Why do people keep doubting you?! They are the exact same but a little bit smaller. Nobody bats an eye when we say that lions and tigers are cats… people are dumb.
Go to an appliance store and ask them for a refrigerator box or water heater box. You can use a knife to cut it to the same height as the table you’re considering, then use it for a bit to see how it suits your lifestyle.
If it works, you can toss the box and buy the table.
Probably the best way would be eliminating reliance on cars and creating walkable neighborhoods with stores, restaurants, and services within walking distance, in the US anyway. Did people ever, throughout human history, just stand around the house?
Edit: not because CDPR did a poor job on it. The Witcher games are my most played games on Steam. I’d just be super interested to see a FromSoft take on the combat and storytelling.
Any parent knows that you can’t go straight from doing-stuff to sleep; your brain needs some veg-out stuff to just process things. (I mean, I can sleep, but something unpleasant builds up if you don’t let decompression happen)
By the time I’ve left work, done grocery shopping, made dinner, cleaned up after dinner, done laundry etc, it’s already late, and I’ve had no me-time to just decompress. (especially when chores drag out longer the more tired I get…)
And apart from that, there’s a mixture of FOMO, resentment and just clawing-for-agency that makes me rebel against the only boundary I can shift, even though I’m the one that suffers for it.
Im not religious, not in the sense that i follow any particular religion.
But it seems to me, analyzing the history of humanity across multiple cultures, that we humans have fundamentally a “spiritual need”, a need to believe into something that is bigger than us, that lies on a superior level of existence.
Call it buddhism, christianity or whatever, but it seems like we need to believe in something like that.
To an extent, i believe it has to do with us being moral animals and having a natural need for justice. We want to believe that justice exists in this world and a religion and its rules is a way to a just world. Because bad people go to hell, or are victims of karma.
So to answer your question. I think we want the world to be fair, because we are moral animals. And believing in religion is a way to believe in a fair world.
The problem with religions is twofold.
One, that across human history the above core element of all religions has been conflated with other foreign elements that have nothing to do with it, like descriptions about the origin of the universe and humans (which is a question of science, not of religion) and rules about how to live your life which have nothing moral about them (and are probably the temporary result of the existing culture within a society). Like forbidding homosexuality, or the idea that women serve a very limited function in society which is limited to taking care of the home and the children.
Usually people have come to accept this because religion is sold as a “complete package” (particularly enforced with rules that you make a bad religious person if you don’t accept it all and with the people close being incentivized to look down on you for not strictly adhering to the religious teachings). That is also why people believe in religion in general (and not just in its moral teachings which actually make sense) in 2024.
The second problem with religion (and here i’m going on a tangent that doesn’t have much to do with the question at hand) is that it usually makes a validity claim for eternity, i.e. religion asserts that its rules and knowledge are valid forever (literally set in stone). This has done more harm than good to our improving of our set of guiding moral principles.
I think that there is a place in the human brain that is responsible for ‘spirituality’. Attempts at stimulating it can produce deep religious thoughts en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
Maybe it evolved as a buffer to store random ideas we couldn’t comprehend. Maybe as a social creator we need a section of our brain to produce spiritual ideas, to help with social cohesion?
IMHO, an easier explanation is that complexity, chaos and the unknown are scary, very very scary.
Things are a lot less scary and a lot more simple if all complexity is explained away by Deity, nothing important is random but rather controlled by said Deity and the unknown is replaced by some fable around Deity.
A mother losing her child in an Earthquake is easier to handle at an emotional level if “It was the will of God and that child went to Heaven” (which is pretty much what the typical Catholic Priest will say) than having to face it being merelly random bad luck and that young person she loved so much being gone forever. (It’s not by chance that for example Mormons during the period when they’re supposed to go out and preach their religion around the World will look at obituaries to find people to try to convert).
I heard somewhere that spirituality is the easing of suffering. Maybe that was from Mark Manson (Subtle Art, YT channel, etc.).
Something in that statement works for me. I’m not superstitious nor do I hold beliefs in the supernatural. But I do undertake efforts to ease suffering - whether that’s meditation, readings, or reflection.
I think many have a spiritual need. Anxiety, depression, grief, changing moods, and more reveal that need. There’s an emotional (“spiritual”) suffering that we hope or need to salve.
Then I think we overshoot the mark.
It’s easy to want concrete perspectives when the world is dark, unjust, or foreboding. Attempting to meet those need with concrete answers helps feed the rise of religion.
I can’t fault the feeling of needing certainty, but I’d hope we can find ways to ease suffering without the use of delusion or lies.
Having said all of the above, I’m an Atheist. I think in rejecting religion, we have, also, overshot the mark.
People need each other. We need the things and rituals that help us find or move closer to peace. We are emotional, feeling, social animals and we’ve wrapped ourselves in new certainties and - sometimes - self-righteousness.
We need people. We need respect. We need love. We deserve human rights. We, also, need to learn how to transcend some of our injuries so we can navigate more effectively. That can be family, community, or national politics.
I’m not talking about losing boundaries. I’m talking about using them differently. Yesterday was MLK Jr day. He set boundaries, but he didn’t do it in hate or overt shame and anger.
He just did the work that needed to be done with the clearest eyes he could. I hope we, the materialists, can find a realistic perspective that doesn’t over-celebrate reason, and forgets the rest of our experience.
Reason tells us we feel. We hurt. We hurt others. We need something (reality-based) that reminds us to tend to ourselves and our communities.
We need balance.
I’ve wandered some in my response. It helped me to type, maybe it helps someone else, too. Either way, I liked your comment and it spurred thought.
I have recently come to the conclusion that there are cognitively functional people with a sound mind that believe that it is not possible to know anything for sure. Like, it’s not possible to know if the scientists are telling the truth. We just have to take their word for it. Why not stick to the thousand year old belief system then? It has better apologists, armed with an experience of hundreds of years of demagogy and dogma regarding fending of criticism of said belief system.
That’s just the excuse they use. Sadly it works on a lot of people who think it’s a legitimate question when it’s not, and is in fact easily disproved.
Take away their wallet, phone or medicine and then ask them if they still aren’t sure. Or point a gun at their head and ask them if they’re not sure a bullet will blast through their skull and kill them if they don’t stop talking.
Or just tell them that means their religion is still bupkis because if we can’t be sure, we can’t accept it as true. Hold them to their standards.
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