Life is a futile, meaningless game where all action is about a neurochemical reward in one’s brain. Whether one is materialistic or spiritual is irrelevant. It’s all the same: neurons firing gratification patterns in one’s skull.
By merely existing the individual dictates terms of suffering and death upon onself and other sentient beings. Being vegan or ethical is irrelevant. Existence creates carnage around the individual. All political affairs aim to entangle the individual in a game where everyone is a looser. The individual will suffer and die no matter who one is or what one does in this life.
There won't be any lost loved ones or god(s) waiting on the other side of death either. All religion and promises of an afterlife is just the neurotic fantasy of petty doomed beings desperately trying to justify their meaningless existence.
The universe and all life in it has no intrinsic meaning. The only guarantee a sentient being has is that one’s brief existence will be replaced by the eternal void of no awareness after all bodily functions cease. Existence is Change’s bitch and there is nothing one can do about it.
The infant feels itself omnipotent, a God. It cries, and food and warmth appear from the void, self-created. Humanity is defined by this very transhumanist realisation whether it creates Gods, superheroes, medicine or technologies.
The child eventually learns the truth. It is a bag of flesh, bound by determinism, and subject to decay and death. This causes anxiety and dread.
"The essence of normality is the refusal of reality."- Ernest Becker
To aid the child in escaping anxiety and dread, society teaches it the vital lies of Character and Culture. Character offers the means to function in society with self-esteem and confidence, through denial of one's fundamental human condition. Culture provides symbolic forms of meaning and purpose, a sense of heroism to serve as a bulwark against death, ranging from the high heroism of a Churchill, to the low heroism of a farmer.
With the vital lies of Character and Culture at hand, the individual often loses himself in the immediacy of life. He works, eats, procreates, and lives according to the symbolic ideals and meaning handed to him by society, with entertainment serving as an escape.
Some people are more sensitive to the dellusion of cultural life that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. These individuals harbor a need to break free from culturally constructed meaning as the basis for the meaning of life.
Historically, groups imprint potent ideologies that aim to sustain a group against another in this strive in change. Religious faith, which offered the sole means for absolute transcendence and political ideology as a minor upgrade from the law of the jungle. The modern, secular society's loss of faith in the soul, God and political leaders has broken down the primary cure for existential dread.
"With the truth, one cannot live. The more man can take appearance as truth, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier he will be ... this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending, and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism." -Otto Rank
With selfishness and the breaking of culturally constructed meaning comes a recognition of the truth of one's condition. It is no strange that the most dreaded ideas of humanity revolve around anarchy, atheism and selfishness. Morality is afterall defined plurally.
With a recognition of the truth, the anxiety and dread of the child returns. The individual struggles to ease anxiety and dread by searching for legitimate sources of meaning and purpose to replace the lies of Character and Culture.
In the modern age many will typically turn to psychology and medication to cure their natural, neurotic despair. The promise of psychology and pharmacology, like all of modern science, was that it would usher in the era of happiness, by showing us how things worked, how one thing caused another. But now we come up against the fallacy of psychological self-scrutiny. The scientific victory of replacing religious faith with psychological introspection, causes more problems than it solves. We are once again caught in the cunning game of chaos.
"Psychology, which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology, is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology. "Psychoanalysis failed therapeutically because it aggravated man's psychologizing rather than healed him of his introspection." -Otto Rank
Sin and Neurosis are two ways of talking about the same thing - the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyperindividualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself, his refusal to recognize his cosmic dependence.
Thus the plight of modern man: a sinner with no word for it, who seeks a rational explanation for his isolation in psychology, and thus only aggravates the problem of his separateness and hyperconsciousness.
Dread proceeds to categorically destroy all human (finite) ends and purposes, until all that can remain is the infinite. The school of anxiety eventually arrives at faith. A faith that despite one's true insignificance, weakness, death, one's existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force. Life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value.
"So soon as psychology has finished with dread, it has nothing to do but to deliver it over to dogmatics."
-Kierkegaard