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Poll: To first order, which existential question occupies you the most
  • What is life?
    10.8%
  • Why to live life?
    13.2%
  • How to live life?
    57.4%
  • Where/when/w whom to live
    18.5%
453 votesFinal results
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The force of the 32.5 year olds is strong in this one
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Everybody I interact with here sounds exactly 32.5, whatever their actual age, even me, despite my attempts to caricature myself back to my real age Eternal 32.5. Some seem much younger than they are, others seem much older. Occasionally the abstractions glitch to show real age.
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I think the natural progression with age is d-c-b-a, but people also have a stable attractor question. Mine is ‘what’ and I tend to phone it in on the others.
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Not sure I agree. What is life is a scientific/definitional question. How to live life is an aesthetic/moral question. Why is there life is the one question to rule them all - why is there anything over nothing? It’s questionable whether science will ever…
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The poll is about why to live life, not why there is something rather than nothing. I tend to dismiss that as a primarily one that academic philosophers find interesting and not as interesting as they make it out to be.
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Ah ok - so I disagree with you obvs about how interesting that question is, though I was once an academic philosopher so there’s that. Why to live life - I keep coming back to that quote from apocalypse now: I took the mission - what the hell else was I going to do?