I’m over the worst of my existential OCD, but my tentative claims - not real delusions at all- about this so-called universe remain a huge stumbling block on my road to regaining function. Nothing feels real, and nothing is real. I guess we all feel like that sometimes, so I find it hard to think of it as a disease. Of course taking meds would change the way I feel and think, but this would be nothing more than an admission of defeat. ‘Normalcy’ entails all manner of bizarre beliefs, ranging from the existence of the material world to the glamour of inner life, which I’m no longer able to share. I’m truly lost.
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Life is pretty meaningless and I am not under the assumption that I am in a simulation.
The majority of people work in pretty meaningless jobs, carrying out mundane existences from cradle to the grave. Perhaps they find meaning in having offspring or helping another person but life on this planet working for money with imagined substance and value seems to be what it is all about for most.
Once food to eat, shelter, sex i.e… basic Maslow needs are met what is the purpose of life even for those that don’t believe this is all a simulation? Perhaps a quest for meaning is our task. All the religions preach it believing they have the answer. Philosophers contemplate it. Others tried to escape it hedonistically.
What does it matter at the end of the day? Meet your daily requirements, and do what makes you happy as long as it harms no one else.
Take a cold shower to feel how real the world can be! Fall in love and be emotionally real!
If you can’t function without meds then perhaps it is a no brainer. If you can then make sure you are clean and respectable and don’t take the drugs which can ultimately shorten life and cognitively impair you.
Or meet in the middle and function on a minimum dose of meds and see how it makes you feel. 
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I have been on meds and it was pretty dismal. I don’t think I’m psychotic, just weak and desperate for answers.
The thing with meds is that it feels awful the first six months. It takes all that time to adjust to the new ‘normal’ and you don’t feel it as much, if at all. It is just that adoption that is the hard bit.
Here in this ‘world’ where people have jobs and function among mere mortals, think what you would like to do. Get a hobby! I think you could be a great author, so perhaps try that.
Most importantly function to the the normalcy. That means get up, bathe, get dressed, wash your clothes, clean your teeth, clean your room etc.
You don’t have to work, but be practical and apply yourself. Not looking after yourself is a sz trait. If you can’t do that then it doesn’t matter how much you intellectualise to the world you become an outcast.
I really appreciate your words. Part of the problem is age, I’m too old to start a rewarding new career. I had my last chance 2 years ago after finishing my masters with top grades in virtually everything and I was set to start a doctorate. Also, I have already achieved most of my early goals, including - and apologies for blowing my own trumpet - having my first and only novel published by a small publishing house, which was extremely well received my readers and critics. The prologue by the way was written by one of the most important novelists of the last hundred years, at least in my second country. Going back to writing is the only thing that could save me, but I lack the motivation.
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Try lion’s mane mushroom. That gave me loads of motivation. Even neurotypicals not on APs can benefit from it.
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Don’t look for meaning in things, be a meaning- maker. We have interest in the things we pay most attention to. The value of a thing is the value you place on it. If you cannot be happy then pretend to be happy. Take your medicine!
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I might give it a try.
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You have to make your own meaning, as Zanx said. I have struggled and still struggle sometimes with it. I searched for years for the purpose to life. I found more of a greater purpose once I switched medications and was able to take more concrete actions like helping my loved ones (a great way to feel purpose), taking better care of myself and sticking with a spiritual path. It’s okay to have an existential crisis, but you have to find the end to it eventually. However you do that will be unique to you. But you have to try! Don’t give up hope!
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I know that this life is a computer simulation, but I have recovered sufficiently that I am almost completely back to the good part where life felt normal and enjoyable.
I’m going to write a book and blog about it.
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Good luck with your endeavours. As you know my formulation of the simulation is somewhat different from yours.
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I am sorry to hear you are having a tough time. You sound quite upbeat, and it sounds like you should have a lot of material for your second book. You could write non-fiction new-wave, or port neo-gnosticism it into the real world.
I have made a career out of my simulation delusions, claiming that Westerners see the world as a “conversation” with a central something, where as Japanese see the world visually, with a central perspective, like the difference between first person shooters (such as Call of Duty) and 2d fighter games (such as Street Fighter).
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Live is a miracle of material science and physics at the very least from our rational understandings. We’re in a very fortunate place to understand our reality and to make meaning where none exists. Just because there isn’t necessarily a fool proof meaning doesn’t mean we cannot choose it for ourselves. I cherish my family and have fought to make those relationships mean the most to me. Even though I’ve taken this schizophrenia pretty harshly and am suffering, there is still worth in loving my family and making the most of my bum situation.
