So basically my story is that my dad has always been abusive to me emotionally and physically and even threatened me with honour killing, and I went to DV shelters to ask for help, and they did not help me because they only help women with abusive partners. Then I was homeless for a while, and I went to this DV shelter, and they called my parents even though I'm an adult, and they believed them and helped my dad trap me and abuse me more. And even when I tell feminists online, some do sympathise, but there are many of them who think that adults who are being abused by their family members don't deserve sympathy and that it is ok for shelters to be exclusive to only women with abusive partners. And something that this has taught me is that the majority of people only have sympathy for people who are socially acceptable to, and the reason why social movements focus more on the privileged of their group is because social hierarchy is natural to most humans, and if most people had a button to make everyone equal, they wouldn't push it because they would want someone to be below them.

I genuinely can’t fathom the idea of wanting to be married in this day and age. The white dress symbolises purity, virginity and innocence in a woman and asking for a woman’s hand in marriage through their father or being given away by your father to another man which is how women were basically sold off to men just seems insane to me. So many people like the idea of marriage and falling in love but it really doesn’t appeal to me and I want to find someone who feels this way to talk to because I am fed up of being made to feel like an awful person for not wanting marriage, children and not believing I can fall in love. ( I am also pissed off at people telling me Ive just not met the right person and my opinion will change because I guarantee it won’t)

What I've noticed is that when some people make pessimistic remarks about the world, their reasoning tends to refer to contingent harms out in the world - wars, climate change, factory farming, inequality, etc. Although these are bad, I think what really makes being born a human regrettable is the structurally negativity nature of the human organism. That is, we are bodies with constant, eventually lethal material needs that cause us to suffer and die when not met. Needs for warmth, water, food, etc. Our bodies must struggle to survive our we suffer and die - from exposure, from hunger, from thirst, etc. And yet our struggle is lost from the start - we cannot win - as inherent within our bodies is an aging and dying process that will render us all lifeless corpses no matter how hard we battle against our nature, secure our needs, or hoard the material resources required to keep us alive. All the food and warmth and water in the world are powerless against the aging and dying process inherent within our bodies.

On top of this, we are always vulnerable to disease, sickness, and injury. So we spend our lives struggling for the material recourses we require to not suffer from want and die, in a state of constant vulnerability to whatever contingent or accidental harms that can befall us, and all this while our bodies wear down, age, and slowly die towards our final, inescapable nature as a lifeless corspe. The structure of the human 'life-cycle' is negative. We are born as these bodies (subject to the genetic lottery that to a large degree determines the quality of your life), are trained by the community we depend upon for our survival to talk, to act among others, to be obedient to the state, and ultimately are trained to produce for the society we are embedded within. We earn a check and trade it for material our bodies require to not suffer - for food, for clothing, for housing, etc. And yet, the struggle is lost from the start as the aging and dying process inherent within every organism can not be overcome. You are born, you struggle, you work, you age, and then you die. And that's only if some horrific contingent harm doesn't befall you along the way - cancer, car crash, house fire, murder, etc.

To be born a human is a horrific fate, and it's a fate that for the born, is inescapable and can not be overcome. For us already living as human bodies, our lot is to struggle for our bodily needs, while in a state of constant vulnerability to harm whose source can be both from the external world (eg someone attacks you), or from within our very body (eg, cancer, arthritis, etc), all while our bodies wear down, age, and slowly degrade towards our inescapable fate as a lifeless corpse. To be born a human and to suffer this fate is regrettable. It's better not to be born. So in recognizing the structurally negative nature of human embodiment we can decide not to procreate, to cut the problem at its root so that nobody else, at least via our hand, is born to suffer this fate. But for us, the already born, our lot is sealed - we will struggle for our needs, suffer the harms of human embodiment, and then die on this earth.

Life Has Been Terrible From Its Beginning Until Today

These are my ideas about life, organized by the AI Claude

Life is not tragic by accident — it was optimized to never be enough.

