Ask Lemmy

We atheists are quite capable of talking to imaginary friends too. We just have no delusions that they're real.

Ride the wave of chaos on your surfboard of acceptance and enjoy the ride, it's all we've got.

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.

What do you mean by "cope"? How do I explain it? Either shit happens because of bad luck (e.g. A bird shits on me) or because someone did something wrong (e.g. Somebody got distracted while driving and broke my side mirror). It's not supernatural entity, it's just statistical probability.

How do I cope mentally? Tv, videogames, a beer o two and a nice meal. Talk to my wife. Remember to play with my kids.

I accept the fact that I don't understand everything, and I get high.

I've always found it easier to accept that the universe is fundamentally random and today is my turn in the barrel than wonder why God did this to me.

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."

Can you elaborate what you mean by things that science can't explain?

Everything came from randomness and is mostly narrated by it, and there's no escape from it. You may hit the lottery or end up with a rare fatal disease any time, your life will be changed and there's nothing you can do about it. It's not about god granting you awards or punishing you, it just happens. From this POV getting depressed because I went through x feels like getting depressed because water flows.

Life is painful, also joyful, beautiful and really ugly, gross and amazing. You're supposed to fall, get hurt and then get up and run a bit more until you can't anymore. Every good and bad thing will pass in time

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.

I'm not a control freak, I know that most things in life are outside my control, and I'm generally fine with it. And when those things outside my control are bad for me, I just... accept them while doing whatever I can to make them less bad?

Two people here mentioned media and booze. For me they're refreshment; they distract me from the problem that I can't solve, but they won't help directly. (Sometimes you do need a refreshment.) Same deal with cooking or talking with my pets.

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.

Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can't honestly think of any.

If you get sick then that's biology.
If your boiler bursts and your house floods that's an engineering problem.
If lightning strikes your house and your home burns down then that's just physics.

Just because it sucks doesn't mean science can't explain it, and it doesn't mean that it's inexplainable.

Ultimately everything is either physics or politics, both of which are very easy to understand at a basic level. Especially politics.

Radical acceptance. And then to follow, build a core of self supporting psychology structures to live by, which sounds complex, but it's just things like

Emotional regulation tools. Distress tolerance. Self support concepts.

Let me know if you want me to expand on anything.

"It is what it is."

Music, games, booze.

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.

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

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

, 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.

I make things better in ways that I can.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

This is something I really don't understand. Maybe you can explain it to me.

For me a "normal" day would be one where earth looks like the moon. The fact that we have all kinds of plants and animals is amazing and the fact that we have buildings, technology and culture is something to be very proud of, because every day that you don't run around killing people or doing other horrible things is a day where you overcame your instincts and helped hold up culture. So to me every day, even one that you would deem "shit that happens in your life", is absolutely amazing and something to be proud of.

But for someone who believes that there is a God a normal day would be one where everything works out great, and it would just be because God took care of it. A bad day would mean that for whatever reason this God decided to let you suffer. And this is supposed to make you feel good?

Isn't it uplifting to say that you can't explain why bad things happen to you? Do you really think it's uplifting to think that bad things happen to you because an all powerful being decided that you deserved it?

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.

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.

Stoicism has been tainted a bit recently by attention from some fringe groups, but stoicism itself is still a very enlightened way to see the world, IMO

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.

🎶 Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry
Be happy
In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don't worry
Be happy, don't worry, be happy now 🎶

Works for me most of the time :)
On a more serious note, I learned to accept that not everything will always go my way. But not every bad thing is as bad as it might appear at first, and sometimes by rolling with the punches you can come out on top. Or at least end up in a better position than you started out in.
Of course I've never had to deal with truly catastrophic life events, so take that advice with a grain of salt.

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.

I talk about it to friends and family. Most things have happened to people you already know.

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.