Thread by @AlpacaAurelius

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF

It is is not how much beef liver you'll eat today...or what vegetable you'll toss in the trash....

It's what a truly good life means for you.

We live in the age of nihilism. People that have all the trappings of success...everything they could possibly imagine...yet fuller medicine cabinets than ever before in history.

It is because they haven't answered this question

People have no real reason to live...instead modern domesticated humans are chasing a carrot on the stick with no idea where they're going.

“You should work hard”. “You should be educated” “You should be healthy”. Sure. But why?

Without defining what a good life looks like for yourself, you will devolve to society's vision of it...

And today that is consumeristic, materialist, hedonism...

A recipe for nihilism & depression.

Before modern times, the best societies were structured around helping humans to realize the highest good.

Humans were understood as beings that were flawed at birth, but had great potential.

Living a "good life" and realizing your true nature required training and sculpting.

Ethics was the science and process of transforming each being from his deficient state to his ultimate.

Ethics, therefore, presupposed a continuum of human greatness and also that your base nature isn't all that it can be.

This poses a problem: if your base nature isn't all that it can be, it means that you have to go AGAINST it, to become your best and most fulfilled self.

Becoming a good human being isn't something that just naturally happens like a tree growing with rain

It requires you fight your base instincts and define a better path.

Human beings are in this precarious position where we can fall to the lowest lows or rise to the highest highs.

This is what the traditional religious quest was always about.

But modernity erased this framework.

In modern times, there is no such VERTICAL path. All paths are equally valid because everyone is totally equal.

Instead, life is about fulfilling all your desires and paying the man at the end.

Desires and behaviors that people were legitimately killed for in ancient times are now glorified as societal ideals.

It's not only cool to own 50 cars and have casual sex with a new woman, but is a noble aspiration...

But all the ancients realized that this was no way to live.

It's not just arbitrary that you shouldn't fulfill all your base desires.

They realized that they're hellish insatiable addictions that you will NEVER get enough of, resulting in more anxiety and restlessness.

Anybody who has partied enough, bought enough nice things or had enough sex realizes this.

This is not the way.

But most people are so seduced by these things they spend their whole life chasing them, only to realize that the so called "happy life" is really quite miserable.

Wake up. Stop being a pawn to the system and start to define life on your own terms.

Money. Houses. Cars. Women. Sex.

These are not going to fulfill you.

They are a societal bait & switch that only get you to buy into the game for even longer.

You will be a hungry ghost, searching forever.

Chasing these things is living in the Matrix.

Instead, I believe Aristotle is right: to achieve Eudaimonia and lasting fulfillment, you need to define your Telos.

Why do you live? For what purpose? What is the sake for which you are here?

If you think it is money, for instance, why is it that you really want money? What about health?

Real telos are things that are ENDS in themselves, not means to an end...

A telos is something that helps you transcend your bodily desires instead of give into them all.

It is something like love, wisdom, truth, beauty, enlightenment, God, LIVER....

Every society in history knew that the only path to happiness is TRANSCENDING these human, bodily desires.

No man is CONTENT with mere bodily pleasures.

We all yearn for the infinite and the divine, for the VERTICAL path, for living for the sake of something more.

Not many answers here, but something you need to think about if you want to escape the matrix of modernity...the purgatorial pit of nihilism.