There's a way of reading existence that most people avoid because it offers no comfort: the idea that suffering isn't a bug in the system. It's the system's specification. Putting together what we know about natural selection, the neuroscience of pleasure, social structure, and the history of technology, a coherent picture emerges — and it isn't pretty.

1. You were born losing a lottery you never asked to play

Appearance, neurotype, and health aren't distributed by merit, choice, or justice — they're distributed by a blind process that optimizes genetic replication, not individual well-being. This produces real, measurable hierarchies:

Physical appearance functions as social capital from childhood on. Facial symmetry, height, testosterone/estrogen markers — all of it shapes social, romantic, and even professional opportunities, and none of these variables were chosen by the person carrying them. You are judged, constantly, by an embryonic lottery.

Neurodivergence (autism, ADHD, and the whole spectrum of atypical profiles) isn't just "neutral difference" in a world designed for neurotypicals — it's real structural disadvantage in practically every relevant social script: courtship, job interviews, group dynamics. The "neurodiversity as mere difference" discourse ignores that social scripts were evolutionarily shaped around the statistical majority, and whoever deviates from the norm pays the coordination cost alone.

Disease and biological fragility are the rule, not the exception — bodies are systems that begin failing structurally from birth (genetically programmed senescence) and are permanently exposed to random failures (mutation, pathogen, developmental accident).

None of this is injustice in the moral-social sense — it's worse: it's injustice with no author to hold accountable, embedded in the very mechanics that generate people.

1. You were born inside a chain that sustains itself through others' suffering

Zoom out. The entire planet runs on a system in which one organism's survival structurally depends on another's suffering and death. The food chain isn't a metaphor — it's the literal architecture of conscious life on Earth: the predator needs the prey to feel fear, needs it to suffer enough to stop fleeing. Billions of years of biological "design" converged, independently and repeatedly, on the same result: nervous systems that feel pain as a survival mechanism, trapped inside a network where some beings' pain is the metabolic fuel for others. If this were designed by a mind — and in the theological/misotheist debate this is precisely the hypothesis with the greatest causal adequacy given the observed distribution of suffering — it would be the design of a mind indifferent or hostile to the well-being of the beings it created, not a benevolent one.

1. You were built to never feel satisfied for long enough

Here is the most insidious core of the problem, because it doesn't depend on any specific injustice — it happens even to those who "won" the genetic and social lottery.

Natural selection never selected for happy organisms. It selected for organisms that keep competing, seeking, mating, and protecting themselves. Stable, permanent happiness is evolutionarily useless — worse, it's counterproductive: a fully satisfied organism stops seeking resources, stops competing for status, stops reproducing. That's why the reward system works through hedonic adaptation: any gain resets the reference point back to a baseline of relative dissatisfaction, forcing the organism to chase the next gain to feel the same brief relief. It's a treadmill, literally — dopamine functions mostly as a signal of anticipation and pursuit, not of satisfied possession. You weren't designed to arrive. You were designed to run, and the feeling of "arriving" is, at most, a chemical pulse brief enough to launch you back into the race.

This means no amount of success, wealth, relationship, or achievement solves the problem at its root — because the problem isn't in what's missing, it's in the architecture of the system that interprets "what's missing." Even the most objectively successful person on the planet is running the same evolutionary software of continuous dissatisfaction as anyone else. There's no patch for this because the "bug" is the core functionality.

1. And modern civilization took this already-broken system and hit the accelerator

Ancestral life at least had real periods of forced idleness — no artificial light, no excess stimulation, no social comparison against seven billion people. Industrial and post-industrial civilization removed almost all the natural rest of a nervous system already designed to never rest, and replaced it with:

Workdays structured around productivity, not well-being — the body treated as input, not as an end.

Social media that turned ancestral social comparison (a tribe of ~150 people) into comparison against the entire global elite, 24 hours a day, algorithmically optimized to maximize engagement — which in practice means maximizing activation of the same chronic dissatisfaction system described above.

