy do I even bother?
Because a book is the prime method of conveying ideas way after you're dead?
naah
Enjoy the life. The rest is optional.
If the book was successful, the author probably has more money than the anon. It's looking bleak, anon.
Same but physics and the author was Ludwig Von Boltzmann.
Would be funnier if the last entry was an ellipses or “fml” and the third entry said “Ernest Hemingway” instead of “he” lmao
Yeah like as a writer (hobbyist) I would say that a lot of writing (me, creative fiction) is just based on IRL experiences and modifying them to fit your world, even some characters are reflections of the writer that wrote them, whether intentional or not.
So I'm not exactly completely caught off guard but you know, I don't expect any name I come across to be already dead especially if they're not known.
[insert all my favorite musicians and Anthony Bourdain]
Let’s go, Akutagawa!