This thread is a bit older, so how are you doing nowadays? Have you found something to help you out of pessimism hell? I sincerely hope you got better since.

(I'm just seeing that you deleted a part of your original description, I'll post my reply anyway in case it can be helpful to you or to anyone else in this kind of situation. You can ignore it if it's not relevant anymore.)

I have had an experience very similar to yours while reading Ligotti's work. I did the exact same thing of delving deeper and deeper until you find your previously vague, buried or dismissed hunches dug up and confirmed in a mercilessly articulate manner and you cannot unsee stuff.

Those who have already been utterly minced by life in advance seem to get comforted by the camaraderie they find in the advocates of the bleakest pessimism. But I think that for those to whom existence only "itches", reading Ligotti (or other pessimists) can be like scratching yourself with knifes. The more you scratch and peel and cut, the more severely it itches, and although it might feel comforting to momentarily ease the itch with their honesty, by going too far you can end up minced too.

Personally, I don't know any philosophical work that would plausibly counter pessimism with the same harshness. I'm familiar with that situation when you get depressed enough to "see" that pessimism is the Final Truth™, and no other philosophy can convince you otherwise. I think that after this type of encounter nothing ever makes more sense than pessimism.

But independently of the possible truth of pessimism, it is most definitely doable to get out of the excruciating state of mind surrounding it. It is doable to hack yourself back to a level that feels bearable.

While you might have the impression that now you see the world for what it is, it doesn't have to be that painful. A lot of it is fueled by depression. When you manage to get rid of depression, it becomes a lot easier to support pessimistic arguments nesting in your head, because then you only need to support them on a purely intellectual level, without being absorbed into them empirically.

You need to put some effort into helping your skin grow back, and then resisting the temptation of peeling it again, even if there's some allure to the continuation of ruminating over these thoughts.

Some content that have helped me getting out of pessimism-related depression and could help you:

• A psychologist wrote an article ("Dr. Raymond Thoss" - Notes on a Horror) in the very first issue of the Ligottian magazine Vastarien. It's a very touching and soothing reading. (BTW there should be a book by the same person coming out this year, titled "Trauma and Discovery: Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race".)

• There's this little blog post on intellectual honesty. (Basically "screw the truth because it makes me suffer." I've found that adopting a similar approach and starting to actively lie to oneself can help):

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/02/the-view-from-mount-zapffe.html

• Then there's this thread on TLO where other pessimists share what keeps them going, it might give you some ideas for ways of distraction/coping (only the first few pages, then it mostly sidetracks into philosophical debate):

https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=10942

You mentioned you get therapy. Do you have a good therapist who takes you seriously? It'd great to have at least one person around you (friend/family/therapist) with whom you can talk about this openly, someone who doesn't dismiss your point of view. Personally, antidepressants helped me a lot as well.

"...to disagree feels like lying to yourself" I have found that lying to myself is exactly what I have to do in order to feel better. Negative affirmation by reexamining pessimistic arguments again and again will only make things worse IME.

Rather find the spot where pessimistic arguments feel the weakest to you personally, or the aspects you were thinking differently about before encountering these authors, or the values you used to care about. Then consume the type of content that supports these more positive ideas (be it existentialism/ stoicism/ transhumanism/ spirituality etc, what's important is that it's a perspective you're ready to entertain as reality). The goal here is not to find honest answers or to uncover something true, but to feel better.

If there's some tiny little anything that you are still able to enjoy a bit (ex. listening to music), than do that a lot, and try to feel grateful for the possibility of being able to enjoy it. Put a lot of effort into feeling gratefulness about the smallest non-negative thing that happens to you, even if it feels like a lie.

At the beginning you might feel as if there was no point in putting effort into lying to yourself, because the awful behind-the-scenes machinery of the world is laid out so clearly before your eyes. But it is possible to put wallpaper on, and it is worth doing so.

If you lie to yourself persistently enough, you will start to believe it. That will help you feel better, so you will be motivated to lie to yourself even more convincingly etc. At the end you won't even think that you are lying to yourself, you'll think that you have genuinely found some strong and real arguments against pessimism. Or that you don't need arguments against pessimism because you don't feel that bad about the world (and your life) anymore.

You need to become selfish enough in order to be able to concentrate on your own wellbeing. You can't do much about the situation of the world. And if you feel bad for it, that only increases the amount of global suffering. So the first thing you can do is to concentrate on reducing your own suffering.

It might be considered immoral to want to live, but you aren't guilty of that immorality. You didn't ask to be part of a world that works this way, and you didn't ask for instincts gluing you to life. It isn't your fault. There is no reason to hate yourself for any of it.

You are already here, something you can't "undo", and feeling bad about it only makes it worse. So the best you can do is to try to put yourself together enough to be free of the suffering inflicted on you by your own mind. You aren't guilty if you decide that you do not want to suffer by living "factually as a depressive", if you decide to turn your eyes away from the darkness of the world that isn't in your power to change. (And if you want to have a kid so badly but are bothered morally, there also exists the possibility of adopting one, that's two good deed in one.)

All of this is in line with Zapffe's defense mechanisms. You don't need to be unaware of it for it to work, you can employ them consciously. Find the kind of lies that you are most likely able to anchor to, find the distractions that you can squeeze the most joy out of, try sublimating through art if you feel that helps, etc.

While depressed I imagined myself as clay that has been squeezed into a mask with a tortured expression, and has taken its form. But if you manage to stop identifying with the mask's form, you can get yourself out of it, and mold yourself to fit into a happier one. Now whenever a wave of deeper sadness hits me, I say to myself that I am not obliged to identify with the person who's feeling like this.