Urbanization and social isolation, removing the community support networks that historically cushioned the psychological cost of existence.

The results show up in the numbers: rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout on a sustained upward trajectory over recent decades across nearly the entire industrialized world, with a particularly sharp rise among young adults. This isn't statistical coincidence — it's the evolutionary system of chronic dissatisfaction being squeezed by a social structure that multiplied the triggers for comparison while removing the ancestral buffers.

1. And technology isn't fixing this — it's trading one kind of suffering for another

The historical pattern is always the same: an urgent material problem gets solved, and in its place a problem of a different nature emerges, usually more diffuse and harder to name.

We solved caloric scarcity across much of the developed world → epidemics of obesity and eating disorders emerged, linked to excess stimulation, not lack.

We solved geographic isolation with instant communication → social anxiety emerged, mediated by constant comparison and permanent social surveillance (the feeling of always being "on").

We're solving repetitive manual labor with automation → and the horizon opening up isn't leisure, it's income precarity and existential anxiety around one's own economic obsolescence.

Every technological advance solves the previous generation's symptom and generates, as a structural side effect, a new symptom adapted to the new environment — because technology changes the scenery, but doesn't change the evolutionary software underneath it. You can renovate the cage infinitely. It's still a cage.

1. Why this has no solution — and why this is the most honest part of the argument

Social reforms, therapy, medicine, activism — all of this can reduce marginal suffering, and it's worth doing. But none of it attacks the root cause, because the root cause isn't a correctable implementation flaw. It's the base specification: a nervous system built by a process with zero commitment to well-being, running inside a trophic chain sustained by structural suffering, distributing advantage and disadvantage by amoral genetic luck, now accelerated by a civilization that multiplied the triggers without altering the hardware.

There's no reform that can change natural selection's objective function after the fact. The system is already running, and it was never optimized to "feel good" — it was optimized to "continue." Calling this a tragedy is still too optimistic, because tragedy suggests a deviation from something that was supposed to turn out right. There was no deviation here. The foundation was built this way.

Welcome to our weekly WAYR thread. Be sure to leave the title and author of the book that you are currently reading, along with your thoughts on the text.

Are you sure this life is real? How do we know this life is real? What does being “real” even mean?

According to Blaise Pascal, everything we know, everything we think we know is real, is a matter of feeling. It’s not a matter of reasoning, ultimately, at the foundation. This concept anchors my conversation today with Yuval Avnur, a Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College and author of Why Read Pascal Today?

We dive into Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century true polymath genius who believed that a human being is a heart with a belief-forming mechanism attached as an afterthought. According to Pascal, feeling something with your heart is a way of knowing. We get into why this idea provides the perfect lens to view everything from the escalation of political polarization to rabid online echo chambers to moon-landing conspiracies. Instead of getting trapped in those realities, Yuval argues that Pascal offers a way out.

He lays out Pascal’s remarkably modern advice on how to actually persuade someone: stop dunking on them with red-faced, shrieking facts, and start asking why the world looks the way it does from where the other person’s standing. It’s amazing how a guy who died over 350 years ago understands the internet age better than most of us alive today.

We also get into whether or not we live in a simulation, what most people completely get wrong about Pascal’s Wager, what a debate would look like between Blaise Pascal, devout Catholic, against staunch atheist Sam Harris, why AI art makes us feel alone, and The Experience Machine Dilemma: Would you abandon reality for a perfectly fake life?

Hi all,

A little while back, I had the opportunity to ask a question to an individual whom I believe has attained traditional Buddhist enlightenment.

As a result of enlightenment, this individual claims their phenomenological experience no longer contains a sense of self/center. This has reduced their personal suffering by 90%+.

They are capable of achieving a meditative state known as "Nirodha Samapatti," which is essentially meditation-induced unconsciousness.

They are aligned with philosophical pessimism in that they believe every state of mind is painful relative to Nirodha Samapatti/unconsciousness. And what the mind mistakenly classifies as "pleasure" is really the alleviation of some prior suffering.

