How are you doing something different? You cherry pick some bad things and decide life isn’t worth it. How were you convinced?
Thinking about it is what people have been doing since before language. It’s music, poetry, dancing. It’s Shakespeare. It’s every philosophy. Pursuit of happiness is in our Constitution. Freedom is one of the most precious values. That’s all we do is think about it.
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Maybe you should read the DSM-V
Hardly. It could very well be that is what you need.
Only if a person is in a depressive psychosis or alike illness does it not make any sense. And again, that’s not a dodge, that is the truth.
It’s not cherry picking, it’s overcoming the bias towards life.
Not really, pursuit of happiness is a recent idea, before that there was no real need to think about such things. They just survived. Freedom being a precious value is also not technically true, especially when you look at people today.
Either way this is a non answer.
I have, but that’s not an answer to the question. The one thing I wondered in my psyche courses was why we just automatically assume suck people are sick. I mean you should know mental illness and how it was defined has changed over the years and can be subjective based on culture. So your position ain’t exactly solid.
That is a dodge, you REALLY want it to be illness because that makes the answer simple rather than complex like someone who’s not ill wanting to end their life.
You have nothing but avoiding the question.
Why? Why did they keep going? Why did they work even in slavery? Could it be that they knew something better was possible? Or that they wanted something better for their children? These are things people have literally said for millennia. You keep claiming to be well read, but I can’t figure what you really absorb.
What people would I look at that would tell me they don’t value freedom? This word you came up with recently, “dodge”, you’re just trolling with it. It’s your latest word to avoid responding to what we are saying.
I have seen the history of how homosexuality was removed from the DSM, very interesting, yes. But that hardly applies. I also am an advocate for people making choices about their own life when they are in physical pain or they know their pain is incurable. It’s harder to apply that to mental pain, and especially to a lack of joy, because it is usually associated with a lack of good judgment. Of course, the person in mental pain doesn’t believe their judgment is bad, that’s the problem, how can you reason with someone who is unreasonable? Also, thinking can change, so it doesn’t compare to an incurable disease.
I don’t think you are an unreasonable person, but I have told you that much of your reasoning is flawed, my opinion, obviously. That’s why I agree with Mriana, that you should not be working through this on your own. You came here asking for advice but have critiqued everything we’ve said. If you don’t understand that not desiring to live and not feeling life is valuable, is a condition that should be taken seriously, then a discussion forum is not going to help you. These feelings are not an obvious conclusion based on simple observations.
Well, I live 200 yards from lake Coeur d’Alene, a large excellent sailing lake and owned a 26 ’ lake cruiser that I sailed often by myself, just to be friends with the drafts coming down from the surrounding hills.
Storm on Coeur d’Alene Lake
I am too old now to step the mast and attend to controlling the boat by myself.
I sailed off the coast of Florida in a friend’s 28 ’ blue water cruiser for 3 months.
Diving for scallops. Inspecting the corals. Made my acquaintance with a baby Hammerhead, that scared the hell out of me for fear of mama shark lurking.
Have scuba dived Lake Tahoe by myself and Lake Havasu with 2 retired UDT divers where at 100’ depth I experienced nitrogen narcosis and went through a decompression procedure. That was a trip !
Born on the cusp of Aquarius and Capricorn, my interests range far and wide.
IMO, curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, it gives the cat knowledge of life.
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I’m being honest, but if that’s how you feel and won’t do what you need to do, then everyone on this forum should ignore you.
Well the survival drive is very powerful and that leads to certain rationalizations. I doubt they would keep surviving if the drive wasn’t so strong. That’s the bias I’m talking about.
In a sense, most. They say they want freedom but mostly it’s that they want their preferred structure in place so the world makes sense. That’s how you end up with the culture wars every time something changes.
That’s the problem, who are you to decide what is good judgment? This is still rooted in the bias towards life and not an accurate view of things. Again it’s assuming their issues is due to sickness.
