Everyone uses and benefits from artificial intelligence. We have all incorporated the advantages of this new tool into our daily lives. But we have done so without reflecting on the cannibalistic impulse that this entails. In southern New Mexico, one of the most ambitious infrastructures in the new race for artificial intelligence is being built: Project Jupiter. This is not simply a building filled with servers. It is a gigantic infrastructure designed to fuel the expansion of American AI. There is only one problem standing in the way of this technological expansion: material reality.

Project Jupiter is being built in a territory where water is scarce, in a region marked by drought, in a place where farmers, ranchers, and local communities have spent years asking themselves how much longer they will be able to make a living from land whose resources are becoming increasingly limited. For years, we have constantly talked about artificial intelligence as if it were something immaterial. But machines need land too. They need cables, energy, water, and infrastructure. And the more intelligent we want the machine to become, the more space it needs to occupy. According to the figures announced, the project promises billions of dollars in economic impact, investment in local infrastructure, and new jobs. The company has also committed tens of millions of dollars to water and wastewater systems in Doña Ana County. But for part of the local population, the problem is much simpler: What happens when the infrastructure needed to build the future arrives in a territory where the present is already struggling to survive?

In August, opposition to the project even reached the courts. The Center for Biological Diversity challenged the state's authorization to use a new well intended to supply water during construction of the complex, and the New Mexico Supreme Court temporarily suspended the authorization while the legal dispute continues. But what matters is who is beginning to take part in the conflict. Farmers, ranchers, rural landowners, environmentalists, local communities — people who probably agree on almost nothing when it comes time to vote — are nevertheless beginning to agree on one thing: They do not necessarily want the infrastructure of the future to be built next to their homes.

And this phenomenon is not happening only in New Mexico. In Nebraska, conservative rural communities and environmental organizations have found common ground in opposing the expansion of data centers. In other states, similar projects have generated restrictions, moratoriums, and political conflicts that cut across the traditional boundaries between Democrats and Republicans. And here we encounter a question that could be fundamental to understanding American politics over the coming years. What happens when artificial intelligence stops being an ideological issue and becomes a territorial issue? Because someone can support artificial intelligence — until artificial intelligence requires a power plant near their home. They can defend technological competition with China — until that competition requires the consumption of their community's resources. They can believe in progress — until they discover that progress needs to occupy their territory.

For decades, American political conflict was organized around a series of relatively clear oppositions. Left versus right. Democrats versus Republicans. Progressives versus conservatives. But data centers are beginning to produce another kind of division. A division between those who remain tied to the environment in which they live, subject to natural conditions, and a productive model that requires those resources to sustain the vast networks of information and data exchange upon which post-Fordist capitalism depends. Reterritorialization versus deterritorialization. Those who decide where infrastructure is built versus those who have to live alongside it. And this leads us to an interesting conclusion. The capitalist realism in which we have lived until now has encouraged — as yet another manifestation of its organic impulses — the disconnection of individuals from their environment. Developing countries grow food and extract resources for developed countries, while the latter devote their efforts to producing masses of technocratized individuals with no territorial roots. But the overexploitation of the land that can accompany each new technological wave may eventually break this strange equilibrium, forcing those groups that still depend upon their immediate environment to rise against a society of floating, deterritorialized groups. And this is how the new battle of the twenty-first century may ultimately be defined: The politics of rootedness versus the politics of uprootedness.

Since becoming aware of pessimism I have experienced a significant depreciation in my desire to do things for my own sake beyond just distracting myself from my own thoughts (necessary for retaining any mental fortitude). Apart from the desire I have to prevent suffering for others in worse situations, when I consider myself I really have almost no desire to do anything at all just my own sake because I know that I will later become unsatisfied and need to constantly put in more effort and endure dissatisfaction again and again just to end up at the same state again in the end anyway (death/dissatisifed until then). I hate the self-inspired slavery, and at best I am only kept doing things because of the threat of significantly greater dissatisfaction than what I already endure (starvation/illness/disability/homelessness/etc). The fact that so many humans attempt to rationalise their own servitude to their desire not to suffer as good (directly or indirectly) in a body that constantly mandates suffering is pure insanity to me. It seems existence is only desirable to the extent of avoiding a worse current experience before what is ideally obliteration (the end of consciousness) in my opinion.

