Fatalism

[loveofreason]

Anyone describe themselves as fatalistic?

If a war can't be won then I see no point in fighting it.

If loss is inevitable then I want to just die already...


The problem really lies in fatalistic choices being based on a monstrous distortion of facts... when the mindview is warped and thoughts are out of control. When we're irrational.

For anyone with experience of their runaway thoughts leading to bad decisions and fatalistic behaviour... have you found a way to counter the process?

Yes... is it possible to successfully contend against irrational fatalism?

 

[NoID10ts]

You know I'm fatalistic, love. I've been on a partiucularly bad wave of it lately, especially where my wife's nephew (who lives with us) is concerned. Strangley, I had two weird dreams about him that were purely from the depths of my psyche and I awoke wondering why I'm so pissed over the stupid things he does. It was like a moment of clarity.

I think maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion, but I'm not sure. It's a bad feeling and I don't know how to counter it.

Is this some deep psychological flaw tracing back to childhood? Is it something to do with being INTP?

What if things are really as bad as I percieve them?

What if their even worse?

 

[loveofreason]

How can we trust our perceptions?

How do we know they accurate?

Do I give up and say... I'll never know... therefore any action I take may be based on inaccurate information... so I must stop all doing in order to prevent mistakes...

further, I must not voice an opinion... it will be flawed...

I must just cease to be active and entirely give up struggling for my position in life...

 

[NoID10ts]

I'll slit your wrist, if you'll slit mine.

For me, part of the problem is that my perceptions sometimes prove to be absolutely correct, even when no one initially believes me. This always makes me question whether it's justified. Perhaps there is always a kernel of truth there that is then blown out of proportion.

Eh. Someone more healthy need to respond, I guess.

 

[Agent Intellect]

so, there's a word for how my mind works? to me its not only expecting defeat, but when it happens (and it often does) i dwell on it as if it were the beginning of the end. i know that this type of thinking has created much of my avoidance and procrastinating behavior (aside from just laziness).

 

[Red Mage]

so, there's a word for how my mind works? to me its not only expecting defeat, but when it happens (and it often does) i dwell on it as if it were the beginning of the end. i know that this type of thinking has created much of my avoidance and procrastinating behavior (aside from just laziness).

Ditto x 1000.

 

[Kuu]

Anyone describe themselves as fatalistic?

If a war can't be won then I see no point in fighting it.

If loss is inevitable then I want to just die already...


The problem really lies in fatalistic choices being based on a monstrous distortion of facts... when the mindview is warped and thoughts are out of control. When we're irrational.

For anyone with experience of their runaway thoughts leading to bad decisions and fatalistic behaviour... have you found a way to counter the process?

Yes... is it possible to successfully contend against irrational fatalism?

No, not possible. Why even waste your energy when you know its a certain failure...

The worst is not procrastinating or just not doing any personal projects, but getting dragged into something by someone else, and you know since the very beginning that its gonna be an epic failure, but still have to move ahead with that sense of impending implosion lurking around the corner, until the sweet satisfaction of destruction proves you right to all the idiots who told you off on your negativity.

 

[Kidege]

Oh you people!
When you're fatalistic you accept it joyfully! Otherwise you're just depressed.

Tekton, Jose Alfredo should have taught you better, but I'll forgive you just this once on grounds of you being a northerner.

I guess I'm a bit less fatalistic than the culture around me. These days I find myself saying things like "if possible" or "God willing" before stating even general ideas for the future.

For those of you not into his music, the particular brand of fatalism Jose Alfredo advocated says that:

a) life's worth nothing
b) death's as meaningful/meaningless as birth
c) we can find sense through joy, love, grief, courage, generosity, rebellion, acceptance and our relation with God.

Jose Alfredo's followers can be found singing out loud and getting drunk in plenty of bars...

 

[Toad]

Is fatalism like when I am supposed to clean my room, but I know I don't have time to clean it well so I don't do it at all?

 

[Enne]

Is fatalism like when I am supposed to clean my room, but I know I don't have time to clean it well so I don't do it at all?

No, that's a sound understanding of the second law of thermodynamics (my ESXJ mom doesn't have one, on the other hand..).

 

[Artifice Orisit]

Existentialistic spite as demonstrated by The Myth of Sisyphus is an effective way of counteracting the demotivation caused by Fatalism.

 

[Android]

I started replying to this about 10 ten different ways.. I want to make some argument against fatalism, but can't find a way to do it that I think others will understand. Fatalism rarely does anybody any good.. so nut up and get over it. It would take an essay to relate how I've done so, but your path will be different. Suicide, physical or psychological, is the alternative.

 

[walfin]

Fatalism is probably the result of learned helplessness.

Monkeys can't think themselves out of it. But humans can try to.

The best thing to do is probably to try something new, to jolt your mind out of the idle loop. And if that fails, I guess you could try ECT

 

[Sapphire Harp]

Do you suppose fatalism could be called the inability to accept failures?

I have been fatalistic in my life, but I find it's going away over the years... I think the concept of 'groundlessness' is something I'm subscribing to more and more - and I'm finding it as something of a counter to fatalist thinking - if not a direct one.

If you're unfamiliar with the idea, I understand groundlessness as the notion that you really have no point of rest, nothing to rely on, no home base... When embraced, the world changes your situation and you just change what you're doing and where you're going accordingly - there's no sense of loss because there was nothing you could count on to begin with...