You keep labeling it something it isn’t and that’s why this is going nowhere. It’s not a condition, so get that notion out of your head.
Well you’re not really answering anything I say. You keep insisting it’s some sort of sickness with nothing to back that up. You literally cannot fathom someone can be “fine” and still want this. You need to break out of your own paradigm or you’ll never understand.
Like I said before, talking about life and death, assisted suicide, things of that nature. Discussions on that won’t really go anywhere if we just assume such notions are wrong or sick by default rather than show why that is, or argue for it at least. I’m not really the first to think like this, to wonder why even bother and question the prevailing notion that life is worthwhile.
But that won’t ever happen because people are scared to talk about it. They’re scared to question the worth of life and how someone can be lucid and still want to end it. It’s easy to just say they’re sick or ill because it’s a thought terminating cliche. As long as something is “wrong” with them we can just pat ourselves on the back and get on with our lives.
That’s not true and it’s also not an answer to the question. Not everyone asking that is “sick” and you insisting that is more a lack of perspective than anything else.
Like I said, you need it to be illness or “doing what you need to do” because otherwise you can’t answer it. That sounds like fear to me.
Stop dodging and actually answer the question. Why is life worth living? Why prefer life over death?
I literally said that you are not the first to say this. What I’m saying is, if enough people thought this, then we wouldn’t be here to discuss this. You’re right, it starts with the survival instinct. When I think about the question of what I am as a living being, that’s at the root, I’m a being that has a desire to live. I didn’t reason that out, I was born with that desire. I was also born with the ability to think, to remember the past and consider how my actions now could affect the future.
How I determine what actions are preferable is not something I can’t write up in a forum post, it’s too complicated, and too many “maybes”. Ultimately, my preferences could be wrong. That’s part of being human, living without knowing for sure you’re doing the right thing. So, no, I can’t answer these questions you have. But I have that survival instinct and I say it’s “normal” because without it, we don’t exist. I find joy, even in the struggle and through the pain. I don’t need inherent meaning or some other reason to keep choosing life.
You know he’s just going to keep arguing with like a troll. It’s as worthwhile as his thoughts concerning life.
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At this point it’s not really about inherent meaning but wondering why when we have little more than some evolutionary drive. Yet we advocate for trying to move past certain drives we deem bad like tribalism yet the drive for life is supposedly too sacred to touch?
You never really answered my questions, which made you about as useful as my therapists when it came to me getting help. None of them could tell me why life is worthwhile and just assumed it was. When I told them death would mean I wouldn’t have to concern myself with any of that anymore they didn’t really have an answer for that.
So apparently life is something that is worth going on for but no one can say why and when you say you want to die because it would mean not having to worry about happiness or sadness anymore no one has an answer.
Kinda shows the level of thought people have given this, though it doesn’t surprise me. You can’t really have a serious talk about death and the worth of life without being carted off to some mental hospital. That’s how they avoid talking about it, it’s easy to just say someone is sick rather than deal with the issue.
You don’t have an answer and therefore you consider ending this miracle we call Life?
Do you think that is a balanced approach to a non-existent problem?
Not surprising that when you don’t have a response to what I said, you change the target. It’s a logical fallacy known as “moving the goalposts”. You’ve been here long enough that you’ve moved them and then moved them back, but I’ve lost track and just don’t care anymore. We aren’t “answering your question” because you don’t have one. You are using tautologies and claiming they are logical problems that need solving. An obvious example is “you are either convinced or you are not”. Right, there are no other options, which means you have said nothing about how humans are convinced.
Definition and Examples of Tautologies in English (thoughtco.com)
Now you are saying survival is something we should “move past” as if it’s just a vestigial response to stimuli. You call survival a “bias”. It’s tautological that our drive to survive overcomes our desire to avoid pain, because we wouldn’t have survived as a species if that wasn’t true. It’s part of who we are, even you. We all know life is hard, we don’t need you to tell us that.