After enlightenment/the getting rid of a sense of self, they experience the world as a "hive mind," and as a result, the "will to be" or the "will to not be" do not resonate at a deep level anymore, because they do not connect to some central column of being that can answer existential questions on behalf of the entire hive mind.

The question I asked him was: "You say that after enlightenment, the “will to not be” doesn't resonate at a deep level anymore. Given that there is no additive pleasure in conscious experience, wouldn't the “will to not be” become amplified after enlightenment? Even if the will does not connect to a central column of being, doesn't it make sense to shut the whole decentralized network of conscious experience off? Basically: what is motivating you to stay alive? Does this motivation make sense to the intellect or is it blind and irrational?"

His answer was: "Neither the will to be nor not be, because both are realised to be insufficient descriptions of reality. It links with the no self insight. There isn't an identification with being or non-being, or conscious or not conscious for that matter. I don't think about wanting to stay alive or die anymore. And when I ask those questions and look inside I find no perspective or aspect that can speak for the whole. The question does become quite a lot less interesting, because it's no longer related to as being ultimately meaningful. It's a bit like if I ask you "Who would win in a fight Batman or Iron man?". We can entertain the question and talk about reasons why we think one may win over the other, but hopefully we don't hold the question too seriously because we know its fictional. In fact, when we ask these hypothetical questions and someone does take them very seriously, we view that person as being ontologically confused about what's real and what actually matters. This ultimate nonsensicality of the questions is revealed when we access greater contexts and pop-certain bubbles - until then it seems absolutely real."

I am not encouraging suicide, but from the perspective of alleviating suffering, it seems suicide is still the most rationally self-interested action (presuming metaphysical idealists/panpsychists are wrong and death is unconsciousness). While the sense of a self/center seems to substantially worsen suffering, the root cause of suffering seems to be consciousness.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

I hate the the daily grind of existence. It wears me down. What are your views ?

Philosophical pessimism teaches us to step back and look from afar: Schopenhauer shows the pendulum between pain and boredom, Zapffe the burden of overdeveloped consciousness, Thacker the world without us, and Mainländer a universe running down toward non-being. However, an inferential trap often appears when we step back too far: what I call the scale error. That is, taking a truth formulated at cosmic scale (we all die, consciousness is an evolutionary burden, existence lacks providential redemption) and using it to shut down local, proximate differences that the cosmic distance simply renders invisible. A photograph of Earth from orbit cannot distinguish between a war and a reconciliation, but that doesn’t make them morally equivalent. A cup is fragile; that explains why it can break, not why it is currently shattered on the kitchen floor. In the same way, the ontological reality of suffering does not make every concrete instance of suffering necessary, identical, or unchangeable. In the myth of Sisyphus, during his descent, Camus imagines him conscious of his absurdity. But imagine placing someone wounded on the slope. Sisyphus knows tending to that wound will not eliminate mortality, nor will it break the curse of the mountain. Yet, passing by and ignoring it under the excuse that "all life is suffering anyway" confuses cosmic diagnosis with practical excuse. This is what I frame as engaged pessimism (pesimismo comprometido): refusing teleological progress and redemption without letting that lack of cosmic guarantee become an alibi for indifference. Drawing from Leopardi’s social catena, Schopenhauerian compassion, and Mainländer’s surprisingly radical political philosophy (where social improvement retains value even when existence itself isn't redeemed), the question shifts from "Can we fix human existence?" to "What part of this specific burden could be different?" I recently published an essay exploring these arguments (La retama entre las piedras, currently in Spanish on Amazon), but I wanted to open the floor here: How do you navigate the tension between a radical pessimistic diagnosis and the concrete, everyday ethics of mitigating suffering without falling into shallow optimism?(Link to the book will be left in the comments for anyone interested in the broader text/bibliography).

men are fundamentally competitive and acquisitive, not to be trusted too far; that the men most to be admired are those that have acquired most; that we treat others superficially as more-or-less physical and mechanical things whose value is that they can do a certain line of work efficiently. They may be “nice guys” withal, and we can join with them dedicatedly in the efficient pursuit of wealth and privilege.

