/lit/ - Literature

>decide to become stoic
>go outside
>accidentally make eye contact with a girl and she looks away with an expression of extreme disgust
>feel awful

What happened? Why isn't my super awesome Stoicism force field working? How do I use it?

I simply fucking hate all the shit that society and pseudo intellectuals say I should do.

I don't give a shit about gigantic boring as fuck paid by the word Victorian novels or trivial as fuck of their time ranting Russian novels or motivational speaker tier edgy philosophers who would never get away with their shit today by the same pseuds who praise them so much. And I can't believe that late 20th century PoMo has managed to be worse than all that came before, but I'm supposed to worship that as well.

This isn't 800 AD anymore. The pseuds pretend that wanking over the Greeks and Bible is 95 % of what an intellectual is. They never acknowledge anything that isn't academised. They note STEM as a trivial footnote while using it as a launching pad for their own contemporary flailing about within the infinitely large unfalsifiable space of ideas.

I don't care about psychology, macroeconomics, psychiatry, the Education system, wars in far away places, and lots of other stuff.

Life truly does end after university. Every fucking issue is sent through the prism of universities these days. Humanities and social sciences are all bullshit and they try to monopolise so much common sense and twist it. Of course you can't say that and /lit/ will defend them.

I am not entertained by TV shows, video games, or movies any more. Novels are mostly narcissistic barely disguised memoirs.

The working world is 1 % intelligence and 99 % a test of normieness.

Women have lives on easy mode and only go for Chads. People actively hate introverts. University prestige is the main factor for success in life. Most of culture is now too ephemeral to have any significance at all. Travelling is the new alternative to reading big books. Coffee is wagie fuel. I lift heavy weights but I can admit it's a sign of betaness. Working is horrific.

Guys, intellectually I'm all spooked out. I can't stand philosophy because of all the unfalsifiable garbage. Many fields like economics etc are just applied common sense and stamp collecting. I see novels as nothing but entertainment despite pretentious people claiming life / philosophical insights and tonnes of people will consider you a disgusting plebeian if you don't initially read shitloads of boring as fuck canon novels.

I think I am painfully adapting to the idea of the Internet age / information overload by abandoning any pretension that I can be an all rounder or even dilettante in everything. There are ten trillion books called "Introduction to [broad and important field]", even if you only have one of each field.

History is similar to novels. Shitloads of reading along with a shitload pretension thrown on top telling you that you truly cannot no nuthin unless you have an in depth understanding of the Greeks / Romans / Christianity / USA / WW1 / WW2 / financial systems / or shitloads of other topics I can't stand it. And then there's current events. I don't care about climate change, outer space, inequality, China, the EU, applied psychology, the education system, diversity, Russia, South America, refugees, nutrition, mental health, and more. Admitting just one of these would make me an iredeemable idiot, no doubt.

Has anyone else had similar thoughts? The spooks are powerful and must be removed but their removal leaves your mind in a promordial state that is more susceptible to spooks than before.

I go to the city centre and see people shopping and the streets are busy, which is comforting compared to when they're empty, but walking through then brings no epiphanies.

I am so past watching movies or tv shows, even ones that pander to "edgy" young males. I just about read books but only because society tells me I should, though I don't derive much enjoyment

And obviously I have an existential crisis but /lit/ is fucking pathetic in demanding that anyone who has one should immediately "grow up" and become a monotheist and wagecuck. I fucking hate wagecucking. Seeing attractive young people is humiliating. I tell myself every day that I'll soon work intensely on one thing but I can't bear to do this. If you're really good at one thing then there are people lining up to call you a tard for not watching opera or being able to run a marathon or whatever shit. So I do nothing.

Every "thinker" is at their core an utter fucking fraud. Nietzche is a Tony Robbins tier Rorschach test. Science and mathematics provide non trivial insights but only in ultra specialised ways that probably require autism to appreciate. I listen to In Our Time podcasts and Bret Easton Ellis podcasts and I think at heart everyone cares about nothing more than social drama.

Apart from money, health, and time, there are very few non trivial concept.

>>9052717

BUT THEY'LL CALL ME A PLEB

What's that word for when you realise that you'll look back at the previous year and three quarters and realise it was completely wasted?

>finished a degree I hated
>worked retailcuck part time jobs
>barely read more than 5 books
>did maybe a month's worth of productive stuff in my free time
>went to the gym regularly and lifts went up but ate lots of junk food and had coffee enough to harm sleep at times
>main hobby is taking walks or driving and feeling sad about my life and telling myself I will work extremely hard to learn productive skills tomorrow
>wasted gigantic amounts of time on internet and 4chan browsing
>told myself every day that I'd start working hard and eating healthily tomorrow and having genuine false hope almost every time

I can't motivate myself to work hard on anything or have goals. I know other people have quarter life crises but my life is fucking zooming past, not due to a boring 9-5 job but my inability to do anything with my free time.