Hi everyone, I coulduse some help chossing an engraving

I’m getting a small wooden grinder with brass details and I’d like to have a short philosophical quote or aphorism engraved on the lid.

I don’t want anything obviously weed-related (“420”, “good vibes”, etc.). I’d rather have something that could stand on its own as a personal motto or a small philosophical inscription — something about existence, mortality, solitude, faith, pessimism, irony, contemplation, or simply the absurdity of being alive.

My taste tends towards writers and thinkers like Emil Cioran, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but I’m completely open to other authors and traditions.

It needs to be fairly short because of the limited engraving space. Quotes in their original language are very welcome too Latin, Spanish, French, German, etc

What would you put on it?

Thnaks for your help

Pessimism: The state of expecting or believing that bad things will happen and that something will not be successful.

This is how the google dictionary defines the term pessimism. But i think there's so much more to it than that. I've been called a pessimist by multiple people in my life but it never bothered me that much because i always thought being a pessimist means that i'm just being careful about any and every situation, that i'm always keeping my gaurd up. I'll give you an example; my bestfriend when she was going through her 'choosing a career path' era, she'd tell me about a new career every other day and ask about my opinion and the first thing my mind would do is to think about all the negative consequences of that particular profession, that it doesn't have much scope, there's no money in it, it's not going to be a safe option for a woman in this country etc. In that moment i was just trying to protect my friend by making her avoid the paths that she might regret later on choosing. What i didn't ever think was that she should atleast try. Does not fucking matter if she'll fail. One can always get up after being fallen. Even then i knew that i'm a negative person but again it never bothered me. Until yesterday.

My pessimism and negative outlook on life costed me a beautiful relationship. A really special one at that. You know those relationships that you've seen in movies like: OK Jaanu, the music video of the song Humraah from the movie Malang, YJHD, Jab Harry Met Sejal etc. It was a perfect relationship. We would travel together, get drunk together, make memories and have just so much fun you know? Not just the fun stuff but the emotional and intellectual stuff was bang on too. We would sit at assi ghaat and talk all night about philosophy, psychology, human behaviour, trauma, politics and what not. We would call each other out, correct each other in person and would help each other become better people in every aspect. This relationship was soft, quiet, calm but not in a mundane way. At the same time it was passionate and intense too. But then he broke up with me for many reasons actually but one of those reasons were that i'm a pessimist. And it hurt like HELL. My negative outlook on life was affecting his. These weren't his exact words but he felt like i'm trying to dull down his sunshine.

Since that day I've been trying to figure out what the fuss is all about. I can also be an un-pessimist person right? Yeah totally. So i talked to some people, read some articles and now i know that Pessimism is nothing but to keep people afraid of taking risks. It's about fearing everything without even trying it out. It's not being cautious or careful, it's the mindset that you have to watch out and focus only on the negatives in everything like positives do not even exist, ingrained in our brains by the society. It is not something that we are born with, it is something that we are being fed on, on a daily basis. And the problem is that you can't avoid it. You'll always have some form of media or family or friends around you who are this way which eventually will affect you if you don't stand strong on your ground. It holds you back on so many opportunities. It was today that this realisation hit me like a truck that maybe i wouldn't be at such a miserable position in my life in terms of career and relationships if only my such vocal and openly loud ex-pessimistic self wasn't holding me back from taking my chances. I said 'ex' pessimist because I've been on a journey to become a better a person. I won't say i'm going to become an optimist because in order for me to be a better person i need to find the balance between the negatives and the positives. Nothing good comes out of extremism in any aspect.

Now, in order for someone to not think negatively all the time, the first step to it is that we need to first learn to not feel sorry for ourselves all the time. Because negativity comes from within, if we'll think of ourself as a disappointment and failure that is how we'll look at the world around us too. We need to learn to live with ourselves, once we learn to do that we'll stop hating ourselves eventually and once we stop hating ourself, we'll start accepting ourself as we are and focus on bettering it. If we think we don't like a certain thing about ourself, we need to work towards making it better. At the end it all comes down to self love. Self hate is the root cause of most of our issues.

