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?

TokyoCalling,

I walk a lot. Head down to the river and whistle for the crows that know me to come down so I can give them some peanuts. Talk with friends and family.

To be fair, though, I do pretty much the same thing when I don’t need to cope.

Daaric,

If I can’t have control over shit happening, then I just don’t care.

I think it was Další Lama who said: “If a problem has a solution, there is no reason to worry. If there is no solution, worrying will not help.”

bappity,
@bappity@lemmy.world avatar

acceptance. hiding my problems behind made up deities will only make things worse when I have to confront them.

GONADS125,

In my opinion, accepting that things are out of our control is a basic requirement of life, just as we have to accept the force of gravity exerted on us.

I think it’s weird and some people have told me I’m crazy, but I tell myself “It’ll all eventually work out, but maybe for the worst.” I find getting hung-up on if something will resolve in my favor often hinders my ability to influence the situation, can cause self-fulfilling prophecies, and is often more distressing than when the negative outcome is reached.

I also consider our insignificance on a cosmic scale, and find a strange comfort in imagining that our problems are just as trivial and irrelevant as ants, and that I won’t care when I’m dead anyway.

Finally, if you’re experiencing any death anxiety, I’ve always found a great exercise to be imagining what it was like before you were born. Did you have any pain or fear? Did you wish desperately to be alive? No. You simply did not exist for billions of years, and that is the state in which we can expect to return. That doesn’t sound so bad to me.

mycatiskai,

Breathe, think, breathe, think, repeat. Life goes on until it doesn’t. My sister died last year at 42 years old, she taught music to underprivileged children. The universe gave her a tumour in her brain so there isn’t much you can do in this existence but keep breathing and thinking, until you stop doing both.

You will find beauty and ugliness, happiness and sadness, absorb it all and accept it knowing that as far as we know we are the only piece of the universe that is aware of the universe.

Skyrmir,

My coping strategy is stubbornness, I may not win, but I’ll be fucked if I’ll let the rest of the world beat me. I refuse to give up.

Cephirux,

Good for you. Be strong. Though I can’t say the same to me because I’m not sure if it’s worth it to suffer.

Skyrmir,

I used to know a guy with some syndrome that made his body stop growing around 6 years old, but not his head. He was in his 20’s, in a wheel chair playing pool. Pulled the stick back, and broke his collar bone. He kinda winced a bit and said ‘pain don’t hurt’ them finished playing with the other hand.

His condition also gave him brittle bones. Seeing him shrug that shit off, knowing it was just one of many, I got nothing to complain about. My sorry, but healthy ass, can just shut the fuck up and carry on. Everyone has hard times, and they hurt like hell. Sometimes stepping out of your own can give us perspective.

Cephirux,

It’s still important to acknowledge the pain, since the pain is a sign or signal that your body was damaged and can potentially permanently ruin your body. Though, that doesn’t mean you should avoid pain forever, and it’s impossible to avoid pain forever, perhaps only delaying it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so I guess it’s fine as long as you’re alive.

JackiesFridge,
@JackiesFridge@lemmy.world avatar

When things happen you can either control the outcome or not. If you can, and things go sideways, you simply made the wrong decisions along the way and can learn. If you can’t, find out what small parts you CAN influence and do your best to make things turn out okay. If you are totally powerless, remind yourself that nothing lasts forever and you can wait it out until an opportunity presents itself or the situation changes.

Sometimes you will find yourself in a ruinous situation beyond your control. Lower your standards until you have something you can act on - even if it’s going to sleep to give your mind and body some rest. One step at a time, even if they’re small steps and you’re not quite sure where you’ll end up. Find any positive you can. That said, allow yourself to get angry, sad, or anything else you need to feel to vent the stress - but afterward, find a positive and hold it.

Religious people have a built in community around their place of worship or shared interests. If something bad happens, the good people in that community will do what they can to offer support - this is usually mistaken for “god is great, look how he sent you to help.” That’s just silly (and rather insulting).

Atheists don’t have that default support community, but hopefully we have friends and co-workers, people on our dart league, etc. who would jump at the chance to help out when things go sideways. Be social. Help others. Be part of a community of good people, regardless of their beliefs, and they can help steady you when life gets mean.

CherenkovBlue,
@CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

I commune with the universe by contemplating it and my place within it. The immensity and my insignificance, yet the fact that I recognize my own existence, brings peace.

GONADS125,

I’ve always found a strange comfort in cosmic insignificance.

dingus, (edited )

Some years back I was temporarily feeling suicidal. But several things stopped me.

Since I’m an atheist, I don’t believe there is anything after death. This is the only chance we get. Is permanently extinguishing that small temporary bit of conscience a productive way to handle things? Would it have solved the issue I was having? It would have ended the problem sure, but it wouldn’t have solved it. And it mean there were no future opportunities for happiness or good.

The only thing that seems certain in life is change. I was in a shitty place mentally and was really struggling in the specific situation I was in. But I knew that it would change. Would it change for the better or change for the worse? Would it be a lateral change? There was no way to tell, but ending it all meant no more change could occur. So I waited it out and change happened. And I eventually found myself in a better spot with a change in scenery.

lolan,

I think that is a good way to deal those situations. Happy that you are in a better space now… Cheers!!

Taleya,

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

shartworx,

I tend to hyperfocus on things I can control and/or try to learn a new skill. Both are distractions, but you can’t control what you can’t control. Obsessing over those things leads to dark places. Sometimes, mental judo helps. You can reframe a situation that seems terrible by looking at it from another context. Unfortunately, it’s hard to give examples for this.

