Making sense of the magic of existance and the pain of missing out

I don't know how to properly put this into words but one thing I've been struggling for a while is the profound feeling of missing out on experiences that feel magical in a scientifically explainable world. I am an atheist and my scientific "knowledge" is on pop-sci level but from what I understand we have evolved senses and motivations to keep us going and protect ourselves from immediate harm and consciousness to create a model of the world and ourselves to make better decisions. I feel like I can break every motivation down to a biological level and yet the experiences in this modern world feel more profound than simply animalistic desires. Like how eating greasy food feels good for evolutionary reasons but you can eat a 3-star restauraunt course that makes you feel something magical. The problem for me is that you are still limited by your biology in experiencing that magic. For example you can lose your sense of taste and many other illness and accidents or simply by being born into poverty with no way out can prevent you from experiencing many things life has to offer. My issue is that this for me leads to addtional suffering by thinking about what I missed out or am missing out on. I feel like I am taking life, in some sense, too seriously and not enough in a practical sense. I cry about missing out on many things by not being born rich, healthy, smart and beautiful instead of making the best of what I have. I still haven't found a way to cope with being me, getting to experience life from this 1 limited perspective. I wasn't born like a video game protagonist into a world designed with challenges I can overcome and things I can get. Some things I am simply not able to accomplish and will forever be out of my reach. I know I am not special yet I struggle with accepting my place and yearn for more when I only get this 1 chance at experiencing life. Why do I have to be locked out of so many wonderful experiences? It makes me question if I am glorifying the conscious subjective experience of pleasure.

>My issue is that this for me leads to addtional suffering by thinking about what I missed out or am missing out on. My truth is that not all experiences live up to the hype and there is no reason to experience them all. Although I am not interested in much. I don't really care about adrenaline junky experiences like skydiving. I don't care for experiencing a 5 star meal. I am interested in computers. Anything tied to cultures. Anything that interfaces with biology and robotics together. History. You also raise a point >I cry about missing out on many things by not being born rich, healthy, smart and beautiful instead of making the best of what I have. >Why do I have to be locked out of so many wonderful experiences? Indeed. There's no valid reason. All the riches of the world and we can't let people travel freely between countries and experience pleasure few will ever experience? Please. You are right. It IS stupid. So while I do not share your FOMO, but understand where you are coming from and want you to understand you are not missing much in the grand scheme of things, I share your feeling of being locked out of experiences. However. Do not despair. For now, You have such a long way ahead of your life. Build the near end of it. Retirement plan. Unironically. Build a retirement plan. a pention for when you'll reach your "golden days". In our current economic system, this is your only chance of eventually living those experiences you dream about and cry about. Take that chance and run with it.

What I have learned over the years is that the only thing that matters is how you feel. That's how you "keep score" in life. Note that recreational chemicals are not a good way to feel good in the long run (just the opposite). It doesn't matter where you are, what you do, who you interact with, whose approval you have, how much money you make, etc. As long as you know a good way to keep yourself feeling good in the long run, you are way ahead of the game. In a lot of cases, that involves working toward a goal in some area of interest, hobby, or whatever is meaningful to you, I didn't read this in any book, I learned it the hard way.

>>84110 That's the hardest thing in the world for me to achieve I think Buddhists would generally say it is impossible and that striving will harm you

