Irrational Existential Dread Thread

There's a book that's a neat little thought experiment called "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. The chapter that I remember moved vividly was about the Houston Ship Channel succumbing to entropy.

I'm sure I've quoted it somewhere on here before, but one of my favorite quotes is from Norbert Weiner, starting with the paragaph that begins "We are swimming against a great torrent of disorganization..."

https://books.google.com/books?id=o8ZxnFkK2wkC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=norbert+wiener+torrent&source=bl&ots=tnotBDQqof&sig=ZFPiBImjzpvy2bDgyDoFrSnaWC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZ36eBj5nYAhWD5YMKHSRnBTUQ6AEITDAH#v=onepage&q=norbert%20wiener%20torrent&f=false

(hope that works)

There's another book, In the Cool, that's a pretty readable account of entropy as a creative force. It's important not to get too one sided about it. Without entropy the universe would be something like an unmoving block, I imagine.

sorry: Into the Cool

Re: my earlier post about coworkers' mistakes, I just encountered 'humanitarium relief' (like multiple times throughout the file in question). Feels like some particularly clever wag or another might be able to somehow employ that newly-coined phrase itt.

weiner torrent tho

i think gleick quotes parts of that in The Information, very powerful stuff

That must be where I first found it! I think it's from Wiener's "Human Use of Human Beings"--a very interesting little book.

the two things that give me such an irrational feeling of existential dread:

sometimes while taking a shit and straining away i am acutely aware of my animalian nature, my mortality, and the ridiculousness of the artifice of the composed and cultured face that i attempt to show the world. this makes me deeply uneasy.

i rarely take baths but the feeling of putting my toes in a too hot bath, how unpleasant it is, the dread of perhaps slipping and ending up scalded is always attended with the thought "you will die one day, you can't escape something much worse than this unlikely, imagined scalding"

got about 10 posts into this thread and have to bail because it's giving me the fear already

this is from thinkin too much, according to schopenhauer, but i didn't read him too close bc i didn't want to get the tremors again

https://media.giphy.com/media/20cr5VNSiuvhS/giphy.gif
what's so irrational about dread anyway

how about the existential dread that comes from suddenly finding yourself to be the expert the room

this happened to me several times this year at work, i suddenly realized that the best person to go to for advice about some intractable problem was ... myself

it was pretty upsetting

(i am having a similar experience rn w/ year-end lists)

A related problem, for me anyway, is aging parents. That’s really been getting to me lately.

yes!

there is a great event around the corner from me tomorrow night. i thought of this thread:

Night Eyes presents A Feast for Saturn

Potluck from 6pm - 7pm
Workshop in session from 7pm - 10pm

Bring a donation for the space and something for the potluck (Saturn would request anything cold/dry/salty/odorous/goaty/fishy)

>wear black<

J***e S****s & G***a S****g lead an extended consideration of the planet Saturn, a dull and slow moving celestial body that grinds along the border between that which we can see, and that which is beyond our embodied power of sight. In contemporary mythology, Saturn sits as a cold hearted witness as we accomplish or avoid such necessary and uninspiring tasks as paying down debt, filing taxes, scheduling dental work, and returning each day to under-paying, time-sucking, youth-robbing day jobs. J***e and G***a will deconstruct the much-dreaded Saturn Return, and delineate a number of example charts. Come knowing your time of birth if you would like your chart to be considered. We will take time to discuss Saturn’s very recent ingress into Capricorn on December 20th, and what these next 6 years of Saturn residing in Capricorn and then Aquarius, the two signs of its rulership, could mean for our world. Through ritual, incantations, guided meditation, lecture and visual explication, we ruminate in the chilly, ashen light of the planet associated with death, decay, misery, and isolation. Mining ancient and recent histories, affect theory, the American-capitalist cult of productivity, traditional astrological magic, and esoteric literature, we learn that when it comes to Saturn, "the best way out is always through." Or, more grimly, that there is no way out, so best to prepare yourself for the long and leaden passage through.

You could drop dead at any point in your daily routine. Even if you opt to stay in bed, you could still die. Either way, not much is affected by the decision that you make (or don't make), and you're still definitely going to die eventually.

I just looked up my Saturn’s Return and yeah those 6 months were fucked up

every time i do some idle tedium like punching numbers into a spreadsheet or putting my PIN into the work printer my chest gets tight, something about the futility of work and the reality of mortality or something

I live besides a busy street and I get a feeling of dread some mornings around 5.30 am as like clockwork, cars start rushing by to go to work. Often I'm up around this time as well and it just reminds me how were slaves to the wage and mostly the working poor. Shit just feels way too scripted sometimes

Realizing in the midst of doing something you enjoy that literally every human activity that isn't a biological imperative is essentially a mortality distraction, and then realizing that your realization has basically undermined the essential point of your endeavor.

i have really bad morbid ideas for movies all the time and the last one was something i thought of after reading a nyt story and it is about two people who die on top of mount everest and the people who go to retrieve their bodies also die and more people go up to retrieve those bodies and then they die and then more people go up....it goes on like that for 6 hours until mount everest is actually officially taller and they have to change the height in all the record books. and it ends there.

I've seen some configuration of the same 20-30 people on my commute to and from work for several years. None of us acknowledge any of the others, none of us know anything about one another (presumably), one of us could disappear one day and maybe at some point several months later someone else will briefly think, hey, wonder what happened to that guy, kinda like how you suddenly notice that a restaurant you use to pass by all the time has been a Foot Locker for the past year.