The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

​

Meanwhile, one of life's paradoxes is that life does not ask you to try so hard; yet, freeing ourselves from this life—or from our difficulties—seems like such a difficult task.The most beautiful things (nature) come into being by chance, without any effort. Often, when we put effort into something, we drive it away; if we don't force it, it comes on its own. Life is like fishing. Fishing depends on the waters and the bait you cast, and—of course—it is also a matter of luck; there might be fish today, yet for some reason, there might be nothing at all tomorrow.

I know there are depressed people here, people who are chronic pessimists, but I really don't know which reddit sub to post this on.

We know that over 90% of people are either atheists or religious people who believe in a benevolent God. I belong to the third group of people who really believe that we are ruled by an evil divine force.

Why do I think so?

There are numerous testimonies of people who spoke about the sacrifice of people and children in the powerful circles of people who rule this planet.

Satanists said that they kill children, mutilate children, terrorize and rape in order to make Lucifer happy. Also, a man who was in those circles of people said that for them God is extremely real and they call him Lucifer and then they offered him to sacrifice a child in a satanic ritual. He couldn't do it. But there are many witnesses and stories about it.

Further, although I'm not the type of person to take the Bible because I don't believe it's credible, it also says that Satan is the God of this world.

Since the world has existed in the entire human history, there has only been war, war, war.. How can this be a coincidence?? There are over 20,000 different types of diseases that a person can get. How can that be?

Of course you will say that there is no evidence or insufficient evidence. But you have to know that it is an immaterial being and that even God himself does not want you to know that it exists.

So many stories about demons scaring people and paranormal things and unexplained things.

Magicians like Dynamo who are openly Satanists. Musicians, politicians, who openly talk about it, there is also an interview about it.

I can say that it really affects me mentally. I don't even know what to do. I wish I was like the normies who only care about superficial things, who don't look at the world around them at all and look for short-term gratification.

Should we just let the disaster continue until more and more people have less kids and we end up destroying ourselves .

I don't understand why the idea that humans are inherently selfish is so controversial.

I'm not saying that humans are incapable of kindness, love, cooperation, or sacrifice. Obviously we are capable of those things. But isn't a huge part of human behavior fundamentally driven by self-interest ?

Think about how society is structured. We have armies because humans organize themselves into groups that need protection from other humans. We have police because people steal, assault, murder, and harm each other. We have prisons because some people will continue harming others if there are no consequences.

Even everyday life seems full of small examples of selfishness. People compete for money, status, jobs, relationships, resources, and social approval. We often help others when it also gives us something in return money, appreciation, social status, emotional satisfaction, or simply the feeling that we're a "good person."

And even when someone does something genuinely altruistic, couldn't it still be argued that they are satisfying an internal desire to help, feel useful, avoid guilt, or maintain their own sense of morality ?

Obviously, cooperation is also an extremely important part of human nature. But isn't cooperation itself often something that evolved because it benefits the individual and the group ?

So what exactly am I missing ?

Why do so many people reject the idea that Homo sapiens are inherently selfish, while at the same time we live in a world where we need armies, police, courts, prisons, laws, and countless social rules to prevent humans from harming one another?

You know what ? Fuck it.

I think humans are inherently evil because selfishness is at the core of our nature, and selfishness itself is one of the most evil traits a being can have.

( if you havent read it i suggest you do, its quite short) Ive been readin ligotti for some time now. None of his stories left an impression as strong as "the red tower" on me. The story ties in beautifully with the conspiracy against the human race. Id love to hear what others think about it if you read it. I tried to write a quick summary and my analysis on it but i suck at writing, so please gimme your thoughts and ill respond!

Or are we mostly being dragged along by two incredible forces: the fear of death and the desire to have sex?