A person travelling the world in some fast paced job making millions is missing out on chilling the fuarrrk out and playing video game and bed rotting. Your missing out on watching paint dry your missing out on getting hit by shrapnel. You cant not miss out on something every moment of your life its just about what you want to do and what you can do. If your eating three star michelin courses every day a regular hamburger just becomes an awful meal to you instead of a half frozen hot pocket. You want to eat at some specific persons michelin started resturaunt now thats 1000$ per course at least once in your life instead of just eating at a michelin starred resturaunt once in your life. You paint with 100$ a tube oil paints instead of with soykaf on the walls of your padded cell yet the act of painting is just as fun either way. This idea that you will have these experiences and then feel more whole or be able to die and not have regrets when it comes to this fomo thing is not really any different then your parents or grandparents thinking this treadmill they saw on tv will be the thing that finally changes their life and gets them into shape if they buy it. Only for it to rot in the basement, just like these experiences will in yout memory. If you are passionate about exercising it would already make you feel whole for a moment and youd be running and then maybe youd get the treadmill because it will allow you to run even more when your stuck in the house. Theres some guy his neighbors all call him the barbecue king hes always on the grill he hosts cookouts he makes the best ribs you have ever had hes not even thinking about michelin starred resturaunts he has a pack of ribs and sweet baby rays from walmart hes dreaming about getting the grillmaster 5000 for 300 bucks instead of his portable coleman grill on wheels. Hes making the best ribs he can on that thing and he could still probably do better. Maybe he does have aspirations to be a professional chef, maybe it does seem possible to him so he does that, and he ends up working at a michelin starred resturaunt. Even then ohh fomo i missed out on climbing mount everest ohh i missed out on having a girlfriend whos a model i missed out on working for a big tech company ohhh ohhh. you are going to regret missing out on everything you could have actually done when you die getting stuck in this instead of just regretting a few things you couldnt do anyways. In fact scratch that dont even ground your thinking in this way, ground yourself in morals and values and you can just stop thinking about this sort of thing entirely. You dont have to be religious, and you dont need to find the eternal universal base morals (unless that is your passion) just accept you are a product of your times on some level and think about what what would and would not be a disservice to yourself and those around you. Lets say you are really into cooking. Are you doing a disservice to yourself by not spending all your money to go on a wacky sea cruise adventure? No thats just irresponsible. Are you doing a disservice to yourself by not taking a free cooking class offered by some local community college like institution you stumbled on? Yes you are, it could even be said you are hurting yourself and hurting people for no reason is usually bad. Every night you spend crying about not travelling the world and not attending a prestigious lecture given by famous artist on the joys of painting and not skydiving and not this and not that is a night you spend not signing up for this cooking class that in this very moment could bring you all sorts of joy and bring you to meet new people and learn so so much. You really have to claw at life for experiences like that and as you move up you have to claw harder and harder because one day you attend that cooking class and theres nothing new to know there and theres only one cooking instructor at that college and now you have to dig for something else to get better, maybe one day you just end up going on that wacky cruise adventure because youve become so good at this soykaf the only way to improve is to try the acclaimed x dish they serve on it and analyze it and deconstruct it. For now though instead of worrying about what special experience will satisfy your palate adopted by imagining yourself as every one of the million screaming online voices, you should appreciate that the bar for a special new experience for you is really not that high (while it lasts).

>>84108 I have been pondering a version of this recently. The strongest contending cope at the moment is that if I consider the property of having a conscious experience to be a regressed form of my self, then "reincarnation" is real no matter what- even if souls and stuff turn out to be real and don't move around in a reincarnation-y way, all souls in abstract when they start out would be a regressed me, then progressing in different ways. This isn't just a "I'll take comfort in the fact that I'll be rich and happy and beloved in another life" cope, it is a realization that being a neurotic, broke, retarded and lazy loser is only a tragedy if it winds up being a rerun. (like an episode on the television you've already seen) The only tragedy is being alive and boring. What would be the point of living a life twice? The set of all my lives would be more enriched if I treated my current condition as an opportunity for experiences I might have never felt before. I am looking for opportunities to hit myself with disorienting manic whiplash from how good things can be, but that might not be unique enough because losers have won the lottery or fallen in love or felt artistic compulsion before, and some of them probably even made their lives better as a result. An iteration on this cope designed to motivate me is considering how much I can help other people who are like me in that they are screwed but have more potential for experiencing some core life experiences in an authentic way. Then I can improve the quality of the set of all my lives and I don't even need to fix myself unless it turns out that would be fun and interesting. I can actually stay an anonymous basement dweller for my entire life and that's okay as long as I make things more interesting for everyone else.

Unironically do drugs (really)