Fatalism... or perhaps more specifically the fears that drive it - wanting to count on only what's certain... seems like the need to have a completely assured goal before even beginning to play. If you can't have the very outcome you want, in the way you want to earn it, it's no good...

(Maybe the above isn't fatalism so much as one way it manifests...)

I find that the game 'Hexxagon' in the arcade is very good at provoking me to fatalistic responses... The board starts quite undivided, but you play on and eventually you and the computer each begin to own sections and have a front dividing your two areas... Then, sooner or later, the computer pulls a brilliant move and plunges into my territory and completely takes apart a seemingly safe zone of what was mine...

I usually react something like, 'No Gawdammit! That was my territory! You can't take it!' But it can and it did... In the spirit of groundlessness, I should simply be doing the same to the computer... No territory ever belongs to either player, but that's never how I think of it. When my notions of how things go get disrupted, I just want to quit because I can't muster enough flexibility to reorient my perspective and keep going...

I also find, in many inevitably failing situations, if you just keep pushing for your goal (impossible though your path to it might be), when you get closer - you may notice other options and paths that weren't available before...

So, one opposite of being fatalistic then is trying to be tenacious?

Do I give up and say... I'll never know... therefore any action I take may be based on inaccurate information... so I must stop all doing in order to prevent mistakes...

further, I must not voice an opinion... it will be flawed...

These thoughts, in particular, are quite similar to what was being talked about in the inconstancy thread... Or rather, same issue - different angle...

I'm on the J-driven outreach tonight, but I feel like I came up with a pretty good alternate notion for LoR's despairing thoughts over there, so this will jump right to that post I made...
​

 

[Waterstiller]

^ Wonderful post. (I also enjoyed your post in the inconstancy thread).

 

[Beat Mango]

@walfin - fatalism as described by the OP could definitely be seen as a symptom of learned helplessness. The problem is it's not entirely illogical. And it's also like, what came first, the thought or the feeling.

 

[Paranoid Android]

Yes. There's one way to believe in fatalism because of your helplessness or disappointment. This belief comes from emotions, and maybe can be cured. Though if you believe in fatalism because you got this answer while logically analyzing can be a more dangerous thing. This can't be "cured" easily.

Though I think this emotional fatalism makes you blind, and if you cure yourself out of it and begin to hope and live like a normal person doesn't mean that you're not blind anymore. So I usually think logical analyzing can help you a lot. And yes, sometimes you get really disappointing answers.
Though my neuralgic point is what if people should sometimes just live and enjoy happiness, love etc., because this is how they will find the final meaning of everything or God, and there's no need to analyze everything, because in this way sometimes you loose more.
Where is the point when you don't have to analyze something, just forget it, enjoy life or believe in idealist, objective truth?

 

[Architect]

No I never understood fatalism, in the true sense. If the war is about to be lost, then doing an early exit sounds smart, not fatalistic.

The defining characteristic of evolution is progressively beating the odds, I see no reason to not further the process to the best of our abilities and chance.

 

[snafupants]

Life's presented without clear rules/purpose. You can commit suicide in the next four minutes, you can invest all of your money in donuts, anything goes and we're all destitute of the script.

 

['lg]

This subject (& reading responses to it) always reminds me of those tv & movie scenes where the camera is focused so close to an object you can't tell what it is -- then they pan back slowly and more information comes in view where you start to figure out (or you think you've figured out) what the object is -- THEN it keeps panning out and info you didn't even consider comes into view and your understanding grows even more, only to be proven wrong once again a few seconds later when more info comes into view.

The point is, the camera could theoretically pan out forever and we would never see the entire picture or know everything about this image no matter how long we watch. This idea parallels religion and science ... both separately and together like a figure 8. No matter how we word an idea, there is always going to be missing information that we just didn't think to consider or knew existed.

All we can form our paradigm & opinions on is the information we actually have. We can't utilize info we don't have or haven't thought of -- which makes any thought or fact we think we know relatively useless in reality (because we can't know everything about everything). However, we can get by with our current reasoning usually, just because we can fool ourselves into thinking we actually know certain facts & figures to navigate in the world. If our way of life seems to be 'working' then we believe our paradigm to be solid, which brings forth confidence.

If our way of life is not working, we either think we are doing something wrong or the people around us are doing something wrong (maybe a mixture of the two). Rarely do we consider that we just can't see enough of the picture to be able to navigate effectively. Many times when life seems to be failing us (feel we are experiencing more negative than positive), we don't consider education/research to be the key to tipping the balence in our favor. The more we know, the more we realize we can never know as much as we wish we could.

Understanding that can cause anxiety or relief -- depending on age and life experience.

Unfortunately, we are in the dark period for new truths to be discovered and old truths to get buried by the realm of sci-fi. Digital tinkering with reality & effectively passing it off as truth is where we are right now. It can be very difficult for people to sift through real facts vs 'rejiggered' reality, which has reversed the reality camera to zoom in closer to objects rather than panning outward.

 

[masterpeez]

@'lg

Thought provoking! I agree, its so fucking difficult to find reality, and the reason is that we don't ultimately don't know what that is.

I'm a fatalist. And it definitely has negative effects on my well-being, but unfortunately I can't let myself fall for any untruth, and that keeps me in an existentialist state. I'll cave eventually and lie to myself.