How to fill the void inside me? I'm sad and unhappy with my life

You could also just do some Yoga or Tai-Chi and be totally sober, or even just sit there on your couch binge-watching episodes of "Frasier."

Filling the void just means existing in a conscious state.

So if you can't control a situation and you can only control your reaction you just look back at the list of principles that are important to you and you react and that is honest and authentic to you and should bring you some measure of satisfaction.

Car accident causes a traffic jam which is at least 5 hours and growing? Turn my engine off and think about what I'd like to do. There is no value to me in seething at the wheel and getting furious. It doesn't bring anything into the world that I feel a connection to and it isn't the person I want to be seen as.

This doesn't mean though that you shouldn't be honest with yourself. Many people get a bit delusional and hypocritical. Consider themselves part of a solution to problems while acting in selfish or self serving ways. Obviously if this is how you choose to live then that is your choice, but it doesn't mean it is honest or enlightened or you've unlocked some sort of secret or something.

Like for me I believe in other people. I believe as social creatures we need other people. I believe that a value judgement taken in isolation with the analysis and opinion of a wider community is subject to delusion. I need other people to validate some of my philosophy so I know that it is not self serving delusional bullshit. Needing others? Shouldn't you be able to sooth and satisfy yourself? I believe this is a lie which fucks us up. Pure egotistical shit, we can self determine everything in isolation?

Anyway. My point is that I believe the happiness of others is essential to my happiness. I don't believe an action which causes suffering to others aligns with my values and I don't believe it to be a positive motivation. I believe engagement with people is important and things should be humanistic.

I say this because a lot of people who start to spout hippy shit like I am often go into you do you which turns into world is fucked so I might as well be hedonistic which turns into living in a fortified compound.

Here's a nice playlist to smooth butter in your ear-brains and massage your gall-bladder.

youtube.com/watch?v=qpMazXiv-lg&list=RDqpMazXiv-lg&start_radio=1&t=3

Interesting. I've found the growing popularity of meditation, mindfulness techniques, exercise classes and any other methods of existing in a semi-automatic state without the constant whirring thoughts that come with consciousness kind of humorous.

It is like ... being alive is precious and having consciousness and awareness is part of being alive, but the more I do it the more stressful it becomes and the more I think about things and try to sort a branching tree of possibilities where I control for risk factors and these start me thinking of the horrible potential outcomes for these risks and I can feel my sympathetic nervous system kicking in and holy shit being alive is hard work.

So the more I exist in the moment, reacting automatically, being 'mindful', seeking out a state where basically I'm like a dumb animal, an absence of conscious thought perversely the happier I often am. Even if this is weirdly close to a state of death, unaware.

The more choices I can make the more alive I am and the more in control I feel and the more aware I am of my brain and how it seems to work to protect me and try to keep me safe. I find certain activities very therapeutic, usually they are mindless ones where I can switch off the constant train of thoughts.

I like gardening. Cycling. Swimming. I especially like gardening because it is often gentle drudgery, repetitive, but it is outside, cyclical, seasonal, feels like it relates to something, takes time to show rewards, can be geeky and controlled or quite wild and holistic. I grow a lot of vegetables and these can be made into things, these things take up time, people like being given them, other people gift you weird seeds and stuff. It brings a lot back.

>You can't really fill the void.

>I am going to focus on what makes me happy.

Those moments, however far-fetched, rare, and random as they may be, when nothing makes you unhappy, and everything makes you happy... that's when the void is filled.

Who knows how long it will last? Who can predict when it will happen? But it exists, and that means that whatever moment it is transcends time, because so many have experienced it at so many different times, and they are trying to communicate it to one another but unable to because it is ultimately subjective to a singular perspective.

So is time.

We have spent the eons of pleasure and pain that span our perspective, after all.

The void is timeless, though. That's obvious, because if there is no existence of any particle within any Planck-length distance throughout the universe, that's bound to a imagined limit of how long you waited to find it, and if that was an infinity, then there would be no time, because forever means forever, and that means that time itself couldn't exist without the paradox of some point where time "ended" or "began" which "forever" would preclude.

So everything must be happening at the same moment, parsed out by various experiences of consciousness that are expressed by whatever methods are available to them as a separate body from the rest of the known conscious universe.

>It is like ... being alive is precious and having consciousness and awareness is part of being alive, but the more I do it the more stressful it becomes and the more I think about things and try to sort a branching tree of possibilities where I control for risk factors and these start me thinking of the horrible potential outcomes for these risks and I can feel my sympathetic nervous system kicking in and holy shit being alive is hard work.

pic related

>Even if this is weirdly close to a state of death, unaware.

I think it is, though. I mean, I feel like a balloon of broken dreams just drifting in some obstacle-course that I don't know how to pass, and even after I've been screamed at by the sergeant or P.E. teacher or whoever is trying to get me through it, there's just this moment where they're like "this isn't working..." and you realize that they don't really know how to get you through it, and you're the only one that does, and so you just end it with as much rapidity and dignity as you can muster before admitting defeat.

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Dick

Was that an epithet or an appellation?

These things are not possible for us to experience due to our nature. We can theorise upon almost everything, but the meat and two veg of daily life is going to come through the sensors and wetware of a stock human being.

Because of that nearly everything which is meaningful to us is out there in the real world and requires interacting on humanistic level. The more time I spend in my head, generally the less happy I am.

>wetware of a stock human being.

Yeah, but that's like saying the wetware of a stock fucking marmoset.

Is a marmoset gay or straight or anything else but a fucking marmoset?

What the fuck is human nature but to experience life, however unimaginably painful as it might be, as human?

Human is larger than anything I know of, and yet it's all I've ever known myself to be.

We've described everything we know how to describe.

How do you describe what happiness is?

>The more time I spend in my head, generally the less happy I am.

But who else's head do you have?

Maybe it's a coalition of heads.

No, the point is that while we can stress out or gain comfort (potentially) by theorising on the nature of time and how it could work, the way it must be experienced, the way time applies to us has to be as a human in the physical realm because that is what we are.

What is time? What does it mean? It being a construct. What does it matter when it comes down to the everyday task of living? We only experience experience one way and if it exists in other ways we cannot perceive them and if something is to come that we are not yet aware of then that had no purpose or meaning to us until we are made aware of it.

The concept of time, the concept of the passage of time, the notion of planning for the future, anticipation of future, awareness of the past, any sadness or regret, stress and anxiety relating to it doesn't go away or change by discussing what if/what could in relation to the passage of time and its physical properties. We still have to experience it as a human using our human limitations and faculties.

Describe happiness? Having my basic needs met. Having freedom. Having choice and potential to engage with the world in ways which align with my core values. Brain chemistry goes up, brain chemistry goes down, it all averages out in the end, but I find perspective and awareness to be a gift for which I am always grateful. The alternative is nothingness which will come for me in the end anyway so I might as well have a positive attitude for the brief time spent having awareness of being a part of the universe experiencing a part of the universe experiencing itself.

The more time I spend in my head? I wouldn't claim to spend time in the head of another. It is more like the greater number of layers of abstract thought which come between me and an action the more potential outcomes exist in my awareness which contain potential negatives and the more of those I'm aware of the more sadness I have against an action which might bring happiness.