Atheists of lemmy, what is your coping strategy when things goes downhill?

I am at an accepting stage that not everything that happens in your life is in your control. When things goes really bad and you dont have much control on it, I would assume a person who believes in god or religious figures has their belief system as a coping mechanism. For example praying to the god and so on.

I passed that stage where you believe a single entity has a complete control of each and everything happens in this entire universe. So falling back to god and thinking it is all according to the plan and he will find out some solution is not really an option for me. At the sametime I also acknowlede that there are some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

So to atheists of lemmy, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?

railsdev,

Kind of a weird question. You just have to deal with the problem or consequences of your actions. Usually when I feel down I’ll snap out of it and figure out what I can do to improve the situation. I don’t feel a need to do anything specific to cope.

amio,

At the sametime I also acknowlede that there are some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

What do you mean? Why does that matter, what would that explanation do for you?

So to atheists of lemmy, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?

I can explain most things logically, that is not the problem. The problem is that the logical explanation still usually sucks. Being religious would only provide an explanation - that can't really be true, let alone helpful. Presumably I'd rationalize everything with how an infinitely loving, powerful and all-knowing God needed me to have a shit time, for reasons, because that makes a lot of sense. That belief wouldn't change much, other than potentially leading me to make profoundly irrational choices. I can manage that perfectly fine on my own, thanks all the same.

corsicanguppy,

, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?

You get back to work.

wantd2B1ofthestrokes,

I have it pretty fucking good in the grand scheme of things so just remember that

GentlemanLoser,

I live like a king compared to probably 90% of this world and 99.99999% of every human that ever lived. I am getting to see awesome and awful things even my recent ancestors couldn’t grasp. And with any luck I’ll kick the bucket right when the air conditioning goes out for the last time.

Sometimes I think about “legacy” but in the end the eventual heat death of the universe is gonna make that irrelevant too.

kometes,

I make things better in ways that I can.

SkyNTP, (edited )

some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

Not really sure about this one. Science doesn’t have answers for really big questions, like why does the universe exist. But for stuff smaller than that, like “why do I have some disease”, or “why did I lose a loved one” … or just “why did I lose 200$ dollars at the casino” well science tells us a lot about how it’s all one giant lottery we have been playing involuntarily, and we are all really bad at it.

We take chances just by existing. It’s literally called a genetic lottery. We take a chance by getting in a car or stepping out onto the street to go to the market. Just by loving people we take the chance that something could take them away. Life deals you a hand. You win some, you lose some. You don’t get to decide what your odds are. The best you can do is play the hand you’ve got. Which to be honest, is a lot less control than we tend to think we have. And even then, most of us don’t play our hand all that great, cause we are thrust into the game of life without a practice round. And we are often too young and arrogant to listen to those who have come before us who already learned the hard way. Worse yet, we see few of our peer’s mistakes, so we have a poor sense of what success and failure really looks like.

Science tells us about the gambler’s fallacy, the human bias towards falsely thinking that the universe tends towards some kind of fairness or equilibrium which is patently false (consider how little the gambler expects “good luck” to turn bad, therefore why gamble at all if it always equalizes?). Karma doesn’t mean the universe owes you exactly what you put in. Life doesn’t hand out exact change.

Science also tells us about how we (humans) don’t truly understand randomness. In nature, successive repetitions of some outcome of luck are vastly more common than we tend to think they are. We see a series of bad luck outcomes and say “that’s not natural, this can’t be real” when in fact it is often the natural laws of the universe on full display.

Despite it all, even if the game of life makes no promises to you at all, it sure as hell is better than not playing the game at all. Regarding karma, the only thing you can be sure of–and forgive me for using a dead meme but it is apt–is that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Edit for the pedants: gambler’s fallacy actually means that past results of independent events do not predict future outcomes, but that’s basically what I just said.

lolan,

That is a lot of wisdom in a single comment. I am re-reading it a lot… Yay! Thanks for sharing

Taleya,

When things go to utter shit you just…buckle down and deal with it? Turn to friends and family for support and comfort?

hperrin,

When things go poorly for me, I just remember that everything is temporary. At some point in the future, it’ll be better.

kibiz0r,

Music, games, booze.

Apollo2323,

Look at Stoicism. It is a very interesting philosophy from the Greeks , you can learn more here : youtu.be/EFkyxzJtiv4?si=ZQSdcIz58lnfl-Og

Dressedlikeapenguin,

This is the best secular world view I’ve found. Since leaving religious thinking behind, I wondered abit between nihilism and the world is what you make it. The Dichotomy of Control really resonated with me. Funny enough, I started rereading Epictetus’ Enchiridion The book, How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci is good to. I found it more accessible. Here is a video with him youtu.be/qjz5a8X9LjU?si=0OsptyOS7MvHiYw0

sub_ubi,

Looks like the stoics found a life raft from reddit

Apollo2323,

Sorry English is not my first language, what you mean by life raft? Like you mean stoics found a way out of Reddit?

lolan,

Thank you!! It is really an intersting perspective. I will research more in this.

uriel238,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

For me, the existential struggle is coming to terms with my irrelevance (or our collective irrelevance – our civilization and species has some big challenges ahead in the next couple of centuries). It’s not that it’s a bad time to be a naturalist, but it’s just a bad time to be human and depend on a society that is supposed to continue without end.

That said, I’ve only acclimated to the idea that only oblivion and irrelevance await me. Living day to day is augmented by social and hedonistic comforts: I pet my cat and my dog. I take care of my wife. I play video games and limit how often I look at the world burning up.

We’ve encountered similar tropes in our apocalyptic fiction. Neo learns that his entire life was a dream, a construct in the matrix. I remind kids they really are in a YAF dystopia in which the education system is trying to mold them into interchangeable, disposable, replaceable soldiers and laborers to be inserted into billionaire vanity projects, used up and discarded, and their story is how they escape that paradigm.

That’s our story too.

whaleross,
@whaleross@lemmy.world avatar

Soon I’ll be dead and then it won’t matter anyway.

shneancy,

absurdism! “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” is what keeps me going

arbitrary_sarcasm,

I don’t remember where I originally heard this from, but the Serenity Prayer has helped me get through some tough times

“Oh God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what can not be helped, and insight to know the one from the other”

I know it begins with “God”, but I found it applicable to my life without requesting anything from God.

foo,

Antidepressants and industrial-strength denial.

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