How to save oneself from this particular angst?

Question

This question relates to the angst depicted in the movie Annie Hall, when the younger version of Woody Allen's character feels demotivated about life when he realizes that the universe is expanding.

For the sake of this question, I'll assume that there's an as yet unknown argument to justify a telos, an aim, or a purpose for our civilization's existence and actions, analogous to an individual human being's self assured will to live and to make choices.

On a pragmatic level, it seems safe to assume that it's typical for human beings to make choices based on use: We keep doing things that'll benefit others, and perhaps ourselves. We do things to minimize our future regrets. But given the finiteness of an individual's lifetime, that translates to actions that'll benefit those who'll continue to live after the lifetime of the individual.

Now it is true that the civilization as a whole (by which I mean the 8 billion of us), although a big complex system, does not possess a centralized information processing unit to direct its own actions, in the best possible way, like the way the brain directs an individual's actions. But, nevertheless, it seems to take a course, shaped by many different factors over timescales much larger than the lifetimes of any individual person.

That flow, hopefully for the common good, seems to provide some motivation at an individual level to make choices that'll contribute positively, at varying levels, to the current and future societies. That motivation works at the level of an individual, and also at the level of groups of individuals, such as an organization.

Assuming no malice, the choices made by such individuals or organizations, are invariably directed to benefit life—- life of people, or life of other living things on earth.

But now I want to consider the fact that in approximately five billion years from now, when the sun enters the red giant phase, it's very likely that all life on earth will cease to exist2. Assuming that life is unique to planet earth and doesn't exist anywhere in the cosmos, after that point, it's just lifeless, rocky, cosmic emptiness everywhere, for eternity.

After that point, whatever it is that was done before with intention and purpose, either at an individual level or the societal level, won't matter. How to save oneself from the angst that can arise from this realization?

Answer 1

Q: How to save myself from this angst?
A: Be consistent with your assumptions.

In more detail

Not just the literal assumption:

Assuming that life is unique to planet earth

But also more significantly

Now I want to consider the fact that in approximately five billion years from now when the sun enters the red giant phase, it's very likely that all life on earth will cease to exist.

Are you a body? Are you entirely and exclusively a body? (Usually called the "materialist" assumption).

If yes, then the 5 billion is pointless speculation. You will die within a hundred and since there's nothing like spirit, soul, subtle body etc, that's that — there's nothing after!

If no, then why the attachment to this specific space rock in this specific solar system?

The Real Assumption

So then we come to your real assumption, the one you feel but not articulate:

Although I will die in a good good deal less than 5 mill... (sorry 5 billion) years, something about my life at least potentially can have meaning even with "me gone".

How on earth can any materialist consistently hold to this position?

And if you see this line of reasoning through, you will see that materialism is an absurdly inconsistent position to hold philosophically.

I suggest you think this through on your own. At least try.

But if you need help, see.

Answer 2

1. I agree with you:

   Now it is true that the civilization as a whole […], although a big complex system, does not possess a centralized information processing unit to direct it's own actions, in the best possible way, like the way the brain directs an individual's actions.

   It is exactly our mind-in-the brain-system which shows that central processing is not necessary to control a complex system. However, it took the biological evolution some millions of years to develop this distributed system.

2. I do not assume that the evolution, that life on earth, or that the human species satisfy any higher goal. From the viewpoint of life on earth it were no loss when the human species did not develop, from the viewpoint of the earth it were no loss when no life on earth developped, from the viewpoint of the sun it were no loss when the earth did not develop, from the viewpoint … Always looking top-down.

   Of course, the whole evaluation changes when considered from my personal viewpoint, bottom-up.

3. But indeed, the end in 5 billion years is not avoidable. One cannot change the facts, one has to understand and accept them. Of course, that’s easily said, but needs time to realize and to become familiar with.

   Explanation can change what initially is Angst.

Answer 3

It is the eminent Ray Kurzweil who has formulated the Law of Accelerated Returns: Technological progress is able to use the just-created, current technology. Technological progress happens at a rate corresponding to its current state. This is the definition of an exponential development: Technological progress is exponential. Kurzweil made unusually correct predictions as a futurologist based on this realization because he was essentially the only one who truly employed this exponential model of progress: We humans have a hard time wrapping our head around exponential processes, which are essentially explosions.