People have been thinking about this forever. You say “no one has an answer”, yet I see many answers in the response to you. I don’t know what others have said, but I can guess that they said something and you weren’t listening, so you dismissed them.
I’m increasingly convinced that you are an AI bot who has only been fed philosophy and no literature or poetry or even heart-warming stories of real people who survived despite the odds, because that’s where you find the human heart.
Below is one of the most famous lines in theatre, because it asks the question you say we are all afraid to ask. It was written hundreds of years ago, so someone has been thinking about it, and you missed it. It’s a great question and should be grappled with. But you don’t. You just get mad at others because they don’t agree with you.
Speech: “To be, or not to be, that is the… | The Poetry Foundation
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
I don’t really consider life a miracle, and more and more I’m starting to wonder if there is such a thing as life or if it’s just matter arrangements.
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I haven’t moved the goalposts, you just assume this is about inherent meaning when it’s not.
I can’t tell if you even use logic. I’m saying the certain drives we label as good to overcome that result from evolution such a tribalism and being quick to anger when threatened. But for some reason others are good or not to be touched.
Nothing you said is related to the point I’m making, I’m asking why bother, I know life persists without regard for “why” but as humans we seek more than “just because” because otherwise we wouldn’t be decrying certain other behaviors we just do.
I don’t care if we wouldn’t have survived as a species, that’s irrelevant to whether life is worth going on or not. I can’t speak for other living things but you’re kinda doing appeal to nature here as well as consequences.
I wouldn’t say it’s part of who we are, it’s just something that happens whether you want it to or not. The people who succeed at suicide have to overcome a very powerful urge that says NO because for some reason we label them cowards and not brave.
Humans make no sense.
I already explained why those aren’t answers.
I have read those stories, but at the end of all of them I have to ask why did they struggle to survive and not give up, it would be easier and any guilt you’d feel at letting them down would vanish too.
My guess is you haven’t thought too hard about those stories past the surface, they never really get into the greater picture of “why”, it just operates on a bunch of assumptions you’re supposed to agree with already. It’s pretty easy to see through it.
Also spare me the part about the human heart, the human heart is rife with unbounded cruelty as well as kindness and yet it seems like the kindness is often playing catch up most of the time. Rose colored glasses much? Those stories don’t work on my anymore now that I see through them.
It actually doesn’t. The point it’s saying is that we are given pause by what might be next, but that was years ago and he was prey to the ideas at the time. In modernity there is nothing to suggest something after this or greater meaning or even just personal meaning.
He hasn’t considered oblivion, the total end, which makes that line far weaker than more recent takes on it. The question he should be asking is “why keep going when we don’t have to?”
That’s something I never get an answer to when I explain it. The way I see it, the arguments for life only work if you must live, but since that’s not true they all fall flat. I don’t have to find love, develop myself, learn, feel, any of that stuff if I just die now. They’ll say “but you’ll miss out” which is a stupid argument, you’ll eventually get old and die at some point and keep missing out like everyone before you. Not to mention you’d be dead so you wouldn’t miss anything.
Like I said, weak or non arguments. The people you say have thought and grappled with this, haven’t. Not really. They are still blinded by our bias towards life. Once you let that go then you can reckon with the real stuff, and few have done that. They’re still on training wheels.
Because you said it. I’m responding to your words
If you think it’s stupid there is no argument that could convince you. (BTW, calling something stupid is another one of your logical fallacies) People enjoy life, whether you believe it or not and they want others to have it too. “The rub” that Shakespeare talks about is the same, without or without consequences after life. Non-existence is a consequence for me. I can’t explain it any more than I already have.
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It’s stupid in the sense that you’ll die anyway and still miss out on life, so it’s not really a good point.
I think it boils down to I want a reason to believe this is all worth the effort but keep finding otherwise.
Everyone ignore him, please, because he does not want to get help, enjoy life, or even live life to its fullest with the time he does have to do all of that. Since he just wants to troll, argue, and refuses to get help from professionals, just ignore him, please. Because I for one am tired of his BS games.