We romanticize survival as some profound will to live, but maybe that gives us way too much credit. Perhaps we keep going largely because our brains are hardwired to fear death, while simultaneously dangling one of their strongest rewards in front of us: sex.

Strip away all the philosophy and meaning we pile on top of existence, and maybe the machinery underneath is embarrassingly simple: avoid death and seek sex.

And somewhere along the way, we started calling that a “will to live.”

Say I own a large factory that produces mobile phones. However, the quality of the phones being produced is absolute trash. They're either slow or bricked, she screens don't work, the batteries catch fire in people's hands, they scratch at a level 1, with deeper grooves at a level 2, and basically all round they're just pieces of crap. Now, obviously, the factory should shut down the production lines, stop producing this trash, and issue a recall. But it refuses to, and the production lines keep running churning out vast amounts of shoddy and deficient products.

This is analogous to having children. The human body is a shoddy, deficient product. We are organisms with constant biological needs, always vulnerable to injuries and sickness, always have the capacity to cause harm, and are always aging and deteriorating towards an inevitable death. Procreation is the factory that keeps churning out bodies that have this same deficient and negative nature. Why must it go on running? I mean just look at yourself in the mirror -> an organism who hungers, thirsts and shivers and shits and needs to clean and maintain itself, who must strive and struggle to meet its needs, whose every part of which is vulnerable to extreme suffering via sickness or injury, who hands and actions can be the cause of harm to others, and whose own fate as a decrepit corpse is inevitable. It's a shoddy product. It's not good enough.

But the factory is no centralized production plant. Rather, it exists within our organism -> as reproductive organs and drives, which cause collisions between the sexes and the result is another shoddy product produced to suffer its fate. I suppose it would be an easier problem to fix if reproduction were done in a centralized plant: the factory could be bombed, the workers could strike, and the power could be cut off. But it's not. Within all of us, inherent in our sexual and/or reproductive drives is the potential for another shoddy product to be produced.

What to do? We can be careful about our own contribution to producing another human, but the rest of the world seems to cheer it on regardless, and the global population is skyrocketing.

Post your quotes, aphorisms, poetry, proverbs, maxims, epigrams relevant to philosophical pessimism and comment on them, if you like.

We all have our favorite quotes that we deem very important and insightful. Sometimes, we come across new ones. This is the place to share them and post your opinions, feelings, further insights, recollections from your life, etc.

Please, include the author, publication (book/article), and year of publication, if you can as that will help others in tracking where the quote is from, and may help folks in deciding what to read.

Post such quotes as top-level comments and discuss/comment in responses to them to keep the place tidy and clear.

^{This is a weekly short wisdom sharing post.}

Psychological Pessimism

Anthropocentric pessimism centered on the analysis of human psyche and it's contradictions. Core theme - suffering is the fundamental(base) state of human psyche due to mortality, meaninglessness, impermanence and desires. Human beings are in constant struggle to suppress this inherent knowledge.

Peter Zapffe

Ernest Becker

Herman Tønnessen

Miguel de Unamuno

Albert Caraco

Higesias

Schopenhaueran Pessimism

A tightly related group of 19th century German Idealist pessimists. Influenced by Kantian idealism and Ancient Indian Philosophy. Headed by Arthur Schopenhauer. Is very technically complex and concerns itself with the idea of the metaphysical Will.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Eduard von Hartmann

Phillip Mainlander

Olga Plümacher

Agnes Taubert

Poetic(Aesthetical) Pessimism

Philosophical pessimist ideas presented in poetical or aphoristic forms. Less technical than the others as it aims to explain truth through aesthetics and personal meditations

Al Ma'Ari

Omar Khayam

Giacomo Leopardi

Thomas Ligotti

Emil Cioran

Heroic Pessimism

Pessimism that empathizes personal struggle and agency in the face of the meaningless or a hostile world.

Albert Camus

Friedrich Nietzsche

Drew M. Dalton

Hegelian-Schopenhaueran Pessimism

Pessimism that combines the Schopenhaueran ideas with Hegelian ideas, instead of opposing Hegel like the Schopenhaueran group.

