[noduerme]

Watching someone you love die of cancer is also super damaging to one's concept of normal life. Getting a diagnosis, or being in a bad car accident, or the victim of a violent assault is, too. I think a personal sense of normality is nothing more than the state of mind where we can blissfully (and temporarily) forget about our own mortality. Obviously, marinating yourself in all the horrible stuff makes it really hard to maintain that state of mind.

On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.

[karlgkk]

Frankly

there’s a difference between a one or two or even ten off exposure to the brutality of life, where various people in your life will support you and help you acclimate to it

Versus straight up mainlining it for 8 hours a day

[stephenitis]

hey kid, hope you're having a good life. I'll look at the screen full of the worst the internet and humanity has produced on the internet for eight hours.

I get your idea but in the context of this topic I think you're overreaching

[Der_Einzige]

Actually reckoning with this stuff leads people into believing in anti-natalism, negative utilitarinism, Scopenhaur/Philipp Mainlander (Mainlander btw was not just pro-suicide, he actually killed himself!), and the voluntary extinction movement. This terrified other philosophers like Nietzsche, who spends most of his work defending reality even if it's absolute shit. "Amor Fati", "Infinite Regress/Eternal Recurrence", "Übermensch" vs the literal "Last Man". "Wall-E" of all films was the modern quintessential nietzschian fable, with maybe "Children of Men" being the previous good one before that.

You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions

Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!

[bowsamic]

I felt this way for the first 30 years of my life. Then I received treatment for depression (psychoanalysis) and finally tasted joy for the first time in my entire life. Now I love life. YMMV

EDIT: If you’re interested what actually happened is that I was missing the prerequisite early childhood experience that enables one to feel secure in reality. If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so. For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke

[Der_Einzige]

But psychoanalysis is literally psudoscientific nonsense. You got spooked.

[motorest]

> But psychoanalysis is literally psudoscientific nonsense. You got spooked.

OP got spooked to stop suffering and love life instead? Is that your cautionary tale?

[lazide]

‘Warning! You may end up irrationally happy and fulfilled!’

[bowsamic]

No it isn’t, it’s empirically justified, look it up. Hence why the state insurance here in Germany is willing to pay for me to go three times a week. It works

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Wow, thanks for your valuable contribution to the conversation!

[keybored]

[deleted]

[bowsamic]

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I don't look up to Freud and psychoanalysis doesn't work for everyone! I don't even necessarily recommend it. It just worked for me and I realised that in my case the depression was a confused outlook conditioned by a certain situation.

My point really is that you can feel one way for your entire life and then suddenly feel a different way. I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.

The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.

YMMV = not everyone hates life

[keybored]

> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

I’m not sure why people act coy when a straightforward mirroring of their own comment is presented. “What could this mean?” Maybe the hope is that the other person will bore the audience by explaining the joke?

> I don't look up to Freud and psychoanalysis doesn't work for everyone! I don't even necessarily recommend it.

Talking about your infant parental relationship as the be-all-end-all looks indistinguishable from that.

> > If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so.

.

> I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.

Except for people who have “this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism”.

> > For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke

Which must paint everyone who defends “suffering” in the Vedic sense. Since that was what you were replying to. (Saying that reality is suffering on-the-whole is not the same as “I’m depressed [, and please give me anecdotes about how you overcame it]”.)

> > The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.

I don’t know how broad your brush is. But believing in the originally Vedic (Schopenhauer was inspired by Eastern religions, maybe Buddhism in particular) concept of “suffering” is not such a fragile intellectual framework that it collapses once you heal from the trauma when your mother scolded you while potty training at a crucial point in your Anal Stage of development.

> YMMV = not everyone hates life

Besides any point whatever.

[bowsamic]

Worth noting that I trained formally in Buddhism under a teacher for a few years. I’m not unaware of all this

And the Vedic version of suffering is all full of love for reality, not wanting to delete it by smashing a button

[keybored]

Interesting to see this perspective here. You’re not wrong.

> There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions

The two largest Vedic religions both have hundreds of millions of followers. Is Jainism that different from them in this regard? I know Jainism is very pacifist but on the question of suffering.

[keybored]

... okay.

Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.

[portaouflop]

Car “accidents” are also completely unnecessary.

Even the wording is wrong - those aren’t accidents, it is something we accept as byproduct of a car-centric culture.

People feel it is acceptable that thousands of people die on the road so we can go places faster. Similarly they feel it’s acceptable to traumatise some foreigners to keep social media running.

[keybored]

Nitpick that irrelevant example if you want.

[ashoeafoot]

ISISomalia loves that recruitment pool though