SatanicNotMessianic, (edited )

Honestly, I think we have it a lot easier than the theists in that regard. If someone dings my car, I find that my dog has cancer, or I lose my job, I don’t have to address the problem of evil. I don’t need to figure out how to square the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god with misfortune. I don’t need to wonder if I am being punished or tested, and I don’t have to worry about prayers that aren’t being answered.

There are multiple non-theistic philosophies and religions that offer a framework for understanding and coping with negative events. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism have an explicit dependency on anything supernatural, especially in the schools and forms most popular in the West. The general idea is that we need to be less attached to certain outcomes and that our suffering arises more from our wanting the world to be how it isn’t.

There’s also a large number of non-theistic schools in Western philosophy that have taken their own various approaches to questions ranging from the meaning of life and the meaning of suffering to how to identify and pursue the good. There’s multiple schools of existentialism, of course, but I would even think that writings on the nature of justice (eg John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Peter Singer), the nature of the ego and human experience (eg Thomas Metzinger), and even works of film and literature can help approach an understanding, which is itself perhaps the best coping mechanism.

name_NULL111653,

Don’t rule out Nietzsche either, with his ideas on the creation of your moral system, becoming a “god” unto yourself, exercising will through art, and will-to-power by helping others (and thus altering their lives and will in a much more effective way than harming them as a “show of force” / what most think of as power). I highly recommend studying his thinking very deeply when anyone abandons the idea of god. And remember, even though god is dead, in thus spoke Zarathustra the character (representing one of us, who knows that god is dead) never told that to the monk, but rather envied his ability to believe. Believing in a god is by far better than taking that responsibility on yourself, but for us, it is no longer possible. We ought to envy that kind of belief.

But at the same time, any dogma that harms us or others (Christo-fascism, all forms of theocracy, etc.) is objectively bad except to those in charge of it. Which is no one except one who “speaks for god,” and protestant Christianity has abandoned such a figure and taken on a life of its’ own. It helps no one, not even a person in power, and thus should be abolished.

But as I said, I envy those who hold other beliefs. For now we must take the responsibilities of god onto our own shoulders.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I think the idea of being envious of religious people is grounded in two fundamental errors. First, it is attributing a level of solace to religiosity that is rarely, if ever, achieved in practice. Yes, you can find religious people who are content, but the same applies to Zen monks who have no god but do have a grounding in a framework that explains the world and their role in it. As the Buddhists point out (if we can take that path), discontent and suffering comes from wanting the world to be different than it is. Whether one subscribes to a Buddhist philosophy or thinks everything is in God’s hands and is therefore all for the best, the key is accepting what happens. Or in the Taoist saying “Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” My point here is that it’s absolutely not religion that’s responsible for that, but rather a philosophical point of view that can also be arrived at via non-theistic justifications. I’d argue it’s even easier without the god part, since you don’t have to rectify with the problem of evil. If an all-powerful and loving god gave your newborn child a fatal disease, that’s a lot to have to figure out. That’s where you get all of those ridiculous, stomach-turning platitudes. If your child developed cancer because biology is kind of stupid (and I’m saying that as a biologist), it is still a cause of sadness and mourning, but there’s no causal party involved.

The second part is that whether you’re reading the lives of the saints, talking to friends, or pouring over the latest Pew survey on religion and life satisfaction, you’re looking at self-reports.

Do a thought experiment. Pick a cult-like religion. It could be Mormonism, adventism, Scientology, or something more like a David Koresh or desert dwelling new age thing. Imagine running through questions about satisfaction and happiness with those members, given they know you’re interviewing them on the basis of the religion they hold and (essentially) whether they’re good people because it’s working for them. Or talk to former members of those cults about how they acted versus how they really felt and what that realization was like.

At the end of the day, we as atheists have fewer reasons for existential dread because once you progress past the theology of a twelve year old, there’s far more problems introduced than answered by religions, and a large percentage of those problems come from the mythological component of their philosophies. I don’t go around trying to pick arguments or disabuse people, and I very, very much get Marx’s point, but I think he under-theorized the social and psychological dimensions and that he could be over-generous.

leraje,
@leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Be realistic - whatever it is, it will pass. It’s not necessary to understand why something has happened to accept that it has happened. If you can understand it, great, but quite a lot of things in life aren’t dependent on things you do or don’t do and trying to understand those things will drive you mad.

Bad things happen but so do good things. Kipling wrote:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same.

Meaning, exceptionally good things and exceptionally bad things are comparatively rare and looking for reasons can sometimes be an exercise in futility. A bird didn’t decide to pose as an agent of evil and target you to take a shit on, all that happened was a bird dropped a load when you happened to be walking there.

In the meantime, do things you enjoy. Go to the pub with your mates, re-read a comforting book, listen to music - whatever. And once it’s passed - because it will - exert control over the things you can control that will make you happy.

slazer2au,

Identify which parts I do control and work on them to improve my situation, ask for help from others/professional services if thing go too far.

Just because your faith doesn’t work how you want it to doesn’t mean you are all alone and have to deal with everything alone.

TraceGallant,
@TraceGallant@kbin.social avatar

Same here. Focus on what you can control, seek help where possible with things you can’t. If there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about something, there’s no use in worrying about it anyway.

It doesn’t even cross my mind if there is a “greater meaning” when something challenging happens in my life.

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.

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