Me and straight laced folk just don't get on. It doesn't work. There's an impedance mismatch whereby there are all of these invisible lines that I cross without even realising.
Like yeah, dude, your job is bullshit. So is mine. Life is, and then you die. If you're not fucking around and having (harmless) fun, what are you doing?
Those sorts of people need to exist - society would fall apart if everyone were so freewheeling - but I definitely seem to self select out of those groups.
I for one tend to envy those who either don't know or don't care. Being cynical seemed cool and somehow "smarter" for some time, and then eventually it can, for some, seem just as naive.
I'd rather look at life earnestly. Yes, it's all fucked and we've no control over it. Society is a fiction, etc. But I'd rather love my wife, do work I enjoy, and not point out the absurdity all day every day to myself and others, because it's just an old stupid joke to which we _all_ happen to be the punchline.
When I'm doing/doing well, I don't need the humor as the crushing weight of of existential dread and absurdity is drowned out by my involvement in life.
It's that kind of 'realistic' mindset that lets you look through a situation in which you're playing a role, and someone else is playing a role, and just be people.
Is that really true, or are we just conditioned to think that? Basic sense and decency can still be made explicit.
the trick is to understand that all people live in a marginal headspace where engagement with the nature of the world is heavily filtered and limited so that their psychology can continue to mostly function on a day to day basis. this is true whether you are a "realist" or "pessimist" or "optimist".
piercing the veil is uncomfortable and unwanted for most people, and it doesn't necessarily provide them with any value to have their comforting or familiar illusions destroyed. in a sense, it's rude if you pop their bubble. in other words, some people don't see the humor in dark humor because they are unfamiliar with darkness, and it scares them.
for me, graveyard humor is the best way to tolerate things. but it's important to know your audience.
Other people (like me) don't see the humor in dark humor because we live in a form of darkness all the time. My partner is bipolar, and I spend a several weeks a year literally talking her off the ledge. So if some edgy cynic makes a "joke" about suicide at work, I've probably already heard the punchline. And it dredges up a reminder of the biggest ongoing challenge in my life. Not finding that funny doesn't make me naive.
It doesn’t make you more naive but it might be an indicator that you’re not able to cope with all the realities faced in your life all the time.
I don't know of any evidence to say either method is objectively better. By removing the situation from their thoughts/avoiding the topic they may be able to cope for just as long or longer than someone who addresses the situation through comedy.
As another depressive person, I have lost most of my social circle because I consider my thoughts dangerous for others, don't lose touch with people around you because you try to hard to insulate them from your thoughts that might damage them.
If you work hard to make your gallows humor actually funny, you can turn things around. No one really knows the person who is too quiet, no one really likes the bitter person who always complains about everything, but the depressed dark humor guy can be the life of the party.
Robbin Williams, Ricky Gervais, and Jim Carrey, and Allan Watts all operate in the "realist" branch of thought. But the way you share those thoughts really matters.
So far this conversation has been around dark pessimistic takes on life, death, and work. I'd like to throw out that there are some descriptive things I believe about the world that I have no desire to spread, because I think that people will generally treat each other worse if they accept the ideas. Because of the very nature of such ideas I hesitate to provide any real examples, but as an absurd and (hopefully) harmless illustration we could use Roko's basilisk. If you believed such a thing, and you weren't trying to spread it for selfish reasons, wouldn't you just not talk about it? I've made the mistake of arguing horrible things which I myself didn't want to believe to close friends and actually changing their minds in ways I wish I could take back... but can't. It's ugly, and I try to avoid it these days, but I do also feel somewhat disingenuous because of that -- I think that's just something I have to bottle up and accept.
>If you work hard to make your gallows humor actually funny, you can turn things around. No one really knows the person who is too quiet, no one really likes the bitter person who always complains about everything, but the depressed dark humor guy can be the life of the party.
I've been this person, and still am in some social circles. I appreciated working in environments that can tolerate dark humor. On a visceral level I really don't understand the other poster who brought up the mental anguish of hearing suicide jokes, despite having dealt with suicidal friends in the past. I don't understand what it's like to get triggered by a suicide joke, but that doesn't mean the experience is invalid, or that the benefits of me being able to make suicide jokes in the workplace outweigh the detriments of other people being sent into dark rumination cycles because of them. It seems presumptuous to assume that somebody else getting upset at a joke is necessarily a result of the joke not being funny enough, they might be in a vastly different headspace that is hard to understand from the perspective of somebody who relishes in dark humor.
