Sociopath Community

The biggest fear I have is looking back to find out I never had control to begin with. And feeling in control is something very deceptive because more often than not it's not that you're taking charge. you just stopped resisting. And suddenly you feel like you're moving forward while in reality you abandoned your dreams and are conventionalising your life. At a certain point I'm terrified I'll lose the person I never got to be to begin with and only realise subconsciously which will drive my existential angst up and I won't be able to put a finger on why exactly I want to fucking sleep. 

cant relate

in english please

Xadem said:

you're done.

Xadem said: 

The biggest fear I have is looking back to find out I never had control to begin with. And feeling in control is something very deceptive because more often than not it's not that you're taking charge. you just stopped resisting.

Has Youtube been sending that shit at you too lately? 

And suddenly you feel like you're moving forward while in reality you abandoned your dreams and are conventionalising your life. 

What's wrong with letting yourself be comfortable? 

Xadem said: 

I've never wanted to become who I am now, but if I could choose I wouldn't know who else to be. Somewhere I'm convinced that I never could have been anyone else, but then all my attempts and successes at changing are but sprints towards the inevitable anyways. If I were to create an ideal to pursue, how pure would it be? If breaking the cycle means being outlandish or extravagant then what happened to setting realistic goals or staying true to yourself? If I don't know who I am and worse, if I don't know who I want to be, how can I be sure that who I've left behind was so bad to begin with? Is feeling one way or another the only indication I can get? 

Xadem said: 

The biggest fear I have is looking back to find out I never had control to begin with. And feeling in control is something very deceptive because more often than not it's not that you're taking charge. you just stopped resisting. And suddenly you feel like you're moving forward while in reality you abandoned your dreams and are conventionalising your life. At a certain point I'm terrified I'll lose the person I never got to be to begin with and only realise subconsciously which will drive my existential angst up and I won't be able to put a finger on why exactly I want to fucking sleep. 

I think you're overthinking things. "Who You Are" isn't some kind of mystical, inaccessible noble truth. It's just a collection of your most recent feelings/relationships/actions. It's also transient and malleable.

I don't really understand why you have such lofty, metaphysical ideas about who you're supposed to be. Seems like a recipe for disappointment to me. 

Xadem said:

Somewhere I'm convinced that I never could have been anyone else, but then all my attempts and successes at changing are but sprints towards the inevitable anyways.

This is true, but the expression also writes off the value of your experience between here and death. Like yeah, I can get up on a rooftop right now and plunge off, and if we think about the universe as a giant algorithm, I've not really changed a lot. Any sort of value judgment on life itself anyways—is just some kind of projection of what worth means to me, relative to myself. But here we are regardless, and if you find existing to something worth prolonging, might as well make it a pleasant experience.

Xadem said:

If I were to create an ideal to pursue, how pure would it be?

I don't think I'd be able to do this simply because I don't see any ideals warranting that kind of devotion. It may be more accurate to say that I focus on the more immediate things like making sure I like my day-to-day life, making sure my life won't suck in the future, etc. Living up to some sort of virtuous ideal seems like what people do when they need rigid definitions in life. Or what they have to do because their conscience rules over everything.

Xadem said:

If I don't know who I am and worse, if I don't know who I want to be, how can I be sure that who I've left behind was so bad to begin with? Is feeling one way or another the only indication I can get?

Feeling might be the best indication you can get? Sometimes I get into modes where I wonder how different I might be if I chose x or y instead of z...it's not a really productive thing to do other than helping to illustrate how I got to where I am, and maybe how I can alter things moving forward.

Xadem said:

The biggest fear I have is looking back to find out I never had control to begin with. And feeling in control is something very deceptive because more often than not it's not that you're taking charge.

There's a really cool book on this topic, The Illusion of Conscious Will. The book strips apart the idea of agency by pointing out things like how an EEG shows we make decisions before we're consciously aware of them, how we can sense agency where we have none, etc. Does it really matter if you're totally in the driver seat like some sort of homunculus? I don't think so.

Xadem said:

And suddenly you feel like you're moving forward while in reality you abandoned your dreams and are conventionalising your life. At a certain point I'm terrified I'll lose the person I never got to be to begin with and only realise subconsciously which will drive my existential angst up and I won't be able to put a finger on why exactly I want to fucking sleep.

I wonder if this isn't dissatisfaction with your current status in life more than a life trajectory confused or uncertain. The trajectory can be a rationale for why things are how they are, but maybe not the real foundation.

Outro said: 

I don't really understand why you have such lofty, metaphysical ideas about who you're supposed to be. Seems like a recipe for disappointment to me. 

Where else is there to go when you've already thought on more immediate needs? 

Turncoat said: 

Outro said: 

I don't really understand why you have such lofty, metaphysical ideas about who you're supposed to be. Seems like a recipe for disappointment to me. 

Where else is there to go when you've already thought on more immediate needs? 

 It’s not the existential dread that I’m questioning, it’s the grandiose idea that “who we are” is some kind of extrinsic riddle to be unlocked, rather than just the manifest sum of how we’re behaving in the world right now.

When you go looking for your identity anywhere other than inwardly, you turn into one of those people who’ll emulate a movie character for months after seeing it in the cinema. If you wanna know who you are, look at your most recent actions, thoughts and feelings. It’s not more complex than that.