I'm away from my well annotated copy* of _The Proud Gentleman_ but this letter has almost certainly come from that collection. It makes more sense in context of his other writings from the time. Another quote, from the same, which I remember as vividly as (and juxtaposed with) this letter: "Everybody is looking for someone who can stand up in the wind. It is lonely standing up and crowded lying down. I refuse to be a…
I can't seem to find that book (The Proud Gentleman) on Google. Any chance you have a link to it?
Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
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Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, nice movies. But damn, read the books! Adding to those two, I'd definitely read: * Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_on_the_Campa... * Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Angels:_The_Strange_a... His ability to just push himself into the situations and into what…
Agreed on books over the movies. First time I watched F & L I turned it off. Eventually I read the book which is fantastic. I did go back and watch the movie then and liked it more but the book is much, much better. As for The Rum Diary I'd suggest the book first because there are a few major character changes between it and the movie and it was harder to follow the book after seeing the movie. Unlike F & L the movie…
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#73Understanding how best to live your life is a gradual learning process and is not really so complicated.
The school of life video on it is 60 seconds and covers the basics:
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try getting good at something you're bad at, like, for example, appreciating your life and the lives of those around you. "Yawning void of nothing" is a pretty hilariously inaccurate description of a family and all the life experiences you describe. I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess, that may be improved through deliberate p…
I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess No experimentation necessary, it's blatantly clear that's the case. that may be improved through deliberate practice Perhaps. Or maybe it's just trying to distract yourself from reality through what are commonly accepted "values." Hard to know. I read all those studies about "happiness" comi…
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your honesty. If you would take some time and explain what it is that attracts you in Camus writings, maybe I'll understand you better.
Simply the idea that in the absence of universal meaning, it is the individual that must create meaning. It's along the same idea of what Thompson is writing about. The downside of this approach is if the firmament for what you created meaning from crumbles or never really materializes, leaving a void.
I've read Camus twice. The first time I read The Stranger, I took away meaninglessness, in the sense that existentialism seemed true.
The second time, I nearly threw up (no, I wasn't reading Nausea :-D), but in the sense that I don't think I've ever felt anything was so absolutely evil and wrong, and existentialism false.
I can't explain this in a philosophical way, and it may be a delusional and biased opinion given my life experiences between the two readings, but I think observing intuitions does hint at universal meaning. Intuitions might be intellectual observations of objective truths no different, in principle, from observations of atoms, or reason itself.
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#76Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you imagine what it's like to be on the other side of you? I don't know you, and I wouldn't presume to know anything about you other than what you've revealed in your comments, but what I can say is that you've been handed enough lego blocks to build anything you want to, and it seems like you've set them aside because they're not the specific blocks that you had in mind to build the thing that you envisioned at…
Oh, yea those close to me hate it. Everyone else seems fine cause they only see the professional side, so as far as they know, everything is just A OK Great! Not only family but I have a high stress business to run and people counting on me! Thanks for taking the time to write that out though. In reality, all you write is correct generally. This wasn't intended to be a mini-therapy session, but for what it's worth th…
The way you've described your life reminds me of a book I've (partially) read: Mindfulness in Plain English. Even if you think Buddhism and meditation are a bunch of malarkey, the book itself is worth a read. What specifically comes to mind are parts where the author discusses why one should bother with meditation:
...you are human. And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life.
There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meed somehow and look OK from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully...
...you suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many arms: Chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head saying, "Not good enough yet"...
Maybe the Buddhists have got it right. Perhaps the more worthwhile goal is cultivating a clear and unbiased perception of reality. Honestly, I have no clue; just putting forward an alternative to consider if you haven't already. If you do figure it out, I'd love to know...
Here's a link to the book btw: http://www.budsas.org/ebud/mfneng/mind0.htm
EDIT: reading firstworldman's sibling comment provoked another thought which may head off a semantic issue. Maybe 'happiness' is neither a meaningful nor meaningless objective; it's simply an ill-defined, subjective concept. So when people talk about 'attaining happiness', its possible what they mean by 'happiness' is objectively different to what other people think it is. From what I understand firstworldman to be saying, he has found 'authenticity of experiences and relationships' to be a worthwhile and attainable goal. Incidentally, this seems to square with Buddhist philosophy, which is largely concerned with attaining 'perception of authentic reality' (i.e. 'enlightenment').
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#78For those not familiar with Hunter S. Thompson and looking to get an understanding of his outsize personality and cult following, I highly recommend watching the 2 movies in which Johnny Depp played his character: * Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120669/ * The Rum Diary (2011) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376136/ If you are not already a fan of Johnny Depp, these movies should do i…
Visual representation is breathtaking, in many ways thanx to Terry Gilliam - for me this is the pinnacle of his career. He managed to get so much spirit of the book and atmosphere of those times into it... Countless little details lying here and there.
