Interesting

Find something in life for you to do first.

Exactly. We can discuss women, feminism, and how to be dominant in society all day, but until you find your passion in life, none of those things will make you feel better. I'm not saying those discussions aren't valuable, I'm just saying you should always come before your analysis of the world.

Find a great cause that goes beyond yourself!

I'm slightly older (early 30's) and I got this advice here before, and it's actually been the most profound to me.

What resonated with me was the advice that I help and mentor others.

I'm not where I want to be yet, but I know where in the world I can go to get the individual things I want (I've travelled a lot). I know that career-wise, I'm technically a winner -- but further advancement will require being at the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. This luck has more to do with success than I wish it did, but that doesn't change much.

When you talk to guys in their 20's, they might not know this stuff, and from what I've seen, especially here, they're eager to ask and learn and do their best to get somewhere in this difficult economy. The boomers try to manipulate them with bullshit, and they just want some straight talk.

Helping others get somewhere definitely goes beyond oneself, and feels pretty good too.

In this day and age, every educated or intelligent person is plagued by nihilism. We all find distractions so it doesn't bother us as much, but no one can ever overcome it. That's just how it goes. We're creatures biologically programmed to seek out meaning, living in a world without meaning.

I've always had a passion for logic and arguing, I always notice flaws in peoples argumentation and have always had a good ear for contradiction, irregularities and such, so went into Law. That was the noble side of me going into law, the darker Machiavellian component relevant to Law came later. I come from a poor family so moving into such a specialisation is incredibly difficult, especially when you have lecturers who just half ass giving you the knowledge you need or the methods to get the knowledge you need, causing you to frantically Google, search academic databases and struggle in general because you lack the direction and guidance to master your syllabus.

Since I started blogging I've discovered I love to write, I never actually wrote much as a kid. I used to draw as a kid and I enjoyed it, but I was never any good at it. I'd make crappy pictures but I'd be happy I made them because I liked the feel good feeling of creating something that I could call my own. As a kid your quality standards tend to be quite low. Now when I write I'm a perfectionist. Some of my articles have a ridiculous number of revisions, like 50+ and one revision can just be one word or turn of phrase being substituted for another, the position of a comma was moved or a sentence I didn't like the flow of was omitted. It's also the reason most of my reddit posts are edited, I'm something of a lingual perfectionist.

My talent for writing is quite weird. I've always had an affinity for words, as in, I've always been very sensitive to word selection, I'm quite pedantic as in I like to be very specific with word choice, I am sensitive to the nuances in language and always try to use the most apt words to describe what I want to communicate. I have an emotional connection with words, that is to say, some words "feel better" than others when you want to put a literary piece together. I can quite literally "feel my way" through the creation of a sentence until I get something potently commanding.

I got an A in English at 12th grade level without doing any revising or really putting any work in, which astounded me. I usually have to work hard to get high grades, I was never one of those kids who just turned up and got A's because he had eidetic memory and perfect concentration. I used to write official letters to government authorities and businesses for people because they never knew how to word things correctly, when making demands or bargaining via letter you need to be very rhetorical with your word choice and create a sort of "command presence" within the fiber of your words. I find it easy to spell 99.9% of words, there are random words that trip me up though.

My mother used to do my spellings with me every night before I went to sleep as a kid and I remember I'd score 17/20, 18/20 etc when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I'm sure that helped my brain to develop in a way that is conducive to literary proficiency, I'm not sure if there have been any studies done on it, but it was practically ritualistic, she'd do it every night with me.

I'm also starting to find a passion for philosophy, which arguably, is related to Law, there is something of an overlap. Unfortunately a philosophy degree won't put food on the table, becoming an author requires a lot of support and law is competitive as fuck, the people making most of the money have social capital/connections and came from wealth to begin with so went to the best schools and had the best teachers.

Don't be fooled into thinking that skill alone is enough, there is a "luck" variable too. You need exposure. I had this conversation with a friend recently, extending the basic philosophy question of "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to see hear or it, did the tree fall?" into a metaphor of: "if you make a masterpiece but it is never recognised, have you truly made a masterpiece?" follow-up: "if it was a masterpiece wouldn't it be recognised as being a masterpiece, surely the fact nobody recognises it as such means it lacks the merit to be considered something worthy of such praise?" there is an inherent assumption that people have the skill to acknowledge and value talent, but this is not always the case. Don't get me wrong, skill speaks for itself, but that skill needs to be seen and create an impression within the right people in order for it to get the acknowledgement that it deserves, and for success to ultimately be attained.

An example of this is the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, it is incredibly saddening that he never knew of his own success. Whilst he was alive his philosophy was overlooked and he didn't receive any major recognition for his philosophical prowess and unique mind, when he died he "was discovered" and people started to appreciate what he had achieved, what he had written and how he thought. How incredibly saddening that such a great mind never had the pleasure of being acknowledged for its creations whilst he was still alive.

Despite my passions, I am incredibly nihilistic. I have a very dry, crude sense of humour. I take the piss out of stupid things, I am incredibly cynical, I expect the worst and see positive outcomes as bonuses. I call bullshit and possess a general ability to laugh about anything and everything by finding some sort of ironic nuance in it and twisting it around via reductio ad absurdum to make a point of humour out of it. I'm pretty fucking good with puns and double entendre too. Humour eases the soul when you've had a tough life. I think I might be developing a passion for stand-up comedy, but I've not explored that fully yet.