It took a few billion years for life to form on Earth. It took another few billion years for life to become multi-cellular. It took a couple hundred millions for the first animals to reach land. It took a couple hundred million years more until the first humanoids emerged, and a couple million more for homo sapiens.

It took only 6000 years to go from stone age hunters and gatherers to TV watching couch potatoes. Cultural evolution is incredibly fast. It is, essentially, like updating your operating system instead of designing and building a new computer. We can not make proper assumptions about the state of affairs in another 6,000 years: Barring any catastrophes, the exponential technological progress will have created a world entirely foreign to us.

5 billion years is much too long to think about. Life on Earth may have been around for a comparable time, give or take a billion years or two. In that time, the shape of organisms has changed from primitive cells to sperm whales and Aspen groves; even if we didn't have just invented genetic engineering our bodies might be as different from our current ones.

If we survive all the Great Filters we may then be a type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, having populated and put to use the entire Milky Way. More than a few stars will have flamed out by then, and others been born. The Sun would be the equivalent of a block heating station, or perhaps a space heater, of which there are many billions. We may decide to stabilize the Sun one way or another to preserve Earth, out of nostalgia or respect or worship. We will certainly be able to do so.

Answer 4

Confiteor, non liquet ... but the point to Albert Camus' absurdism is that the ultimate, total meaninglessness of life is unremediable. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to change facts. "Reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" ~ Philip K. Dick. If you read Camus, I suggest you do, he prescribes "you have to imagine Sisyphus happy". Make what you want of that. Hypothesis non fingo.

"The only real philosophical problem is that of suicide" ~ Albert Camus.

Answer 5

If the only things that matter are things that will matter forever, and things not mattering forever won't matter forever, then things not mattering forever don't matter.

If things not mattering forever matters, and things not mattering forever won't matter forever, then some things matter which won't matter forever.

If things not mattering forever is a thing that matters forever, then some things matter forever.

Answer 6

Easy, the sun expanding to swallow the Earth is somebody else's problem and I can therefore ignore it. It would be a whole lot more salient if I were one of those 4.99999gigayear future humans, but even then the chance that I would be living at the exact time where life ceased to be possible is extremely low. Only if I were on the exact cusp would the question even have meaning to me.

Answer 7

There’s an argument to be made that the only things that truly matter in the long run are things with lasting impact. If we were truly alone in this world, sentient beings with no maker and no life after death, then even in our own individual existence there would be a certain purposelessness beyond the collective one you describe. In the moment each action would have a purpose but as we near our certain end and think about our past and our future, if we imagine a black nothingness, our life simply snuffed out into oblivion, what purpose was there in our life?

But if we have a maker and if we have a life after death, then there is purpose because our “end” isn’t an end after all and the question instead becomes which of our actions on this earth have eternal permanence that does not end with our death? In short the solution to that dread that you mention is to know and believe that there is purpose by believing in God and then find out what pleases him—what does he define as being of eternal importance and then do that.

That thing is believing in Jesus (see the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the book of Romans, all in the New Testament of the Bible for more on what this means) and repenting of your sins so that your life after your physical death on this earth can be with God in heaven and so that your actions in service of God in this life can carry into the next life in the form of treasure in heaven, a reward by the grace of God for service that is over and above the free gift of eternal life that’s through faith not earned. You can live a life with eternal impact and eternal purpose.

This knowledge keeps me from getting depressed as I advance in years and consider my own mortality. I can view my impending death not with dread and hopelessness but with joy, knowing that every year brings me closer to being with my God in heaven, a far better existence than the one I experience here and now. Here there is pain, sickness, sorrow, and death. There there will be none of these things and we will be with God in a closeness that we can only imagine now.

The other side of the coin is to reject Jesus and live a life for yourself in this existence, receiving the due reward for your sins in the next, separated from God for all eternity, and experiencing the full weight of knowing that your life on earth was without purpose. How much better to choose life (eternity in heaven with God) than death (eternity in hell apart from God), the former a life of eternal purpose, the latter a life of eternal futility.