I am a Stirnerite that knows deep down that all advice is trivial and worthless.

I hate that there are ten trillion topics considered important and that there is always someone willing to call you a retard if you don't know it. I fully realise that it's all social signalling nonsense. Yet it still weighs on me. There's always someone willing to say you only need to work hard if you're stupid. Or you're stupid not to work hard. Or that procrastination is great- or not. Or anything.

I feel like everything is so trivial it's not worth doing or extremely frustrating and out of my reach.

I see successful people and almost all of them just got in to the right institutions and took the elevator up with tonnes of support. I go to graduate assessment days and am surrounded by normie clones who are interviewed by their normie clones. I have almost no chance. And these are interviews for "respected" jobs that usually do pointless things.

>>9025016
>The Aenid in a trilogy with the Iliad and the Odyssey
This fucking triggers me. The Aenid was written hundreds of years after Homer's epics, in a different language, in a different culture, and it's entirely distinct stylistically. This is just a fucking meme to sell to stupid college kids.

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is how high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

>>8954478
>reading to impress people
Get the fuck out normie scum

>>8953422
>Calls for decolonisation aren't really about identity politics though.
Yes it is you brainwashed limp-wristed nu-male cuck. "Decolonization" is a leftist meme.

>>8952481
>af
This isn't twitter, go pretend to be a nigger somewhere else

You filthy normie

I really feel like giving up on every single book that doesn't either give me immediate enjoyment or raise my pseudo intellectual cred among the pseuds.

Fuck the academia-media-publishing industrial complex telling me that I have to care about some New Yorker / NYROB / LROB, Oxbridge / HYP attending, former public / prep schooler's self indulgent, narcissistic, and barely disguised memoirs and pretend that it is both entertaining and informative and philosophically profound and somehow I'm supposed to give a shit about them when none of them give a shit about me (yeah, it's 2016, I can say that, deal with it).

I'm tired of being told that I have to read shitloads of stuff to be smart while those pseuds have done nothing intellectual in their lives and live the bohemian fuckfest life in London or New York while pretending they're above it.

We have the internet, stop pretending that reading means shit in an age where chopping down trees and to make a book is an anachronism. Stop pretending that 99.9 % of non fiction books can't be summarised easily.

1. How is it possible to care about philosophy when you realise that you are literally flailing about within the infinitely large space of unfalsifiable possibilities? The only difference between STEM and other parts of philosophy is that in STEM the axioms and criteria for validity are more widely accepted. That's it.

2. What the hell can a non-STEM philosopher who works at Harvard or Oxford POSSIBLY have to say, that is either / both: non-trivial or uses axioms that are extremely widely accepted? It never happens!

3. Why do people pretend that "objective" morality exists? Why isn't it acknowledged that in a non-universally Christian society without a widespread belief in a god who is external to the universe, the idea of "objectivity" collapses in to a trivial "whatever I define it to be" (a human definition").

Replace "morality" and "objective" with "quiggle" and "bibble" respectively, two terms with arbitrary definitions. Does bibble quiggle exist? This shows how absurd people are in thinking that philosophers can have anything to say. I just provided two arbitrarily defined words that we can argue about for the next 2000 years? So why do philosophers not talk about bibble quiggle or "Does an objective list of rules for Football exist?"? That's easy to answer. (NOTE: THE ANSWER RELATES TO "PRACTICE OF PHILOSPHY", NOT "PHILOSOPHY" I'm not I shitting on reasoning itself). The answer is that philosophers are instantly drawn to the important sounding questions in order to gain attention and funding. They flee any field that has been colonised with scientists who use maths at a greater than high school level, even though they truthfully tell us that the scientific method is merely one out of infinitely many methods.

Note: AT ROOT, I simply point out the trivial conclusion that an unfalsifiable system is infinitely large. So I don't even shit on philosophers or the pseudo intellectual hangers on. THEY shit on everyone else because other people didn't bother learning their ONE particular self referential system out of the INFINITE possible number. Don't ask me why I shit on unfalsifiability. I don't. Ask why Philosophers, as Philosophy is currently practised, shit on everything other than themselves.

