Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy

Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy

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Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy
Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy
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We exhaust ourselves with the lies we tell ourselves to make life look okay.

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Martin Butler
Aug 05, 2025
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Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy
Martin Butler's Negative Philosophy
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man standing beside rock formation
Photo by Vicky Sim on Unsplash

Cursed as most of us are, living in a society that only knows striving and struggles, we adopt these demonic behaviors in all areas of life. Even leisure time becomes an intense effort to find the most gratifying enjoyment. But I'm not interested in the mundane aspect of the curse of effort; I want to explore the domains where its poison is most effective.

Being the owners of minds that never rest from looking for solutions to problems, we take the programming we get from our culture and search frantically for metaphysical entities such as meaning, purpose, truth, morality, and the like. We are most needy for significance, and our ingenuity has been instrumental in creating all kinds of stories where our significance and ongoing existence are assured: this is nothing more than the animal survival drive pushing us to find immortality. The survival drive is distinctly uncomfortable with death and the end of life.

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