Answer 8

To me, 90% of your article is a statement of opinion, or a hypothesis, or whatever you may call it. Nothing of what you write is self-evident, and many people do not think your way. So one way to tackle your anxiety is to get away from all these statements which are founded on nothing, with nothing to suggest they are true (neither that they are untrue, in many cases they are completely outside of the range of topics we can reason about), or follow from each other. Even if you do not replace the belief system encapsulated by those statements with a new one, the original problem can go away.

If you need a direction to go when moving away from those assumptions, then the Meaning of Life page on SEP gives you an entrypoint on what Philosophy has come up with. If you want to tackle all of this in a logical manner, that may or may not work for you. I mean, Nihilism, duh.

That said, Philosophy is based on logic, and it is generally very hard to use logic to argue people out of positions that they have not argued themselves into, in the first place. So if all those beliefs you mentioned are deeply ingrained in your character, I fail to see how Philosophy could help you.

Going away from Philosophy, generally, anxiety is amenable to therapy - there may be good results with cognitive therapy or other variants. Those would focus more on giving you mental tools to employ if and when the anxiety arises, or maybe where those persuasions come from, and whether they can be untied somehow.

A further practical way to tackle this kind of problem is meditation, especially Awareness/Mindfulness/Vipassana Meditation, where you focus on becoming aware about what enters your brain via senses; about how your thoughts do their own thing, how emotions arise and go away and so on and forth, and just let everything happen. This can be extremely helpful, as it makes it abundantly clear that you (whatever "you" is, or whether there is a "you" at all, notwithstanding) are not in control about any of this, and things like anxiety are just automatic processes running in your brain. Meditation can give you this experience, and over time it can also lead to you not getting annoyed or crippled by it anymore. It is what it is.

Answer 9

If life is pointless because it's finite, it would also be the case that it is pointless to have a nice meal, to watch a movie, to play a game, to talk to people, to engage in hobbies. Why would you do any of that when you know there will come an end to the meal, to the movie, to the game, to the conversation?

But most of us engage in those things, because the point is that we enjoy it - there doesn't need to be some eternal consequences for us to enjoy it. In fact, some argue that the finitude adds more meaning to it. If you eat your favourite meal once a month, that may be really special, but if you eat it every day, it becomes somewhat boring or you might even start to hate it. Someone might really enjoy a TV series at first, but they lose interest after a few seasons. And so on. This isn't true for everyone all the time, of course, but the point is that there doesn't need to be an eternal purpose for there to be meaning.

Also, if you have an eternity to look forward to, some argue that this diminishes the meaning in whatever you do now. If you have a finite life, this is all you've got, so that makes it as meaningful as it could possibly be for you. If you'll life forever, anything that doesn't have eternal consequences would be less significant - if you'll have billions of years of experiences to look forward to, why would it matter to have one nice day now? If you're always trying to contextualise purpose in terms of eternity, you won't find meaning in a finite life, but you also won't find meaning in an eternal life, because you'll always be focused on the future and never on the present.

One lie religion tells us is that you need eternity to have purpose, but that claim bends and breaks when you apply even a minimal amount of scrutiny to it.

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Of course, there is also the question of what gives us purpose in our finite lives.

But this is something for each individual to figure out for themselves.

Some may feel fulfilled by helping others and through relationships. Some may feel fulfilled by their career, others by their hobbies or by more hedonistic pursuits or by whatever legacy they may leave behind.

None of these are more or less valid than any other, but any one of these may be more or less fulfilling to any given person, and it's up to you to figure out what's most fulfilling to you.

Answer 10

"Now it is true that the civilization as a whole (by which I mean the 8 billion of us), although a big complex system, does not possess a centralized information processing unit to direct it's own actions, in the best possible way"

This is very debatable, especially in light of the Simulation Theory.

In my personal opinion, the World as we know requires constant intelligent adjustments. It would not cancel a free will, but it would put this free will within some boundaries.