(Or possibly the worst kind of zombie. But still, metaphorically.)

Since I was a kid, as far back as I can remember having thought about the issue at all, the basic arguments against existential angst have seemed obvious to me.

I used to express it something like: "If nothing really matters [ie, values aren’t objective, or however I put it back then], then it doesn't matter that nothing matters. If I choose to hold something as important, I can't be wrong."

However, a few months ago, it occurred to me to apply another principle of rationality to the issue, and that actually caused me to start having problems with existential angst!

I don't know if we have a snappy name for the principle, but this is my favorite expression of it:

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

[I first read it used as the epigram to Yvain's "Least Convenient Possible World". Call it, what, "Fight your own zombies"?]

Sure, "The universe is a mere dance of particles, therefore your hopes and dreams are meaningless and you should just go off yourself to avoid the pain and struggle of trying to realize them" is a pretty stupid argument, easily dispatched.

But... what if contains the seed for a ravenous, undead, stone-cold sense-making monster?

I just got the feeling that maybe it did, and I was having a lot of trouble pinning down what exactly it could be so that I could either refute it or prove that the line of thought didn't actually go anywhere in the first place.

Now, I had just suffered a disappointing setback in my life goals, which obviously supports the idea that the philosophical issues weren’t fundamental to my real problems. I knew this, but that didn’t stop the problem. The sense of dread that maybe there was something to this existential angst thing was playing havoc with all my old techniques for picking myself up, re-motivating myself, and getting back to work!

In the end, I never quite managed to pin it down to my full satisfaction. I more-or-less managed to express my worries to myself, refuted those half-formed reasons to fear, and that more-or-less let me move on.

Has anyone else ever had similar problems? And if so, how did you express your fears, and how did you refute them?

For myself, the best I could come up with was that I was worried that my own utility function was somehow inconsistent with itself and/or what was really possible. (And I don’t mean like propositional values, of course, but the real involuntary basics that are part of who you are as a human being.)

To use a non-emotional-charged analogy, say you had a being that valued spending its life enjoying eating broccoli. Except it turns out that it didn’t really like broccoli. And whether or not its values prohibited modifying itself and/or broccoli, it was nowhere near having the technology to do so anyway. So it was going to be in internal emotional conflict for a long time.

So maybe it should trade-off a short-term slight intensification in the internal conflict in order to drastically shorten the total period of conflict. By violating its value of self preservation and committing painless suicide ASAP.

And while the being is not particularly enthusiastic about killing itself, it starts to worry that maybe its reluctance is really just a form of akrasia. It wonders if maybe deep down it really knows that, realistically, suicide is the best option, but it knows that it anticipates feeling really awful if it commits to that path enough to actually go prepare for it, even though it would only have to suffer the short period while preparing.

Broccoli being an analogy for... meaningful human relationships or something?

Now as to the counter-arguments I came up with-- well, what would you come up with? Make your own zombies out of my hasty sketch of one, and figure out how to strike it down.

Quite honestly, expressing your existential angst in terms of broccoli probably helps a bunch in itself!