I cannot be alone in my constantly thinking about existential fatalism. To put it in words is to say that only habit, a thin adherence to convention, and aversion to reprisal is keeping me… performing each day. Is it right to continue physically existing just in spite of the ability to choose whether or not to physically exist? The central issue that punctuates the end of my every thought is the eventual end of, at minimum, all of humanity. At some point in the near or far future, whether as homo sapiens or another evolution, all that humanity is doing now, physically, will be obliterated. If the natural forces under Earth’s sky do not do it, then it will be an asteroid, a meteor, a black hole, or a solar flare that does the trick. Being able to conceptualize such a future event is, with respect to the Earth’s creatures, and only as far as we know, a solely human plight. Our brains are uniquely capable of being time machines. Is the best way to live to act and think as if humanity will live forever, physically or metaphysically, which is to say that our actions will matter into eternity? Is this delusion necessary? Is this one of the origins of religion?
It is my observation that only religious belief concerning an afterlife gives an easy escape from such a bleak thought to the masses. In this, I mean to say that when asked why anyone does anything, the average religious person may reply that to do well while living, now, is not for the rewards of living well, now; rather, living well now is for the unknown, unknowable, unprovable and, therefore, irrefutable rewards subjectively waiting for each soul after (physical) life. The easy counter to this view, for the non-religious types, is the other average person who may say that to do well now is for the well-being of one’s family or to do well for humanity in any little way one can influence. The well-being and actions of family and humanity, though, have already been accounted for, in our train of thought, in the future, along with everything else physically influenced by humans now and ever, as being eventually all for naught despite how attached we feel to anyone’s well-being now. To live as if there is an afterlife, perhaps inhabited by a god, anthropomorphic or not, in which you, or your subjective view of individuation, your soul, will be held accountable for your deeds while living tends to make you live and do well while alive.
Without that view, though, how does one go about living? To answer this for oneself, a thinker, used in place of any preposition pointing to a human who does anything more than react to a day’s events as they come, may go through each philosophy and religion looking for the proper way, or paradigm, to live through this cosmological blink of a life. If the thinker takes each to its end, there are only six ways to live and one other option if not reliant on and adherent to a religious view. These 6 are:
1. The Hedonist Way: get pleasure while you can as the consequences, ultimately, do not matter.
2. The Willingly Deluded Way: clinging to one philosophy or religion’s tenets as a child does a comforting blanket, and the thinker may change the chosen philosophy or religion at any time.
3. The Ever-Present Way: in the now, continually resisting the pull of thoughts of the future or past.
4. The Transcendental Way: not in the strict sense of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller, but in the sense that the only actions worth performing while living this physical life are those that help a thinker transcend the limits of usual human consciousness to enter, attune with, or forever think in a higher reality of sorts.
5. The Absurdist Way: to play the game as if it were truly a game, whose end will come, but the players know this - have fun and act in such different ways regardless of this known end.
6. The Reactive Way: to not usually, or ever, think such existential thoughts and react to whatever this life hands the non-thinker.
It seems to me that these are the six options, or suicide, either by a single, final act, or by living in extreme apathy – giving up any striving.