This is tangential to redpill, but hopefully interesting and perhaps helpful to me and others.

I am "bipolar," or in retrospect finding temporary meaning in external things (money, women, career, physical image, fame) resulting in mania and elation, only to see all these temporary things fall away leaving me depressed, and sometimes suicidal / hospitalized. I'm not being general, I made 100k one year, "dated" 8 or 9 women this year, put out two albums, etc. Yay, ego!

After getting out of the hospital for depression for the 6th time in my life this week, I saw the same patterns I do everywhere. This guy's talking to this girl because he wants to fuck and she's not interested. Everytime I look at this girl she plays with her hair but this other woman is completely aloof. I mention my career to this guy and he blurts out what he does because I inadvertently wounded his ego. This guy says we should hang out outside the ward because he thinks he can get money out of me.

This was all during 3 days in a really shitty psych ward, and those weren't the ones pacing or screaming.

I left thinking we are all just animals with very complex patterns. This viewpoint is devastating.

What has helped me was reading a quote by Woody Allen and his view that life is indeed meaningless (I felt like this was pulled from my brain):

"I'm not saying that one should opt to kill oneself," Allen said. "But the truth of the matter is, when you think of it, every 100 years, there's a big flush, and everybody in the world is gone. And there's a new group of people. And that gets flushed, and there's a new group of people. And this goes on and on interminably — and I don't want to upset you — toward no particular end, no rhyme or reason."

"And the universe, as you know from the best of physicists, is coming apart, and eventually there will be nothing, absolutely nothing. All the great works of Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Da Vinci, all that will be gone. Now, not for a long time, but shorter than you think, really, because the sun is going to burn out much earlier than the universe vanishes, so you don't have to wait for the universe to vanish. It'll happen earlier than that. So all these plays and these symphonies, the height of human achievement, will be gone completely. There'll be no time, no space, nothing at all. Just zero.

"That's why over the years, I've never written or made movies about political themes. Because while they do have current critical importance, in the large scheme of things, only the big questions matter, and the answers to those big questions are very, very depressing. What I would recommend — this is the solution that I've come up with — is distraction.

"That's all you can do! You get up, you can be distracted by your love life, by the baseball game, by the movies, by the nonsense. Can I get my kid into this private school? Will this girl go out with me Saturday night? Can I think of an ending for the third act of my play? Am I going to get the promotion in my office? All this stuff, but in the end the universe burns out. So I think it's completely meaningless, and to be honest, my characters portray this feeling. Have a good weekend."

I went from that to stumbling on Camus and other philosophers who reason that if one views life as meaningless, there are three options for coping:

  1. Suicide. Obviously I've considered this greatly, but ultimately can't do it, not for lack of willpower or caring for others, but it would be the ultimate defeat in admitting life is meaningless.

  2. Find God. I renounced God my first year of Catholic school as it never made sense for me. Too many things happen that just don't fit, and my rational brain won't allow it.

I test drove Buddhism for a year meditating and doing yoga, and shutting your thoughts off for a bit is a neat trick, but for me it quickly goes back to a dark, nihilistic "fuck the world" belief.

  1. Absurdism. This is how I am currently coping. If life has no meaning, you never make sense of it all. Choose to laugh, because you don't want to sleep all day.

"7 AM! Let's go for a jog! It doesn't matter at all Weeeee! Hey look my neighbor's walking her dog I'll play with it! Hi dog! Oh look, a dead cat! How'd that cat die? Who knows? Keep running!"

It's like making Tim and Eric your inner monologue.

If someone could point out a better strategy / way of distracting myself, I'm all for it. In the meantime I'll be watching Zach Galafanakis scream "The Hot Tub's too HOT!"

Edit: As a result of my mindset, I've lost the ability to put up with lots of bullshit - silliness at my corporate job which I've quit, my parents endless self medication of work, alcohol and TV, women wanting to talk to me because "I'm hot." Conventionally I've had or have everything a man can want and not only is it empty, but everyone hates me for having it. If God is real, he's a master of irony.

Job is over tomorrow, lease is up at the end of the month, parents are likely disowning me tomorrow, I have about 2 months expenses saved up. Since suicide is silly, any idea what I should do?