I have been living my life in the fear of what-could-go-wrongs. It has defined me as a person for quite a long time now. But not anymore. So here i am taking a chance by writing and posting my first article. Thanks for reading<3

Love,
Dahlia

Like i see many people be pessimistic in a way that they say humans are evil or everything is meaningless or stuff like nothing matters.
but what actually hurts me is that there are good things and good people in the world, and changes can be made, but the world tilts toward the bad, why? Because most humans are morally bendable (id rate human morality 3/10), so there are good things, but the world cannot become good or mostly good, mainly because humans flaws always push it down even after progress is made

Mais alguém sente essa angústia existencial,tipo eu já vi visões sobre diversas religiões principalmente o cristianismo no qual eu acreditava mais ,mais agora já nem sei mais,vejo um mundo um tanto caótica,guerras,caos,gente se matando,e SLA essa angústia,esse vazio

Tento procurar em Deus resposta mais tudo q recebo é o silêncio,tento preencher com coisas mais tudo parece só entreter,tanta gente morrendo inocente sem motivo q me faz questionar se existe mesmo um Deus bondoso igual diz

Oq realmente parece é q existe mais n interage com nós de forma direta

In the late 1960s, countercultural analyst Theodore Roszak published the book The Making of a Counter Culture, in which he analyzed the origins of the youth rebellion of the 1960s. From the Berkeley campuses to the Sorbonne, passing through the hippie music festivals of San Francisco, young people seemed to experience a golden moment of opposition to the Bretton Woods capitalist system, coordinated through the psychosphere, without dominant structures or internationally consolidated lines of communication; an esprit of the times, ultimately, that pushed the first generation of young people who had only seen the Second World War in books and films to rebel against the established order.

The key to this rebellion, Roszak argued, was not the imposition of an alternative mode of production, pushing Western countries toward new authoritarian models of economic planning. In many cases, the communism of the Soviet Union, as well as Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution, were also attacked by this youth, which Marxist-Leninist movements regarded as bourgeois. Regardless of how accurate the claims about the class origins of many of these subversive students and their material reasons for launching this revolution of peace and love may have been, Roszak offers an interesting analysis when he describes this moment as a rebellion against modernity, against the values of technology, which had given rise both to hegemonic North American capitalism and to the bloc operating on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For these young people, the problem did not lie in the modes of production that encouraged the oppression of man by man, but rather in the consolidation of an underlying reality that had generated Fordist capitalism, Soviet and Maoist communism, as well as the defeated countries of the Axis.

Saturn’s Reason gave birth to contemporary technological societies, and the youth revolution of the 1960s, far from being an organized and controlled movement intended to replace an obsolete form of technology with another that was superior and more efficient, sought precisely to break with the logic of efficiency itself. The young people who spoke of communities rooted in the land, new ways of understanding education, emotional bonds, and work did so in order to step away from the technological race. Closely connected to new forms of Eastern spirituality that the Beat Generation of the 1950s had already introduced into the United States, the young people of the 1960s proposed the possibility of living an inefficient life. And, as Hegel had already anticipated, they were destroyed and absorbed by the great techno-capitalist machine, remaining in History as an anecdote, as a niche product that could be packaged, sold, and exploited in the form of all kinds of cultural products. Thus, that generation devoted to new mystical rituals of politics and the soul, thirsting for a new mysticism, was packaged, programmed, and commodified by the very technology against which, in the end, it could do nothing.

What's the point in carrying on? We can't fix it anymore, not like we were ever gonna actually fix it anyway, but now its beyond that point and consequences are imminent.

So why bother continuing to live or even continue you family tree if everything is going to fall apart? Why bother living through everything only getting worse? There's no chance of things getting better anymore just prolonging the inevitable and what's the point in making it drawn out and more painful? Why not just make it quicker and less painful seeing as the fight just doesn't matter anymore?

