Sorry if this has been done to death before but what exactly is rick sanchez's dysfunction?

sorry if this has been done to death before but what exactly is rick sanchez's dysfunction?

is he just lonely and unable to connect with anyone or is he paradoxically dealing with his fear of death by engaging in high risk behavior constantly?

He knows too much.
He's a nihilist. He's seen enough of the universe to know that nothing he or anyone else does matters, so he's filling his days with idle amusement.

But at the same time, he's a human. And humans need other people to feel fulfilled. It's what makes his dynamic with the rest of the family so fucked up, he's using them, but at the same time, he needs them and does care for them in his own weird way, even Jerry.

But at the same same time, he knows that they're all disposable. He knows that he's pretty disposable too, there are literally endless, infinite amounts of him and his family out there.

But at the same same same time, he realizes that he's toxic, something about him is poisoned at a fundamental level, and all he can do is spread that poison around.

This.

Hardcore scifi's tend to get existential and dark...because nothing really matters, life goes on and when you die, you will be forgotten.

He's been to, and destroyed to many worlds to count, and he's jumped into so many different timelines, he has no fucking clue where he really comes from anymore, so he just goes with the flow and tries to escape the federation.
If you lost where you come from and are living with people who aren't really "Your" family, I'm sure you'd be as destructive and nihilistic as Rick Sanchez

Because, like many of the world's smartest and most successful people, he wants to have his cake and eat it too

And yet he knows that he cannot.

So he fucks around with drugs and alcohol and being an asshole who ignores the rules and common decency, all so he can continue denying it and pretend that he can for a bit longer each time.

High functioning addict. Without his substance abuse, he'd be fine.

no he wouldn't, he'd probably actually kill himself instead of just attempting if he didn't have drugs to keep him preoccupied.

His dysfunction is he's a fucking asshole

Shut the fu-URRP-uck up, M-Morty. You little bitch

he has to constantly stimulate himself and act manic because it's the only thing that distracts him from existential dread

If anything that's what has kept him around for longer. It keeps him busy even if it's no help and at that point in life is imagine you'd do anything to make yourself content for even a little bit or just something to dull it all.

do you think the character (by proxy an extension of the writers) is more frightened that one day we all cease to exist or more that life is intrinsically meaningless (and that he is toiling to bring meaning to his existence)

Hope you watched all 2 seasons. Yes he knows he's the smartest human out there and he also knows too much about everything to better improve his life. At the end he turns himself in to give his family the normal life they wanted in the first place at the risk of spending the rest of his in jail.

Next season will start off of him breaking out on his own and saying it was nothing or the first episode will be the family rescuing him and him being narcissistic about it saying he could have gotten out himself

based on the lore of the show it would make the most sense for the Council of Ricks to save him since that is their entire purpose,and if nothing else, they owe him for finding the Rick killer.

Genius comes with a really sucky price: most of the incredibly smart people of the world are (to put it mildly) whack-a-doos.
Einstein bought a brand new suit every time he had a public speaking engagement, Poe would constantly complain that everyone was too stupid to see how obvious his formula for writing a story was ... and kept a pet racoon, Alexander The Great broke down in tears when he had no next millitary challenge to overcome.
The modern ones are often dismissed as "eccentric" because we finally made up a word just for it.

what about Terry Tao?

Is he a nihilist though? I thought nihilism was more about building a meaning out of your own life since there is no intrinsic one, but he seems more like an eighth graders understanding of nihilism, where he's just using it as an excuse to lead a meaningless hedonistic lifestyle since "lel nothing matters." he apparently used to lead a much more purposeful life when he was younger, but that seemed to have been beaten out of him, leaving him the empty pleasure seeking husk we know him as.

Nihilism is since there is no meaning to life, why bother.
I think its existentialism that you explained. There is no meaning to life so attribute your own.

In regards to Rick i think part of the reason he is so broken is because of his wife. In all the multiverse we havent seen her in any version. surely there is a pretty sad reason for that?

>Nihilism is since there is no meaning to life, why bother.

You have obviously never read Nietzsche

True but I watched The Sopranos.

could you elaborate?

Pretty much this.

Knows too much and developed severe mental and emotional issues because of it.

so why doesn't he just kill himself

He tried

Cause he knows it's hollow. Even if he dies there are near infinite alt versions of himself that will keep on ticking. His whole character is him living with that knowledge.

There's not much to it, really. Nihilism is the denial of any inherent meaning of life. Christianism is nihilistic because life on this world is irrelevant and it's only a warmup for tha real deal in the afterlife. Nihilism, by definition, escapes any value judgement in the sense that, since you assume nothing has meaning or intrinsic value, you can either give meaning to things 'artificially' (think Batman) or just lie on the ground bitching and crying.

Couldn't get himself to do it. He knows it would be pointless, being just one Rick among infinite others.

No fuck you you stupid fuck.

Exactly. Rick is an example of what Nietzche considered to be the Übermensch, a person living to the fullest and beyond conventional morals. Except he finds out that leading this kind of life has nasty side effects.

Nice counter argument you drooling retard.

But Thorse, good and evil don't really exist on a nihilistic world view, they are 100% subjective assumptions and biased, and no moral view is objectvelly better than other. Staling might as well wakes up one day and say "lets do good" and throw any of his potential oppositors in a shitty prison on Siberia or directly kill them, because he think that it is for a greater good.