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> [Holmes] battles with drug addiction, loneliness and depression. His genius thrives in part because of these vulnerabilities, not despite them. If there was
by delichon 11mo ago
> [Holmes] battles with drug addiction, loneliness and depression. His genius thrives in part because of these vulnerabilities, not despite them.
If there was a pill for that, how many masterpieces like the Sherlock Holmes books would never be made? The products of misery have always been the devil's advocate's best arguments. If Doyle had not sympathized with Holmes' afflictions, he could not have written him. Or if he had written Holmes as a Mary Sue we wouldn't have cared. (Though for some reason it worked for Harry Potter.)
An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.
- chuckadams 11mo agoFor every tortured genius whose passion comes from pain, there's a hundred who never get started because they lack the energy to get out of bed half the time, are slowly killing themselves with alcohol and other substances, and so on. But a pill alone doesn't fix that -- hell, current research shows most of those pills do no better than a placebo -- so the mythology of the nobility of suffering will continue for some time hence. (Fun fact, you know that "lorem ipsum" text that's used as filler? It's not nonsense Latin, it's from a speech by Cicero where he denounces the stoic ideal of suffering being good for the soul, or at least "pointless" suffering anyway)
- nicechianti 11mo ago[dead]
- joshcsimmons 11mo agoThis is 100% not true. > An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted. It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.
- paxys 11mo agoQuite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.
- delichon 11mo agoThe most miserable people I've known were rich people's children. Depression is more about the lack of hope than money.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- paxys 11mo agoYou probably don't know very many poor people then, because poverty, food insecurity, physical insecurity, homelessness, job loss are all very common depression triggers. It's just that these cases don't make the front page of newspapers at the same rate as celebrities committing suicide.
- delichon 11mo agoThe ones I knew weren't celebrities, they were friendless and isolated and consumed with self disgust. Poor people trapped in unemployment have something in common with rich kids trapped in lethargy. A kind of spiritual constipation.
- michaelscott 11mo agoNo, more like literal survival. In these conditions there is no mental bandwidth for things like spiritual constipation