Delusions are irrational beliefs. Existential delusions are irrational beliefs that determine how one lives out its life, a natural means of compensating for one’s existential frustrations, substituting existential purpose for an impulse driven lifestyle. These irrational beliefs allows the self to indulge and escape from the reality of being in a stagnant existence. They are manufactured thoughts that biases the self as the priority of existence to avoid the awareness of boredom. When one has nothing to serve beyond the self, one serves the self by default, specifically towards its biological urges and desires.
1.3.1 SELF CENTEREDNESS
Self-centeredness is the belief that the self’s urges and desires should be made priority. Maybe it’s because the self is superior, special or the favored member of humanity. In which case, the self believes it is made a primary concern for the qualities that make it great. Or maybe it’s because the self is inferior, ordinary or a neglected member of society. In this case, the self believes it is made a primary concern to compensate for all that it lacks. In either case, the world revolves around “me”.
First, the self would distract itself from recognizing its authenticity by assigning itself as the main character of existence. All others would fall into the camps of either “supporting characters” or “villains” depending on favoritism.
Likable people are supporting characters. These tend to be friends, family, colleagues that you get along with, charitable strangers, doctors, and whoever you are dating at the moment. The role of supporting characters is to support the main character: offering assistance, validation, entertainment, belonging or the general provision of dopamine stimulation.
Dislikable people are villains. They are hated politicians, abusive neighbors, irrational bosses, the asshole who stole your wallet, the guy who seduced your date, the plumber who did a piss poor job, the slumlord who raised your rent without maintaining the upkeep of your home. The role of villains is to provide challenges for the main character to overcome: offering someone to resent, to blame, to be a target for cycling thoughts of hate or being a general source for adrenaline and cortisol stimulation.
Once you have your characters set, you’ll need a ghostwriter that focuses on you being the primary focus of the story of existence. This is the role of reality.
Reality is the author that you hire to rewrite existence by manifesting your thoughts into the fabric of universe. As the main character of existence, you expect reality to spin a narrative around you, your thoughts or how you feel.
When you genuinely believe that reality is a personal storied narrative writer designed to manifest your thoughts and feelings into the universe, it can be very upsetting to witness instances where reality ignores your thoughts and feelings. Such experiences can be very invalidating to your sense of esteem in being the main character of existence. The feeling can often be described as hurting your ego.
As the main character of existence you expect reality to answer your wish fulfillment demands.
When you feel hungry, food is expected to find its way in front of you. But reality sometimes dictate that you starve and go to bed hungry. When you are lonely, you expect others to befriend you to include you in their social gatherings. But reality can dictate that you remain isolated from the rest of humanity. When you feel directionless in life, you expect to have a life goal in mind so that you have something to strive for. But reality may dictate that your life is meaningless.
Idealism is what you expect. Realism is what you get. Reality is an ethereal presence thatis supposed to manifest into existence per the demands of your thoughts and feelings.
1.3.2 APOPHENIA: HOW TO DEAL WITH NARRATIVE OBSTACLES
When reality acts against your self interests, you try to make sense of it by ascribing meaning where none exists. It is a means of deflecting realism, by lying to yourself. After all, you’re the main character of existence, the center of the universe, how can it possible make sense for reality deviate from your desires when it is supposed to serve you?
Well, you invent a way to make it make it sense.
We can take any small observation and inflate the hell out of it by filling with inventive meaning to create a false narrative that the self would swear is true. This is the practice of apophenia. These are your conspiracy theories and your superstitions, creating correlations between things that have no correlation.
Yesterday I was craving lobster. I prepped my dinner table with cutlery, plates, butter and napkins. Despite having waited for an 6 hours, no lobster dinner happened on my table. A logical conclusion to explain the lack of lobster dinner could be that I failed to perform the logistics of acquiring the lobster, cooking it and then serving it on my plate. But that can’t be the truth. Reality would’ve manifested lobsters onto my table as per my thoughts and feelings. With apophenia, we can manipulate the framing to protect the “I am the main character” ideology from being violated. Thus, reaching a different conclusion that lobsters just don’t exist anymore.
Last weekend, [insert second example]
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1.3.2 PLEASURE / DOPAMINE STIMULATION: WHAT REALITY IS SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE
Another delusion is hedonism. It is the irrational belief that life is centered around pleasure based experiences.
Instances of short term pleasure makes the mind docile. Distractions such as drugs, porn, games, social media, food, compliments, and sadism are all sources of pleasurable excitations to numb the mind from having any mindfulness.
The issue with this practice is the fact that pleasure, with repeated experiences, will desensitize. Your favorite food tastes better the first few times you’ve had it, rather than the 100th time. The same goes for sex: it is more pleasurable when it was unexpected and surprising but not so much when you’ve figured out the patterns and it became predictable.
This lifestyle ends up being dull very fast, where one would constantly chase greater highs but getting only a fraction of the dopamine response.
1.3.3 CORTISOL STIMULATION (EMPATHY MANIPULATION)
On the flip side of the pleasure coin is victim mentality. It is the irrational belief that life hasn’t been centered around the pleasures of the self and therefore such compliance from the universe is owed to the self.
1.3.4 DENIAL (LYING TO OTHERS)
Realism reminds us of our vulnerabilities, our psychological intolerances, or our insecurities. It reminds us that we are flesh and blood. We can bleed. We can get hurt emotionally and physically. We are limited in skill and in resources. We can’t change the past to erase our traumatic experiences. To escape acknowledgement of all of the above mentioned, one must undermine the authenticity of reality.
Lie.
Lying keeps reality hidden from the minds of others. Lying provides us the freedom to represent ourselves however we desire without the limiting constraints of what’s real.
Lying makes us appear taller, wealthier, more human, smarter, higher status, more experienced, less clumsy and better at sports. It generally makes us more ideal. It controls and misleads others into believing what we want them to believe in regards to our identities, influencing them to invest their trust in our non-existing character traits, allowing us to use them as a means to an end.
Notes:
Existential purpose is served by free will, the ability to act against one’s impulses.
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