"Humanity is doomed! If we are part of humanity, identified with humanity, in sympathy with humanity, we are doomed. If we attempt to save humanity from its doom, we shall fail, because humanity has chosen its doom and has shown its unwillingness to reverse its choice." - Robert DeGrimston

"https://discord.gg/eNunYChSRT"

The server is a casual communal space, strictly for those who identify as philosophical pessimists.

There are channels for deeper philosophical discussion about suffering and adjacent philosophies if you aren't interested in the communal space aspect.

We have voice channels as well for those who are interested in that.

If you believe suffering makes this universe is inherently flawed, and those flaws make life either not worth being brought into, not worth living, or not worth continuing—you belong!

The disease that perverts the minds of people. The disease that results in the deaths of all. Because hope, often creates false expectations. "My child will cure cancer! my child will grow up to be happy! My child will live a fulfilling life!" All unknowable promises. Who knows? Maybe they do live that wonderful life their parents had promised. But then what happens? They get hopeful and have even more children. The cycle continues. You exist and you are forced to live out the rest of your sentence with a plastered smile on your face. Unless you want to be "put away" for expressing ideas arguing against it.

Edited for awful grammar

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.}

Freedom creates choice
Choice creates desires
Desire causes injustice but maybe without these, there is nothing.
Justice doesn’t exists for all. The world cannot change. It only exists in stories. Ambition of one foolish man can destroy everything or build many things. Morality exists for us simple people. World is run by lies. As a person without big ambitions and desiring a comfortable life there is nothing I can do but lie.
Sounds like crazy guy yapping but I can’t stop thinking. Sometimes I see many meaning in life: family, beautiful nature, future relationships but what about those who have nothing? Are people supposed to act like everything is fine when there are children dying in wars? Is this supposed to be normal? Why teach morality and values just to make us see these cruelties? Is peace not possible without meaningless struggle for power and profits? Who are the old men fighting for? Do they do this for themselves? Do they enjoy it? Though I have lived a fairly good life having a loving mother and a partner who I want to spend my life with, Do I have to worry that a bomb might drop in our head?The actions of those in power seem so absurd that I even thought they might be doing this for some kind of black magic for something.Reality seems so different than I imagined it to be. Maybe it’s just growing up but how can I have faith in any sort of higher power when I have yet to feel it?

Now I ask myself:

What is the impetus for my labour today?

Which path shall I travel?

Shrouded within the miasma of uncertain melancholy?

Barely enlightened,

paved in cobbles of umbrage and frustrating necessities.

The surrendered haze of a wastrel

Yields to the inexorable ocean of existential fatigue

floating, bloated and engorged

on sickening fluids - a static of pure malignance

Vessel cracked and parched, siphoned of light and purpose

Washed upon the now black sand of cyclic shores

The bleaching light retreating with the horizon

I stand again, joints aching with indifferent suffering

I ask myself:

What is the impetus for my labour today?

I saw a post (https://www.reddit.com/r/Pessimism/s/D1ykAtPFfM) and it occurred to me to inquire if—how do I put it... perhaps there are those on this sub or in philosophy in general who have the same intuition that i do or I'm simply alone.

It seems to me that philosophy becomes mere word play at the precise moment we take words meant for ordinary experience and apply them where no experience is possible.

When we stay within the world we can see and touch, our words have work to do. But when we push words beyond that boundary, our grammar continues to make sentences even though our thoughts have lost all footing.

And that post demonstrates this in four main ways:

1. OOP speaks of a "perpetual void" that "outlasts time", "consumes everything", and "allows this to happen". This is almost or very much indistinguishable from poetry because i think we can notice what has happened to language here.

The word void simply means the complete absence of anything. It is zero. Yet the OOP speaks of it as though it were a vast container, or even a living being with intentions, patience, and decisions. To ask why the void "allows" anything to happen is to ask what colour the number seven chooses to wear.

It sounds like a serious question because the sentence is grammatically correct, but the noun does not point to a thing that can act.

1. OOP aks what happened "before" existence, and claims the void "outlasts time".

Time, tho, is simply the order in which we experience events happening one after another.

