this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Music also. Cant begin to count all the great songs that have really resonated with me and then find out the artist overdosed or blew their brains out.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 hours ago

Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

[–] ameancow 3 points 3 hours ago

Same but physics and the author was Ludwig Von Boltzmann.

[–] finitebanjo 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

So there is this guy Christopher Johnson McCandless, AKA "Alexander Supertramp" and he wanted to survive amongst nature and spent like his entire life prepping to be able to do it. He was inspired by a bunch of authors who wrote about survivalism and the frontier. Him and Carl McCunn were both well read and educated.

They both stepped into the Canadian Wilderness, at different times and different places, and both died alone with their journals, no one to call to for help in their time of need. McCandless was a 67 lbs fresh corpse when they found him, he ate some "alpine nut" purple flower legumes with antimetabolites and started to feel too weak to forage. McCunn shot himself, simple as.

Mental Illness apparently expresses itself in very strange ways for some people. Avoid isolationism if you want to live.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Is McCandless the one from the book Into the Wild? Iirc he had a pretty sweet scholarship lined up, but fucked off without telling anyone so he could "live off the land" in Alaska

[–] finitebanjo 3 points 2 hours ago

And importantly DIDN'T BRING A MAP.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I, too, have read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

[–] dumpsterac1d 2 points 5 hours ago

Immediately thought of this

[–] captainlezbian 20 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

I'm fortunate that the author with my pessimism is Pratchett. Humans, a bunch of terrible little assholes that I love and treasure

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

acknowledging complexity is not in itself pessimism. it often makes uncut pessimism very difficult.

[–] Dasus 9 points 10 hours ago

Idk I wouldn't call Sir Pratchett as much a pessimist as I would an absurdist.

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett

[–] Meltdown 11 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I too have read David Foster Wallace/Ernest Hemingway/Virginia Woolf

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

If the book was successful, the author probably has more money than the anon. It's looking bleak, anon.

[–] Matriks404 4 points 10 hours ago

Enjoy the life. The rest is optional.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

> read a book
> author already dead

why do I even bother?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Because a book is the prime method of conveying ideas way after you're dead?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Anybody got any recommendations for more stuff like that? Something like this which I read quite recently was No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It's a bit less philosophical than most other books like this (stuff like The Stranger by Camus) but still a very gripping book.

I never thought I'd be asking for book suggestions on a greentext community, but why the hell not

[–] [email protected] 10 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse was eye-opening and I remember reading as a profound experience. I know this sounds ridiculous but this book was the feeling you get when someone on a forum has the exact problem as you and explore it in depth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Herman Hesse is drastically underrated in general IMO. so many great books. I enjoyed Siddharta and Glasperlenspiel (both in german).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm having trouble understanding Siddhartha but still having a good time reading it ;).

I'm not super privy to this new paradigm of spirituality he goes in depth into !

[–] benignintervention 60 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I had that experience with David Foster Wallace and his commencement address. The first half was exciting intellectually and by the last half I realized it was a cry for help

[–] Wav_function 14 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone.

:(

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

For me it was a combination of gaining true self-acceptance, recognising that there was the possibility of personal joy and fulfillment despite humanity being irredeemably lost, and starting to work toward long term goals.

Everyone's experience will be different, but by focusing on myself I found that I became someone who was never alone because I found a rich group of people who shared similar interests and cared about me. If you're feeling stuck in your own head I would genuinely recommend seeking professional help and think about trying Psilocybin as the mental shifts can be more profound than you might imagine. At least they were for me.

[–] benignintervention 1 points 11 hours ago

With another ten years of hindsight, it's pretty apparent

[–] [email protected] 10 points 19 hours ago

As far as I know he did his best to find an alternative to the antidepressants that he couldn't take any longer due to allergies and tried different therapies with no avail.

This seems to me it was a condition less linked to environmental stress-inducing factors and more of an internal condition.