[avgcorrection]

> Generally, when people's reason for holding a belief or performing and action is "lol idk", that isn't conducive to a continuing discussion.

That’s not what I meant. I didn’t explain it properly.

You could easily have no reason to live and yet continue living. I guess I’m gonna be forced to say the s-word: living is something that happens while not living (your question: why live?) takes deliberate action, i.e. suicide. But someone could be terrified of killing themselves.

Thus they have no reason to live, and yet no way to end existence as they know it.

Which is again different from “idk”. They know that they have no reason to live. It’s not a mystery.

[BobbyJo]

> You could easily have no reason to live and yet continue living. I guess I’m gonna be forced to say the s-word: living is something that happens while not living (your question: why live?) takes deliberate action, i.e. suicide. But someone could be terrified of killing themselves.

If you sit down and do nothing at all for a week you will die, no work required. To continue living takes work. I believe that was my original point. To do anything more than nothing at all requires some reason, be it reptilian drive, fear of death broadly, or otherwise.

In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.

It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.

[avgcorrection]

> If you sit down and do nothing at all for a week you will die, no work required. To continue living takes work. I believe that was my original point. To do anything more than nothing at all requires some reason, be it reptilian drive, fear of death broadly, or otherwise.

Now you’re changing the goalpost to “reason”. My god. There’s a reason for everything. But it might still suck. You might try to kill yourself by “doing nothing” (very hard and difficult but okay), and yet (as you say) that survival instinct part of you might kick in and “save yourself”. So does that counter any claims about everything you have to do sucking? Not at all.

Say you get to the point where you are about to starve to death. Then the Survival Instinct kicks in and you get something to eat. Does this prove that, actually, you like living? Not at all! It probably sucked to almost starve to death, it probably sucked to get that sudden fear of dying, and things probably suck now (not close to dying) just like they did before you tried that arduous suicide attempt.

> In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.

I guess suicidal people are famously well-adjusted? Well, some are and yet they didn’t think that life was worth living despite that.

Who cares what “well-adjusted” people think? The only claim that I care about is if it is possible to think that basically everything that you have to do sucks. And it seems like there is.

> It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.

No it is not.

Didn’t Schopenhauer claim that life sucked and that we only lived because of a kind of “will to live”? Maybe our old pal “survival instinct” as well as some others?

If Schopenhauer’s philosophy is so easily refuted, why is he one of the more famous philosophers? Just as a beginner refutation practice.

Come to think of it. Don’t people claim that Schopenhaur was inspired by one of the major world religions?

[BobbyJo]

> Now you’re changing the goalpost to “reason”. My god. There’s a reason for everything.

What goalpost?

> Who cares what “well-adjusted” people think?

I imagine the person claiming universal knowledge of the human condition would care. If well adjusted people are an exception to your rule, it's not a great rule.

> The only claim that I care about is if it is possible to think that basically everything that you have to do suck

Oh, if that's the claim then sure. I thought the claim was "everything you have to do sucks", not "it's possible to believe everything you had to do sucks."

Totally agree then. I've met lots of unhappy people that believe that. 100% true.