5 ms·

Whenever I find myself having similar thoughts I reread Willa Cather's story, "Paul's Case", here's the relevant part, the very end: "He stood watching the app

by Jun8 15y ago

Whenever I find myself having similar thoughts I reread Willa Cather's story, "Paul's Case", here's the relevant part, the very end: "He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands." Think about the "vastness of things left undone": Have you chatted with a homeless person in winter? Have you read Anna Karenina? Have you watched The Kid? Have you traveled to a foreign city and got completely lost? Have you held the hand of a starving child in Somalia or at least looked at a picture of her and wept? Have you written a letter to Santa? Have you kissed every (and I mean every) square inch of a woman's body? Have you sneaked in and slept among the ruins at Machu Picchu? Have you fallen in love with a woman who's monolingual in a language you don't speak? Have you tried to understand general theory of relativity? Have you tried to explain GTR to a bright 9-year-old kid over coco? I could go on. These are all the things that come to mind that I haven't done. One day I plan to do at least some of them. Think about this.

thedark 15y ago
Okay, so the last few years I've had time and means to travel, and I'd like to comment somewhat on a perspective I gained while doing so. The list you gave- I've done all of those things. Well, change Machu Picchu to Pompeii and Somalia to the Congo. I realize your list was not comprehensive- but let me realize the spirit of your post and say I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die," save perhaps going into space or winning a Nobel prize and few others. I made a pact with myself when I was miserable in high-school and my most suicidal, that I would give life a chance and see if things got better as I did more and more things I'd dreamed about and that people told me were worth living for as you've done now. If I did those things and was still unhappy, I felt I should be justified in ending my own life having given it fair chance. Well, there was a moment, I rememember it in detail, where I was hang-gliding near Interlaken in Switzerland. A man near me said something to the order of "this is the time of our lives, huh!" And I realized then that not only was I still quite unhappy in this most excellent of situations, but that I still wanted to kill myself and indeed had never stopped wanting to kill myself. Not at the Louvre, not in Tokyo, not when succeeding financially, romantically, or in academics. There was a quote in the Brother's Karmazov which has always troubled me, though I can't find it at the moment, when Alyosha tells a child that he "will always be an unhappy man" and the child says he knows. I believe myself to be fundamentally broken somehow genetically, and I feel that I no longer have any rational reason to expect to ever feel content as a person or free of the suicidal impulse. I will always be an unhappy man. I can only assume there are others like me in this realization, and to them your words will seem hollow, cliche, and unrelatably foreign. To them what you've said is no different from "but you have so much to live for"- they know that and it doesn't matter. If such a person is out there and is now reading this, all I can say is, well, me too. I keep going somehow, who knows how or why, and I guess all things considered sometimes it really isn't so bad. If I can't ever silence the demons telling me to end it all, I can at least make noise somewhere else that they don't seem so loud. Not a happy result by most measures, but that's the way it is.
- shenberg 15y ago
  This resonates with me unfortunately well. Note that happiness has definite genetic links - twin studies show that it is a somewhat heritable trait, and some mechanisms have actually been found as to how it's heritable (for example, see http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf).
- singular 15y ago
  I feel terribly sorry that you feel this way. I don't want to mess with this kind of stuff on something this important but, speaking from my own experience, and I do understand this feeling very well, I'd say that this is evidence that the sadness and ideation comes from inside and that the road to resolving it comes from working on that rather than outside things. I've come to realise this quite strongly myself over the years as various things succeeded/failed, that what I thought would help it didn't, and that all that helps is to face the depression and actively find ways to fight it. I've found schema-based therapy very effective, for example. I really hope you find a way to resolve these issues, or at least ways of making it better. If you want to talk (hope this doesn't sound awfully patronising) you can find my email address in my profile.
  - xibernetik 15y ago
    For many people, what you say rings true, but it's dangerous to imply that that these feelings are purely a product of someone's thinking and that they can fix them on their own. There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed -- likely due to chemical imbalances and structural differences in the brain. Thinking about suicide might be how this manifests. Telling someone they can think themselves or "figure themselves out" to not being homosexual, schizophrenic or transgender seems crazy to many people, but not crazy when we say the same about depression. Pushing "think about it more! sort our your life!" as The Solution can be dangerous in the case where deferring more radical treatment is necessary or prudent, and the mentality that "I can think/will my way out of this" is a frequent excuse or cause for noncompliance with medication in some patients who actually do need it to not be a danger to themselves, or others. I'm not implying the poster is such a case, or that such treatment shouldn't be tried, but it can and will fail in certain cases, and it's easy for others and the patient to justify "well I just need to try harder" or to push blame when that's deferring necessary treatment.
cj 15y ago
+1 for Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" But the problem with serious depression is that you lose interest in even the things you used to love, let alone things you could love. You find it hard to find meaning in even the most meaningful things. The things you have done become meaningless. The things you could do in the future don't even cross your mind. You become horribly short-sighted and pessimistic. The key is regaining a fair perspective on life, which is on par with "finding meaning" -- something many spend their whole life trying to do. It's no easy quest. There's no easy answer. I'm never sure what to say to friends who are depressed, besides what's cliche.
rehack 15y ago
Glad, you mention Anna Karenina. That's my all time favorite book. Read twice :-)

