Lovecraft Mythos - Cosmic Horror

I prefer the ant on a circuit board, that briefly gained human understanding allegory.

Yeah....

And the chaos causing Lovecraft's overwhelming sense of dread was black people moving into his New England neighborhood lol

That got kind of increasingly oddly specific the longer it went on.

This is probably less accurate to Lovecraft's intent, but I like to think of "cosmic horrors" as being more literal. The universe, by and large, does not care about life - and the fact that it continues to exist at all, let alone so peacefully, is largely just chance or luck. It's almost absurd that we go about our lives so mundanely, given how chaotic and inhospitable the universe at large largely is.

Events at scales large enough to completely destroy Earth's biosphere happen on the regular and without reason in the universe. The Earth doesn't "owe" us a stable and habitable environment, it just happens to have one largely by chance - one cosmic catastrophe and we're out. One collision of sufficient size, or nearby supernova, or gamma ray burst aimed right at us, or front of vacuum decay, or solar superflare. A rogue planet could pass near our solar system at an odd angle and destabilize our orbit (or those of millions of asteroids).

Even our own actions - man-made climate change and ocean acidification could trigger a phytoplankton die-off, disrupting the global oxygen cycle, slowly suffocating most life over a span of decades. Or we could pass a tipping point and actually have Earth's biosphere run away into a Venus-like state, no longer habitable at all (there's on the order of 10x-50x more methane trapped in polar ice, than is in the entire atmosphere). A supervolcano could erupt today and send us into a decade-plus of freezing temperatures, famine, and overall civilization-collapsing conditions.

And in the very long term, an end of this nature is completely guaranteed. Life on Earth will one day end, because we're entirely dependent on the sun - one of those unfathomably large and powerful cosmic entities that could, at any point, destroy us or our civilization with a single random event. We're just a lucky ant on the cosmic dance floor that hasn't been stepped on. Yet.

per se

Immediately thought of the vamp kids from South Park....

That being said, they completely miss the point.

Lovecraft was one of the few authors that got the utterly incomprehensible aspect of it right. If higher dimensional beings interacted with a human it would completely break our minds and leave as a complete mess.

It's not just that the human isn't the main character, it's a small stone that's never mentioned or shown, that gets stepped on 27% of the way through a story and has absolutely zero effect on anything.

Nothing about us would matter and if the higher dimensional being did pay attention to us, it would be like us skipping a stone across a pond. A peaceful mindless thing a human would do to kill time without a single thought that the stone was even alive let alone what it would think about the act, or during it.

This is really well written, and nails how I’ve felt my whole life since n ways I could t even explain. I’m going to save this and send it to anybody who has never been able to understand me, because there is no way in Hell I’d ever be able to articulate my feelings as well as this Internet stranger just did.

I feel that way about at least 3 things. Camus called it "the absurd". The universe, he said, essentially does not make sense. You can dig and dig and there is no meaning at the bottom. We really are just atoms. The absurd is the interface, when humankind presses their hand against the meaningless and tries to make too much sense of it.

There isn't going to be an achievement screen when you die.

Terry Pratchett in Hogfather can be read as a direct response - You can live a good life anyway if you believe in "the big lies" - Truth, justice, love, etc.

The essay Meditations on Moloch is powerful reading on this topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

For the record, I don't endorse Scott Alexander's opinions in general.

TLDR - it's the fear when you first realize you're a nihilist

I think, generally, a lot of people have poor literacy and analysis skills. Like, they might know how to read the words but pulling any deeper meaning out is a reach. I've seen too many people that think stories are just stories, and or they have secret meaning for you to find like a puzzle with one or two "correct" answers.

So I think a lot of people read Lovecraft and latch onto "oh yeah squid monster cool", very literal, and don't really think about what this post is about. Kind of a shame.

There was a book for an RPG I liked that talked about horror. It said something like yeah monsters with tentacles can be scary but also that's very mundane, really. You can see and understand that, and probably shoot it. But horror can come in other forms. Like, how would you fight an enemy that is a song?

um, i was promised tentacles?

Sooo... Donald Trump is a cosmic horror?

To truly understand cosmic horror, look no further than a mathematician.

They get a small (smaller than most will admit) look at something barely comprehensible to human understanding, and it is beautiful, and they dedicate their lives in search of this beauty.

To those outside falls the cosmic horror, the (culturally implied) madness of the mathematician. To those who see, only cosmic bliss exists (seriously, go explore mathematics WITHOUT exams, it will bring you joy).

Consider that HP was writing at a time when we were first figuring out that the Milky Way wasn't the only galaxy, just figuring out how unfathomably HUGE the universe is. Knowing this and looking deeply into the night sky kinda freaks me out, even in 2025. This was all new to Lovecraft's generation.

And that's not even touching on the other scientific advances of the time. We were hit in the face with the fact that what we thought was reality was nowhere even close. Lots of room for unimaginable horrors!

Consider this pic from 1927. All those minds were active at once, tearing down our past conceptions of truth!

Ants on a leaf drifting towards the Niagara Falls.

Dang, I should go back a read some of that stuff, it's been too long.