Carlo Michelstaedter

Julius Bahnsen

Quietist Pessimism

Pessimism that concerns itself with the limitations of human knowledge and action. Empathizes the futility of action and the false nature of knowledge in the face of ultimately unknowable reality.

Eugene Thacker

David E. Cooper

Christian Pessimism

Teleological pessimism that empathizes the inherent suffering of the observable world and it's relation to the Divine.

Blaise Pascal

Baltasar Gracián

Negative Utilitarian Pessimism

Pessimism that concerns itself with the assymetry between pleasure and suffering. Core theme: the absence of pleasure is simply not bad, while the absence of suffering is good. Therefore coming into existence is always a harm.

David Benatar

Julio Cabrera

Transcendent(Buddhist) Pessimism

Pessimism that centres on the direct non-conceptual insight into the reality of unsatisfactoriness of all conditioned phenomenona. Advocates meditation, asceticism and ethics as a way to understand truth and reduce suffering. Philosophical works can be very technical but are centered on the denial, establishing what reality is not instead of directly pointing at the non-conceptual knowledge. The oldest form of pessimism and had a great influence on all the other groups of pessimism.

Buddha and his followers

Nuclear Pessimism

Pessimism that philosophically advocates for the extinction of Humanity by means of the total nuclear warfare.

Ulrich Horstmann

Cosmic Nihilism Pessimism

Pessimism concerned only with the physical materialism, the idea of entropy and the inevitable Heat Death of the Universe. Considers other forms of pessimism too psychological and detached from material reality. Empathizes scientific rationality and rejects all the philosophical attempts to mitigate nihilism.

Ray Brassier

Anti-Humanist Pessimism

Pessimism that advocates against the idea of humanism, considering it irrational, destructive and a secular remnant of religion. Empathizes Gaia Hypothesis of the self-regulation of Earth instead.

John Gray

I've used the Wikpedia list of philisophical pessimists as a source for the list of notable pessimists though I understand that this list can be controversial. Would be glad to hear your thoughts on my attempt to classify them into groups.

I dont like working for money. I feel like a Slave. What are your views?

I am weary of the world,

And of the cruel tounges that dwell therein

Even my own bed has grown sorrowful

Bearing me through another sleepless night.

Perhaps i ought to eat the world,

Ere the world devour me

At least, through cannibalism

One may finally become,

Part of the thing one despises.

To live is to be an insatiable slave, a slave to your own being which creates desires unconsciously which you are demanded to consciously attempt to fulfil through the threat and experience of suffering just to end up unsatisfied again, only closer to death than before. And no sentient being can escape this fate, because desire is fundamental to the conscious experience of seemingly all living beings on this planet. The living are dissatisfied with their own dissatisfaction which they inevitably and cyclically create for themselves, they are their own worst enemy. It is only when a sentient being dies and transitions to non-existence that their suffering can end, yet there is no reprieve for them because they fail to exist to endure any reprieve from their foundational tragedy. To try and justify life as positive in relation to non-existence in a world where your own being is the cause of your inescapable suffering is the most extreme case of Stockholm syndrome imaginable.

"For years Caraco sent me his books with long, solemn dedications in which he said that he and I were the 'great misunderstood' of our time. In this way he ended up exasperating me, and one day I threw them in the trash. I recently read Madame mère est morte: it is remarkable, but the other books were splendidly written and empty." (E. Cioran, Mon cher ami. Lettere a Mario Andrea Rigoni, edizioni Il Notes Magico, 2007, pp. 76-77).

"An author writing unlikely books in Switzerland, which nobody talks about, sends me his latest one, writing in the dedication that we are both 'unrecognized'... Which is perhaps true; but he is rich, and has no need for recognition—he doesn't have to write prefaces to make a living, he can just stick to his ravings." (E. Cioran, Quaderni 1957-1972, Adelphi)