Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2010–2022years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Albert Camus, the stranger
Earnest hemmingway, the old man and the sea
Have read many times, I like short books!
- Getting into a habit of exercise is the obvious answer. A less conventional advice that has sometimes worked for me is to totally embrace the feeling of being somber, and binge on some of the classic sort of miserable apathetic existentialist books. Things like Albert Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausia, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Sometimes after I have read those works, after I have stopped trying to ignore the feeling and just went all in for a few days, do I even get bored with being miserable and then start to look for other emotions to experience, and usually they're a lot happier in flavour. Obviously this advice could also exacerbate the problem, so try it at your own risk.
- So you rationally came to the conclusion that life is suffering, and rationally determined that suffering is bad and should be ended, but realize your own reluctance to end such suffering. What, then, do you think to be more likely: you are rational about all these things up until what, from this view, seems like an arbitrary point; or there's another piece to the puzzle - a sort of joy in realizing the absurdity of this existence and seeking contentment in spite of it?
Disclaimer: you're free to believe what you want, and it's neither my business nor my concern whether or not you pass on your particular genes, I just can't resist this discussion.
Related reading if you're interested: Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus), Sartre (Nausea, Being and Nothingness)
- > There were short, punchy openers like: Mother died today –Albert Camus, The Stranger
Well, that's only half the line. The real punch is the next part:
> Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know