by Jun8 15y ago

thedark 15y ago

Okay, so the last few years I've had time and means to travel, and I'd like to comment somewhat on a perspective I gained while doing so. The list you gave- I've done all of those things. Well, change Machu Picchu to Pompeii and Somalia to the Congo. I realize your list was not comprehensive- but let me realize the spirit of your post and say I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die," save perhaps going into space or winning a Nobel prize and few others. I made a pact with myself when I was miserable in high-school and my most suicidal, that I would give life a chance and see if things got better as I did more and more things I'd dreamed about and that people told me were worth living for as you've done now. If I did those things and was still unhappy, I felt I should be justified in ending my own life having given it fair chance. Well, there was a moment, I rememember it in detail, where I was hang-gliding near Interlaken in Switzerland. A man near me said something to the order of "this is the time of our lives, huh!" And I realized then that not only was I still quite unhappy in this most excellent of situations, but that I still wanted to kill myself and indeed had never stopped wanting to kill myself. Not at the Louvre, not in Tokyo, not when succeeding financially, romantically, or in academics. There was a quote in the Brother's Karmazov which has always troubled me, though I can't find it at the moment, when Alyosha tells a child that he "will always be an unhappy man" and the child says he knows. I believe myself to be fundamentally broken somehow genetically, and I feel that I no longer have any rational reason to expect to ever feel content as a person or free of the suicidal impulse. I will always be an unhappy man. I can only assume there are others like me in this realization, and to them your words will seem hollow, cliche, and unrelatably foreign. To them what you've said is no different from "but you have so much to live for"- they know that and it doesn't matter. If such a person is out there and is now reading this, all I can say is, well, me too. I keep going somehow, who knows how or why, and I guess all things considered sometimes it really isn't so bad. If I can't ever silence the demons telling me to end it all, I can at least make noise somewhere else that they don't seem so loud. Not a happy result by most measures, but that's the way it is.

shenberg 15y ago
This resonates with me unfortunately well. Note that happiness has definite genetic links - twin studies show that it is a somewhat heritable trait, and some mechanisms have actually been found as to how it's heritable (for example, see http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf).
singular 15y ago
I feel terribly sorry that you feel this way. I don't want to mess with this kind of stuff on something this important but, speaking from my own experience, and I do understand this feeling very well, I'd say that this is evidence that the sadness and ideation comes from inside and that the road to resolving it comes from working on that rather than outside things. I've come to realise this quite strongly myself over the years as various things succeeded/failed, that what I thought would help it didn't, and that all that helps is to face the depression and actively find ways to fight it. I've found schema-based therapy very effective, for example. I really hope you find a way to resolve these issues, or at least ways of making it better. If you want to talk (hope this doesn't sound awfully patronising) you can find my email address in my profile.
- xibernetik 15y ago
  For many people, what you say rings true, but it's dangerous to imply that that these feelings are purely a product of someone's thinking and that they can fix them on their own. There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed -- likely due to chemical imbalances and structural differences in the brain. Thinking about suicide might be how this manifests. Telling someone they can think themselves or "figure themselves out" to not being homosexual, schizophrenic or transgender seems crazy to many people, but not crazy when we say the same about depression. Pushing "think about it more! sort our your life!" as The Solution can be dangerous in the case where deferring more radical treatment is necessary or prudent, and the mentality that "I can think/will my way out of this" is a frequent excuse or cause for noncompliance with medication in some patients who actually do need it to not be a danger to themselves, or others. I'm not implying the poster is such a case, or that such treatment shouldn't be tried, but it can and will fail in certain cases, and it's easy for others and the patient to justify "well I just need to try harder" or to push blame when that's deferring necessary treatment.

cj 15y ago

+1 for Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" But the problem with serious depression is that you lose interest in even the things you used to love, let alone things you could love. You find it hard to find meaning in even the most meaningful things. The things you have done become meaningless. The things you could do in the future don't even cross your mind. You become horribly short-sighted and pessimistic. The key is regaining a fair perspective on life, which is on par with "finding meaning" -- something many spend their whole life trying to do. It's no easy quest. There's no easy answer. I'm never sure what to say to friends who are depressed, besides what's cliche.

rehack 15y ago

Glad, you mention Anna Karenina. That's my all time favorite book. Read twice :-)