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Existential Angst Factory - LessWrong

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Followup to: The Moral Void A widespread excuse for avoiding rationality is the widespread belief that it is "rational" to believe life is meaningless, and thus suffer existential angst. This is one of the secondary reasons why it is worth discussing the nature of morality. But it's also worth attacking existential angst directly. I suspect that most existential angst is not really existential. I think that most of what is labeled "existential angst" comes from trying to solve the wrong problem. Let's say you're trapped in an unsatisfying relationship, so you're unhappy. You consider going on a skiing trip, or you actually go on a skiing trip, and you're still unhappy. You eat some chocolate, but you're still unhappy. You do some volunteer work at a charity (or better yet, work the same hours professionally and donate the money, thus applying the Law of Comparative Advantage) and you're still unhappy because you're in an unsatisfying relationship. So you say something like: "Skiing is meaningless, chocolate is meaningless, charity is meaningless, life is doomed to be an endless stream of woe." And you blame this on the universe being a mere dance of atoms, empty of meaning. Not necessarily because of some kind of subconsciously deliberate Freudian substitution to avoid acknowledging your real problem, but because you've stopped hoping that your real problem is solvable. And so, as a sheer unexplained background fact, you observe that you're always unhappy. Maybe you're poor, and so always unhappy. Nothing you do solves your poverty, so it starts to seem like a universal background fact, along with your unhappiness. So when you observe that you're always unhappy, you blame this on the universe being a mere dance of atoms. Not as some kind of Freudian substitution, but because it has ceased to occur to you that there does exist some possible state of affairs in which life is not painful. What about rich heiresses with everything in the world available to buy,

x Existential Angst Factory — LessWrong Metaethics Emotions Rationalization Frontpage 82 Existential Angst Factory by Eliezer Yudkowsky 19th Jul 2008 4 min read 101 82 Followup to : The Moral Void A widespread excuse for avoiding rationality is the widespread belief that it is "rational" to believe life is meaningless, and thus suffer existential angst. This is one of the secondary reasons why it is worth discussing the nature of morality. But it's also worth attacking existential angst directly. I suspect that most existential angst is not really existential. I think that most of what is labe

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