Nature is an honest-to-god 24/7 horror movie and we only get to pretend it’s not because we’re on top and happen to be intelligent and social. And it fucking still is for some of us. And the social games and shared social fiction that saves us from it is still pretty sick, much of the time.
Also existence itself is best described, in a broad and literary sense, as Lovecraftian. Don’t think about anything too hard. Especially your own perception of reality, or place in reality. Or... reality. Just don’t think, maybe. That’s safest.
Oh yeah? Do some research on interspecies altruism, for example. Whatever box you want to put nature in, nature will step right out of. Regardless of how comfortable or uncomfortable that vision seemed. And this might be the most uncomfortable realization of all. Or the most exhilarating; it's entirely up to you.
I'd get on that immediately but I'm a bit busy climbing to the top of a tree so this fungus that's taken over my nervous system can proceed to the next stage of its lifecycle by getting a bird to eat me.
It sure looks like prey animals (so, most of them) live every day of their lives in a slasher movie. If not something worse. But maybe a constant, very real possibility of being attacked then eaten alive is actually not horrible? IDK. Best case all the "lower" animals have no consciousness whatsoever so at least they don't observe their own experience of the horror they live—but then that's creepy in its own, more cosmic-horror, right (think Watts' Blindsight).
But yes I am absolutely capable of ignoring that and going "wow aren't those flowers pretty" and do it all the time.
Good you can still do that. Next level would be to do it without ignoring all that dark stuff.
Yes, there is plenty of horror to go around, but we humans sometims like to fixate on it, amplify and imagine it somehow absolute, fetishize it. Animals don't live in constant horror, it's pretty obvious (and surely their cortisol levels are not constantly through the roof), they just don't fixate on all that stuff. One day, they'll probably experience agony and death, but so what, it's all part of life. That doesn't make them less conscious really, but in this case just more sane than a lot of us humans.
Also existence itself is best described, in a broad and literary sense, as Lovecraftian. Don’t think about anything too hard. Especially your own perception of reality, or place in reality. Or... reality. Just don’t think, maybe. That’s safest.