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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 vict

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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
keybored 2y ago
... 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.
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  ISISomalia loves that recruitment pool though
- portaouflop 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Nitpick that irrelevant example if you want.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
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!
- keybored 2y ago
  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.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  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

karlgkk 2y ago

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 2y ago

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

keybored 2y ago

... 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.

ashoeafoot 2y ago
ISISomalia loves that recruitment pool though
portaouflop 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Nitpick that irrelevant example if you want.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

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!

keybored 2y ago
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.
bowsamic 2y ago
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