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you imagine what it's like to be on the other side of you? I don't know you, and I wouldn't presume to know anything about you other than what you've revealed in your comments, but what I can say is that you've been handed enough lego blocks to build anything you want to, and it seems like you've set them aside because they're not the specific blocks that you had in mind to build the thing that you envisioned at…
Oh, yea those close to me hate it. Everyone else seems fine cause they only see the professional side, so as far as they know, everything is just A OK Great! Not only family but I have a high stress business to run and people counting on me! Thanks for taking the time to write that out though. In reality, all you write is correct generally. This wasn't intended to be a mini-therapy session, but for what it's worth th…
When something is hard and you can't manage to get the desired result no matter how hard you try, consider that rather than to keep working 'hard', you just try something different.
I know you haven't (and couldn't, on this forum) encapsulated the breadth of all of the things you've tried to overcome this lack of meaning that you've been experiencing throughout your life. But, and please forgive me if I'm oversimplifying your search, it seems pretty clear that you've been looking in the wrong places. Trying something different doesn't necessarily mean trying a different activity, or finding a new thrill, or a new drug, or anything like that. Put simply, it means try doing something that you wouldn't otherwise do.
When you say that the people around you hate it, that's what I'm getting at when I say, 'Can you imagine what it's like being on the other side of you?' Are you giving the people close to you the access and information they need to help you? Do they know you need their care? Do they know what things they do that give you energy, and what things they do for you that are demotivating and de-energizing? Simply giving them access to 'where you're at' can do a lot to empower them to help you. You can't get through this alone. You need to do everything you can to let them know that you're working on it and that they can help.
When you say that 'everyone else seems fine', that's a symptom of the lack of authentic connections in your life. If you're like most of the people on this forum, it's possible you spend a likely unhealthy amount of time working. That makes it crucially important that you have some professional relationships that can help fuel you to do the best work you can do (for the sake of your own business, your own sanity, and just generally making the world a better place by being easy to work with), and to get through the business of being a human being within the constraints of our economy. I don't know what business you're in, but I would be shocked if you couldn't improve it by being better connected to the people you're working with.
Whatever is stopping you from improving those connections, whether it's introversion, a sense of superiority, or simply being a low-friction provider of a minimal interaction service, just be aware that there are steps that you can take to make those connections stronger. There is not nothing you can do.
The fact that happiness comes from the inside is so easily written off by so many people is a persistent and vexing concern. Think of how much you contain, honestly. Within you is all of the pain and all of the joy of every Russian novel, every bit of the dazzling, puzzling, frustrating and ecstatic complexity of every single film, poem, painting, song, etc, ever made. The degree of difference between you and me and every other human being is infinitesimally small if you zoom out just a little bit. So, if someone else is able to apply that idea that happiness originates from within, so can you. I hate myself for writing things that contrived, but it's true. For what it's worth, you may have to take someone at their word that they were able to build happiness just with what was contained within them. Trust it. It's true. Set aside the practical dilemma of working it out in steps that can be described to fit your life, and understand that it's possible.
You mention having a dozen therapists. That sucks to go through that many therapists and not find 'the one', but please keep searching. It's the same with mentors. The compounding problem of trying to attain happiness and to have massive amounts of real effort turn up little reward is a huge and understandably discouraging one.
Despite the absurd and self-aggrandizing length of this reply, I have no answers and no wisdom that couldn't be more succinctly expressed through common idioms. The only thing I can offer is my own experience, and to vouch for the experience of some people I know that were able to slough off the feeling of torpor and malaise that can set in when hopelessness comes easier than hope.
Your Rodney Dangerfield example is well appreciated. The best comedians give us the pain of the world wrapped in a bow. I have found that in my own life, I get both much happier, and also experience much more sadness and even depression as I open more and deeper connections with other people, and with the world at large. In general, you just feel more. That is one of the beautiful (and obvious) things about connecting with others... you get to feel more.
The 'road' that I mentioned sharing with you was probably a bit presumptuous on my part... the road that I was talking about was basically my own history of trying to obfuscate my needs and feelings with more-than-casual drug and alcohol use, believing that the reason 'things' weren't 'happening' had mostly to do with people/influences/circumstances/other factors outside my control, which led to blame and avoidance and some bad stuff that comes along with those things.
Your example comparing the accumulation of experiences/memories with saving Polaroids is concerning because, sure, collecting Polaroids is a bit boring if they're all the same picture, but ideally they shouldn't be. But anyway the analogy doesn't really work, because the important factor is not that they 'happened', but instead that they accumulate, which leads to deeper connections, new connections, etc.
Sorry in advance for the ridiculous length of this post.
Re: Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's not about the destination it's about the journey" is extremely cliche in my experience, though it may be good advice.
Yes, banality to an embarrassing extreme. That someone would comment "I find this is quite new & profound" gives me a philosopher's wince. Oh well, maybe said commentor is 10 years old.