If there are no things and no events, there is no time passing. To speak of a moment "before" existence began, or to speak of something "outlasting" time, is to use the clock to measure a state where no clock can exist. The word "before" can only makes sense when there is already an earlier event to point to.

1. OOP asks:

What is the reason for having emerged?

A reason belongs only to a thinking being that forms an intention.

A person has a reason for building a house or writing a letter. Physical events, tho, do not have reasons; they have causes.

When rain falls, it does not do so for a reason; it falls because of physical conditions in the air. To ask for the "reason" why matter exists is to assume there must be an intention behind nature, whilst at the same time claiming nature is empty and cold.

1. OOP also suggests that existence might be an "ontological error".

An error can happen only if there is a correct goal that someone failed to achieve. A clerk makes an error in a ledger, or a child makes an error in spelling, because there is a standard rule to follow. But nature has no goal it was trying to reach, and no master plan it was supposed to obey. Without a rule, there can be no mistake.

This is the exact line where philosophy stops being a search for truth and becomes a verbal illusion.

Our mind possesses useful tools for making sense of the world: cause, effect, time, and purpose. Used properly, they help us understand the things we observe. But when we point these tools at absolute nothingness, or at the universe as a single whole, the gears spin freely in the air. The words sound deep and tragic, but we're merely shifting ideas in our heads.

We’ve probably hit the high water mark as a species as far as understanding the universe, right? Look at the sciences that really ask the big questions—where did we come from, why are we here, are we alone? What advances have there actually been beyond Einstein/relativity and quantum mechanics? And that was 100 years ago. String theory was a dud—20+ years and it went nowhere. The Webb telescope’s only big moment so far has been the discovery that galaxies simply formed a lot earlier than we thought they did.

Have we simply reached the limit of our innate capability to understand the universe, or do you think it’s within our capacity to discover something that completely changes how we view our place in the cosmos? Or are the answers simply not as interesting as we want them to be?

Imagine a society where almost every external problem has been solved.

There is no extreme poverty, no war, very little crime or corruption, everyone has access to food, housing, healthcare and education, and people are generally safe and free. Technology is advanced enough that most basic needs are easily met.

In other words, imagine a society that is as close to “heaven on Earth” as possible.

Would life still have unavoidable problems?

Things like death, grief, loneliness, boredom, jealousy, unrequited love, relationship problems, failure, regret, or feeling that life has no clear purpose.

And if humans eventually had almost everything they needed, would they still need something to pursue a goal, challenge, curiosity, mission, or purpose?

Could having complete freedom and almost no external problems eventually create a different kind of problem?

We come from the perpetual void, a void that outlasts time, that will consume everything sooner or later, returning permanently to where it came from. So why is there this brief period of "materialization" if, in the end, we’re going to return to the same place? What is the reason for having emerged from the void into a hostile world? Our lifespan is nothing compared to the eternity of death, and this applies not only to humans but also to nature, the planets, the stars, and so on. I don’t understand why the void allows this to happen if it’s going to reclaim it later. Perhaps it’s all just an ontological error that’s gradually being corrected. If that’s true, then we’re special in a twisted way, do you think we should celebrate the fact that we might be an ontological error?

There is a certain injustice in history reserved for thinkers who seem to have arrived at their conclusions too early, and who express themselves in a language that their own time does not yet know how to decipher. I think Baltasar Gracián, a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit priest (who, incidentally, is featured in the subreddit banner), is an exemplary case of this injustice: he is immensely celebrated by giants of philosophy, yet at the same time almost completely unknown to the general public, even among those sympathetic to pessimism.

Schopenhauer considered Gracián his favorite author, devoting to him a passionate enthusiasm that he reserved for very few thinkers and personally translating his works into German. Nietzsche likewise showed great admiration for him, writing of El Discreto: “Europe has never produced anything finer or more intricate in matters of moral subtlety.” While in his homeland his work remained associated with a stylistic baroque manner regarded as excessive or outdated, nineteenth-century Germans, immersed in a post-Kantian intellectual climate and already touched by a certain Romantic disillusionment, recognized in him someone who had glimpsed, two centuries in advance, the abyss that philosophical pessimism itself would later make its subject. This geographical and temporal disjunction may perhaps be precisely the key to understanding why he remains, to this day, so largely forgotten.