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is how high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is how high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is how high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

>>8855607
Listen here you little shit

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is he high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

Oh my god, OP, don't get me started. The latest mainstream media meme is to talk about the "post-truth world" or about how "critical thinking" is lacking in people and can exclusively be taught in Universities by qualified Professors (the exact type of people who write those articles, coincidentally).

This is partly why I am insulting the literature industry relentlessly on here. These same journalists, social "scientists", "Critics", and "Critiquers" are telling you that you have to read 593 books a year about China, WW2, the Romans, the Greeks, sociology, psychology etc. or else you're supposedly dumb.

One of the funny ironies is that Shakespeare had less formal education than 12 year olds today and wrote for people with even less. Similarly for Dickens. The Greeks read practically fuck all compared to the laziest Party University freshman. Yet here we are in 2016, being crushed under the exponentially increasing BS and pseudo intellectualism. This is one of the reasons I check Nassim Taleb's twitter everyday

I'm an ugly loser with no friends and the only time I ever asked out a girl, she laughed at me. Why the hell should I care about books if they're just the barely disguised narcissistic memoirs of some rich person?

Why are books and everything surrounding them so faggy? To start, I'm not even allowed to point at a book and say "That's shit" or "That's great". I'm told that I have to love 9001 boring as fuck western canon novels written by rich people in the past. I am told to care about the narcissistic barely disguised memoirs of some postmodern boring as fuck fiction writer.

It's painful seeing people on lit pretend that A confederacy of dunces (which was quite good) was laugh out loud funny. It's even worse when it's Pynchon.

You are fucking deluded if you say that literature hasn't advanced well on its way to painting tier, or in other words, is becoming nothing more than a tool for social signalling.

>I just luv books!
>My booktube channel...
>I LOVE to read
>omg I spend SO MUCH on books
>Reading opens your mind
>Reading broadens your horizons
>A good book is like a good friend

When did you realise that literature is a faggoty hobby coopted by attention whorish Buzzfeed tier women who use it as a status symbol and as a way to attract beta orbiters.

I think I'll just read the bare minimum amount of books.

This book worship masks the fact that reading takes time away from working your way out of wageslave bitch status. Of course if your a woman then that doesn't matter but can you seriously defend reading in this day and age. You literally can't.

I hate being told that I have to read shitloads of books or else I'm dumb

>I just luv books!
>My booktube channel...
>I LOVE to read
>omg I spend SO MUCH on books
>Reading opens your mind
>Reading broadens your horizons
>A good book is like a good friend

When did you realise that literature is a faggoty hobby coopted by attention whorish Buzzfeed tier women who use it as a status symbol and as a way to attract beta orbiters.

I think I'll just read the bare minimum amount of books.

This book worship masks the fact that reading takes time away from working your way out of wageslave bitch status. Of course if your a woman then that doesn't matter but can you seriously defend reading in this day and age. You literally can't.

>tfw work 18 hours a week and live at home
>tfw have to go to my wagie part time job in a few hours
>tfw COMPLETELY WASTED the four days of freedom

Oh my god, I am such a cuck. I will post my perfected over time copy pasta in the next post, which I edited to fit in multiple topics. You will have seen it before.

I just fucking hate working part time and doing a cucky job.

You know, my expenses are so low I really could quit it and have no consequences apart from slightly disappointed parents who put no pressure on me. But I get paid about £550 a month for a zero pressure job and I spent way too much on coffee and junk food, and LMAO at the idea that I have the willpower to give that up. Especially at the end of those demoralising 6 hour shifts

Who else went to a lower ranked university or did a subject they hated and regret it massively?

I went to my nearest university. I feel ripped off even though I paid literally nothing for it. Compared to good universities the courses were light on content and depth. In the UK all universities and subject courses arent standardised. You dont always have maths / physics / engineering students all taking the same Calc 1 (etc.) class in first year. You get "[Subject] for Engineers" and so on. So they feel free to skip shitloads of stuff (at the bad universities). They skip shitloads of stuff. I remember being in the third or fourth year of my degree, doing this really stamp collecty course and then having this crushing demoralised feeling when looking at the exam papers for Cambridges maths degree in third and fourth year. It was like staring at the secrets of the universe in comparison with my own course, which was a big fat joke.

I remember overhearing two students talking in my first year. One of them said that people who go to the library were "weird". Of course when the new shiny library opened up it was a normie haven. The old library was too small and run down yet had a lot of free space because nobody went there.

Of course your university matters a lot for how many job interviews you get. Why does /sci/ or /biz/ never mention this factor? Someone who does history of art at cambridge would find it easier becoming an investment banker / other high paying job than someone who does mathematics at a lower ranked place.