Find your passions and once you find them, practice them, they will bring you great joy. If they make you money and you become prominent within your field of choice that's great, but even if you don't "make it big", you'll be happier than the next guy whose only passion is of a consumerist nature eg: getting drunk/porn/games/drugs etc. The good feeling you get when you produce something to a high standard is a type of moral pride, you are justifiably proud of your creation and have an intimate connection with it, when you are happy because you have consumed something it is because what you consume is acting upon you, you are not acting upon it, you're passive rather than proactive. To truly be happy you have to be able to express yourself, be that writing, comedy, debating, building shit, fighting, whatever.

Passion is fundamentally the epitome of expression, one must realise this in order to find their passion. What is it you want to express? What makes you sad, what makes you angry? What activates your sense of morality? What snaps you out of mediocrity and has you form an opinion on something? What makes you want to take action? The answer to any of these things is something that you're passionate about. Now find a way to express that passion in a way which is useful to other people and you begin to have the beginnings of something special. Get a lot of exposure to your passion and if it's good enough people will find it useful and assign it value. Repeat this cycle and hone your craft and essentially you end up with a marketable product/platform/service that is in demand and produces value.

We can all produce, but one can typically only produce what one wants to produce. Forcing ourselves to produce things we don't care for leads to an inferior result and a sense of nihilistic torture in the process. You have to live in harmony with yourself, rather than force yourself to grind pay cheques, that's no way to live in a reality where life is all but fleeting.

Sorry to bring you down, but your interpretation of Nietzsche misses completely, and existential nihilism is pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

edit: I was entering the dentist's office when I wrote the above and now have time to explain.

Nietzsche believed asceticism to be the opposite of the natural life force of the powerful man. Just because he believed this to be so does not invalidate your claims however: anyone worth their salt is going to turn away from the enticements of the herd and determine what they value through introspection and testing. When I was 20 (and truth be told, because I was under the influence of Nietzsche) I dropped out of my worthless college literature studies and decided to walk through Mexico with out a cent in my pocket. Insane, yes, but it was the moment in my life that describes what it is you are referring to: unplugging, and risking what seemed to be a pitiful living in an attempt to find life. While I was very interested in exploring what I thought of at the time as the 'razing of the idols', a nihilism towards the institutions and beliefs that I saw as controlling the people in the US, it was also clear to me that what I was moving towards by doing so was 'being', not the non-being implied by 'existential nihilism'.

I have a sincere bone to pick with this 'existential nihilism' because it is an oxymoron: existentialism is the philosophical study of subjective being as the starting point of developing meaning (an ontology for the modern human), and nihilism describes an inherent meaninglessness, originally and correctly applied to social institutions. When someone first brought this term up to me a year ago I instinctively wrinkled inside. I searched it up on wikipedia thinking it must be some article put up there by some intellectual midget and found I was correct: it was a short article of two lines linked from several places, but of no real worth, with references created in the past two years. Over the past year this entry has been fleshed out and given some substance, but still lacks coherency: it is a term coming from film criticism, not philosophy. It is a term that negates itself, but that describes nothing else. Existentialism is not a pit, it states in the most basic terms that your subjectivity is an appropriate place to begin understanding the world from. It only appears to be 'a pit' or meaningless from the outside, and in this case you are not in the existential frame of reference. 'Existential Nihilism' is philosophical persiflage and I highly recommend you do not use it in the context of an actual philosophical discussion due to the fact that anyone truly familiar with Nietzsche, existentialism, or nihilism will know you are full of shit. My main hatred of this term is its weakness: people who are strong and who revolt against mass mind control find meaning in the act of revolt itself, in the power of the ability to do so that ignites from within, not a bland and vaporous meaninglessness in their own being. The strong in spirit coalesce in the crucible of emptiness, the weak and timid fade into this passive self-hatred.

The good news is that you don't have to cite those sorts of terms to understand what is important to you or what your path is. From what I understand of your post you have oriented your point of view to seeing from the inside out and found a sense of purpose in developing your capacity while valuing your perceptions and interests above the opinions of others and social pressures to conform to an eroding masculinity. Right on.

Also Joe Rogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1csNcTKnLM

Great post. Nice combo of ideas not typically seen here, yet definitely related.

Good post. Re: Joseph Campbell, I recommend the book "The Power of Myth". It's one of the books that helped me, pre-TRP, figure out that I needed to find a greater cause to drive me, and that I needed to be "at the center of the wheel of fortune", not its edges.

Not into books? "The Power of Myth" is just a transcribed conversation between Campbell and Bill Moyers. You can watch / listen to all 7 hours of it on Youtube, beginning here.

The problem I have with this is that we now have a lot more scientific knowledge about our universe. The big bang and the huge distance and time scales involved. And finally the heat death of the universe so far away in 10^100 years.

So how can whatever I do have any meaning in this context? It can't unless you belief in a higher cause or being. So the only "meaning" I can see is for myself only and it is to be able look back and have as little regrets as possible so to be less or not afraid of death.

Note: This is another example of egoism being a good thing because if I strive to have as little regrets a possible I will be better and happier and so will be my surroundings.

Dare I say one of the best posts in here... Screaming in my face wake up.

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