The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great (Funny Self-Help Book, Guide to Lowering Stress and Dealing with Perfectionism)
It will surely pierce a lot of people's beliefs.
Could you unpack this for me?
Reading it can be frightening for overachievers and people whose world view and beliefs (the upper class who need servants) requires we have people working for them otherwise their materialist and GDP/economy driven world views might cease to exist...
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-stars-ratings-calculated/
many of our medicines are "poisons" in the sense that if you take them in a large enough dose, they will kill you. but a small dose can be therapeutic, in the right context.
likewise, a dose of reality-groundedness is a necessity to navigate life correctly. some people can tolerate the side effects of higher doses better than others, however.
Personally, I think a little dark humor helps people get by but that's just me. :)
No one, literally no one, using the incredibly common idiom of "dead in a ditch" is thinking of or referencing anything to do with Native Americans, alcohol or this person you've just referenced who I've never heard of before.
There is roughly a 0% chance that someone saying that phrase means it, or has ever even heard of it as, the weird imaginary negative stereotype usage you've claiming here.
I feel that not many people walk the line you're walking, and so I feel like you're prob bridging the "pessimistic realism" chasm for others, and helping them derive the value of seeing it (but you're recognizing that it can hurt others to be presented it too clearly).
Not only am I not prone to depression, my mother called me Shirley Temple when I was little (in part because of my sunny disposition). I can kind of relate to Sara from Jake Long, American Dragon. She's a Seer or Oracle who only sees all the bad outcomes. Her twin sister, Kara, only sees good outcomes.
Sara is always in a good mood because all of her surprises in life are pleasant surprises. Kara is always in a bad mood because life is a huge disappointment that never lives up to her rosy visions of the future.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Sara_and_Kara
Conclusion: One's own attitude -- whether it is positive or negative -- is not the issue per se. Overly accurate observations about how life works socially are simply unwelcome by most people for reasons unrelated to that metric.
I am like you. However, I hold the old quote to be true: "People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel." It doesn't matter if the things are true or not. You stating those things makes people feel scared, worried, and/or defeated. If you had those feelings when another person was around, how often would you want them around? This is not a criticism but simply another viewpoint.
> So I try to keep this "depressive realism" to myself most of the time.
Do you ever start to feel alone, isolated, and mis- or not understood too?
Reading literature helps. It largely deals with the big, sad themes & topics of life and existence. Yes, the "stuffy" "canon" stuff. At least you know all these famous (or famous among lit-reading folks, anyway) authors saw the same things you do, then, which is a kind of camaraderie. Hell, Gilgamesh is about this stuff, very directly. Egyptian didactic literature treats of it. The Bible. Homer and the Greek tragedians. It's been around as long as we've had written culture, basically. You Are Not Alone (aside from how you totally, completely are, naturally! hahaha).
Then find other people who read that stuff and talk with them about it and set up dinner & wine parties to talk about it and hey you guys wanna go see the latest Lars Von Trier film and congratulations, you've distracted yourself from the fundamental horror at the center of existence by way of engaging with it, mission accomplished.
I told him "We're all going to be dead in 50 or so years and none of this will have mattered. So, not really."
The response was "Holy shit, that's dark".
But I think I do use nihilism to cope with potentially anxious thoughts. I know that I can't make any meaningful contributions to the universe on any sort of scale that would be noticeable. So making a mistake isn't the worst thing in the world.
I say this because I have met people with depression who definitely do distort things constantly with no logical basis, and try and slip in their viewpoints as jokes. I’ve typically found these depressed individuals to be especially unpalatable when they stop making sense.
With too much exposure their cynicism just got tedious. The edgy jokes lost their edge. The worldview seemed more defeatist-for-its-own-sake than inherently more perceptive than alternatives. Making fun of all the clueless optimistic imbeciles out there started to seem pointlessly mean. The conversations started to get boring and repetitive.
YMMV.
Usually when I do express these thoughts they're in the form of semi-dark humor ("You don't like the boss? Don't worry, you'll only have to deal with him for a couple more years (because you won't quit) and then the company will go under and you'll have to work somewhere else with a similar boss"). The humor is to mostly try to diffuse how harsh these statements can seem to others, and because I find them legitimately morosely funny, but for some reason I tend not to get laughter when I say them... So I try to keep this "depressive realism" to myself most of the time.
I promise I have social skills. That's probably my biggest consistent faux pas. But sometimes I wonder why I can lose friends so fast by just saying things that are true or are very likely to be true. I guess a lot of people don't like to see that clearly? I don't know.