Try to find something you still love still value and keep trying to do something to further it.
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I can agree with what you said. Life is meaningless and the more meaning we try to add in the grand scheme of things seems worthless, but if you think about the small details that build the bigger picture, every drop a paint in an artist painting has an objective and that is to be itself in its best way possible, and it ends up making a master piece. So we can derive from that analogy that everything matters and everything is part of something we don’t comprehend so maybe there is a ignorance factor in it, but living a life in such a concrete matter will only bring misery and pain. I hope this dread wears off @NotSeksoEmpirico. I wish you the best and I hope my words can bring some form of comfort.
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I’d like to learn more about this!
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Thank you…
Thank you…
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A life without meaning is depressing. I think it takes a lot to work yourself out of the maze. Maybe have a good rest, make notes and complete your puzzle.
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I was quoting you, but that was, near to, my experience also.
However, at least with regards to the (Western) self, it is argued to be the result of an internal conversation by a number of authors.
E.g. Vytogsky points out that children’s early nurdlings (he uses a different word) that become quiet “thought” later in life, are thought by the child to be heard by someone. He demonstrates this by putting nurdling children in rooms with children who do not speak the child’s language. The child then ceases to nurdle on. This, he claims, is demonstration that children’s self-narrating nurdlings, and later human thoughts, are not entirely self-addressed but rather a conversation someone he refers to as a (intra-psychic) helper.
Lacan’s Other is opaque but I think similarly for Lacan the symbolic self is created in comversation with another in the heart.
Bakhtin claims that when we talk to someone else, a real or imagined second person, there is always also a third person listening in the wings of stage of our heart (my phrase) a “super-addressee” (his term). If there were no such third person then when the second person of our conversation does not understand, then since meaning is created in communication, there would only be miscommunication, and we would lose sight of our own meaning. But we subconsciously believe that someone else, who understands us perfectly, is listening in.
George Herbert Mead claims that it is only through the vocal gesture that humans can hear themselves from the point of view of others, since otherwise they would need a mirror or audience. We can hear our speech, and we hear it as if someone else said it, which allows us, by internalizing a “generalized other,” to identify with the first person of our self narrative.
Arimasa Mori incidentally claims that European languages have this third person somehow built in to the language (or culture) but that in Japanese “I” (the first person pronoun) only ever means “you for you.”
Pierre Rochat in “Others in Mind” argues pretty much the same thing, that the self is created in “negotiation” with “others in mind.”
Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” (and perhaps “invisible hand”) is not specifically linguistic but subsequent theorists have suggested that the “split” we create in ourselves when evaluating our own behaviour can be interpreted in a conversational/linguistic way.
Derrida is all about “hearing oneself speak” and the effect that this has on us and Western culture. His book “The post card” is a parody of the internal narrative, converted into a series of (I think self addressed) love postcards (as in love letters). The dualism that we think inheres in the linguistic sign is not really a dualism but a temporal deferring or simply a taking it in turns to speak and then, with the ear of the other, hear.
Freud’s very short paper " A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ (the name of a child’s toy, nothing mystical exactly) uses the analogy of writing notes and then erasing them, as the mechanism of consciousness. Derrida in a nutshell.
There are many more eg. Dennet “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” mentioned previously. Bruner “Life as Narrative,” Gottshall “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” (not yet purchased). Ricoeur “Time and Narrative” (i have yet to get through it). The first book I read was Paul Kerby’s “Narratie and the Self.” Kerby is now a musician, I think.
I don’t think that this is the only way we construct self though. We also see self in the mirror at least when we are young (as Lacan argues famously) and I think that the Japanese continue to identify with their imagined/visual self, which it is possible to imagine even without an audience or mirror. E.g. see “Video Ergo Sum.” Nishida Kitarou’s “devil” is hidden in the depths of sight, rather than as interlocutor.
When I was psychotic I seemed to discover that I was thinking to someone nasty (or nastily) but it was no devil. It was rather someone far more familiar but the nature of the conversation made the conversation extremely distasteful, to say the least.
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I’m deeply sympathetic to this approach, Bakhtin and Mead in particular, which led me to choose discursive psychology as one the methods for my master’s thesis. To my shame, however, I’ve never read Derrida, but I am trying to challenge my prejudices about the guy.
If it’s not too much to ask, what was your psychosis like? Did you have systematised delusions? Also, is it delusional to believe the universe is a demonic simulation and our humanity an illusion?