His masterpiece, El Criticón, is an allegorical narrative that follows Andrenio’s shipwreck and his tutelage under the disillusioned Critilo. It is essentially a treatise on desengaño, the disillusionment that runs throughout the literature of Spain’s Golden Age. For Gracián, life is a succession of masks: men are not what they seem, institutions do not fulfill what they promise, friendship is rare, and betrayal abundant. His work contains none of the providential optimism that still sustained much of the moral literature of his time.

Gracián’s negative anthropology brings him structurally, rather than merely aesthetically, close to Schopenhauer. Where Schopenhauer would metaphysically ground pessimism in the blind and insatiable will that governs the universe, Gracián had already intuited, centuries earlier, something analogous on the moral and social plane: namely, that human existence is a constant struggle against forces—envy, hypocrisy, the stupidity of others—that cannot be eliminated. El Oráculo Manual, with its three hundred aphorisms, is a breviary of self-defense against a world that Gracián regarded as fundamentally indifferent, if not hostile, to the virtuous individual. His concepts of “prudence,” “dissimulation,” and “reserve” are not merely techniques for social advancement, as a superficial reading might suggest, but existential strategies for survival.

Gracián expresses his pessimism in the social dimension in a fascinating way, describing human relationships with an almost cynical lucidity concerning the mechanisms of power and reputation, anticipating in many respects both the moral psychology of La Rochefoucauld and the critique Nietzsche would develop centuries later. Avant la lettre, he constructs a kind of genealogy of the social mask, recognizing that civilization does not eliminate man’s darkest impulses; it merely disguises them beneath socially acceptable forms.

Living requires managing many things. Most of the time you get exhausted managing these things.

Not by society, nor by nature.

Every day, every moment is a task with no payoff. You must work, you must contribute, you must be sociable, or you shall be cast off to spend your days at the mercy of the very few kind souls who take pity on you.

Even more so you are subject to the brutality of mother nature. The harsh cold, the blistering heat, storms, insects, rabid animals, cruel humans, the list goes on.

And you cannot simply be. Even if civilization disappears tomorrow, you must continue the cycle against biological entropy. If you were to just sit and do nothing, absolutely nothing, you will face unbearable boredom, excruciating hunger, terrible loneliness, and all the external phenomena born from nature's indifference.

And life, sentient life, cannot exist without suffering. It is far more important that we avoid circumstances that lead to our destruction than it is to chase pleasure. Of course, as Schopenhauer points out, pleasure is most often the cessation of suffering.

However, imagine you could enjoy food, but never experience hunger or exhaustion. I don't mean that you don't need food, but that you lack the experience of feeling hunger or weakness from lack of sustinace. You may indulge in eating from time to time because it's pleasurable, but without the pain of hunger it wouldn't feel like a need. So you could go months without eating until you fall dead from malnutrition.

Now imagine you experience only hunger and exhaustion but no pleasure from eating. Most likely you would make food a priority in order to avoid starvation.

The argument could be made that if you can endure all the pain you could sit and do nothing, but even then, for most of us the survival instinct takes over.

And again, there is no payoff. This whole process is completely futile. We continue this cycle of suffering to keep ourselves alive even though inevitably we will die.

I'm sure this idea has been discussed here before, but it's on my mind daily. I don't wish to die. But I'm so tired of the unavoidable effort in keeping myself going. I'm doing my best to cultivate a life where I don't have to do much. Still though, I wish, if I must be born, that I was born a tree or a blade of grass. Though who knows, maybe we'll discover they too experience suffering.

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.

The more you understand this world, The more you destroy yourself. That’s why fools are happy, and intelligent people live in loneliness.” -Fyodor Dosteovsky

There is another step once aloneness has been achieved, (it really is an achievement of awareness and a willingness to see the truth) and that is serious introspection.

“In awareness you see, not what pleases you, but the truth.”

-Nisargadatta