And yet, having kids has actually made it easier for me to resist those thoughts. They haven’t gone away completely, but I feel more confident that I’m not going to act on them, and their frequency and intensity has definitely declined as well. Maybe I could do that to my wife or family or friends, but I could not do that to my own children. I think that, if there is such a thing as hell-if I did that to them, I’d be going straight there.
Having children has given me a new and very compelling reason to not kill myself. The best reason I’ve ever had. It also has given me a new motivation to try to keep a lid on my own “craziness”, which I think has helped my mental health as well. OTOH, it has also led to a lot of stress, and no doubt that stress has aggravated some of my mental health issues. Still, I think overall, the positive benefits of fatherhood on my own mental health have outweighed the negatives.
The only situation I can foresee myself now actually going through with suicide, is if both our kids died (say in a car accident), or if I’m terminally ill and trying to hurry along the inevitable. Outside of those two scenarios, I’m definitely not doing it. I don’t think I could have been so firm about that before having children.
I do now have an illness that's "almost definitely terminal" (but haven't been given a definitive timeframe yet), and old-me would've just ended it to get it over with without a second thought, but instead now I'm driven to make sure my wife/kids have the best possible life set up before I go.
I will remember too. God bless you.
On the other hand, it is good that they exist, even if they aren’t the world’s most genetically privileged individuals. It is not like they could have had different genetics than they do-either they exist with these genes, or they would never have existed at all. And not all of my genes are bad - our son has inherited my ADHD, my autistic traits, my anxiety - but he’s also inherited an above-average IQ, which gives him an advantage over many other people which partially makes up for those disadvantages. He is in the 3rd grade but he does 9th grade mathematics - most 3rd graders don’t have the genes for that, he does. Our daughter has so far not been so precocious, but I still get the sense from talking to her that she is smarter than the average 4 year old, so I think she has a bright intellectual future as well.
And I think a lot of my problems have been not just due to my genes, but also due to my own lack of self-understanding, and my parents’ poor understanding of me. Even though I can see how I inherited these traits from my parents, my parents possess them in a more attenuated form, and they lack self-awareness that they have them. By contrast, being very well aware of my own traits, and seeing the same traits in my children, I’m hopeful I can give them guidance on how to manage them which nobody ever gave me when I was young-and beyond guidance, empathy-I never felt my parents really understood what it was like to be me, I feel like they wanted to be empathetic but lacked the imagination (theory of mind?) to really do so. I hope I can do better, and our kids might avoid some of the life problems I have faced. We will see.
Then I got a little better and those daily thoughts became weekly, then monthly and nowadays they are simply not there anymore. Well, sometimes they are but they are now very easily dismissed.
I just came here to say that, if god forbid both your kids are taken from you, even then, I would say to you, fucking hell man, don't do it. Your loss will crush you and you'll never be the same. But you'd be alive. And you'd get to see how you'd deal with such a loss. And you wouldn't be alone. Because this shit happens to people and with some support, they live through it.
Anyways, I'm glad you find such joy in being a father. Isn't it great?
Sometimes, kill -9 seems to be a valid option to me, all I'm saying.. (In a responsible way, get your stuff in order, do it in a clinic, etc etc etc)
The pain a suicidal person feels is like nothing else. I hope that after years of mourning I would pick myself up and feel that pain to its fullest and become an expert pain feeler, because those were the cards that were dealt to me. And I hope that I would find some meaning, again.
However, if I find that I have lung cancer and will inevitably drown in my own mucus, I'm pretty sure about the bullet through my head.
Yay, rainbows!
Heavy shit, this.
Maybe we just ignore it until it happens. Seems to be a time tested approach ;)
People have been thinking on this very question since the beginning of people.
If you're invested in another take on them, I would seek out Gudo Nishijimas dharma airs :}
Life is weird. We're all islands until we realise we are the island. Don't take anything too seriously. :)
Hmm, my take on this is maybe a little different -- I don't really think alcohol (or other intoxicants) are really 'THE' problem, when we consider them in the context of a problem. These kinds of things are (at least as far as I see it) a kind of self medication; some people drink a lot as their form of escapism, others read 200 books a year or watch endless mindless TV shows, it's all kind of the same thing in different clothes, it's a retreat from having to deal with something. Years of 'AA' and the American 'War on Drugs' seem to have got into our collective mindset that these symptoms are actually the cause, which I disagree with.
So anyway; I always took this precept as guidance against doing any of those kinds of things which only serve to distract you from whatever it is that's making you unhappy, or to numb yourself to avoid having to think about things. Such evasive behaviour is the truly harmful part and should be avoided.
I think if you do any of those things just for pure recreation, then it is ok.
I mean, I don't think having a small glass of Whisky while reading a good book in-front of the fire with the rain battering on the windows could be too much of a problem, and if it is then I guess it's a problem I'll choose to keep :}
Of course, we are all different.
Gassho. Night night :)
Had to keep the Lagavulin ecstasies partitioned off for the duration of the read, necessarily.
But I do have mental health problems that are nonetheless treatable, but which I did NOT treat until having children. Seeing how obviously unfair my "crazy" was to them as small kids, not to mention the fear of passing some of these traits to them made me finally decide to get my shit together, hard as it was and sometimes still is.
Not because they were the only thing stopping me, but because life without them, by now, is incomprehensible.
To be honest though, I think suicide is probably the best way to go unless you die instantly. I mean, say I get diagnosed with some horrible cancer or other. My son is 3, he would only remember me as some kind of horrible pale monster in a hospital if I went with the treatments.. TBH, in such a situation, I'd probably just wait until I was so sick I was unable to function, somehow attempt to say goodbye, write a ridiculous amount of letters to him and head off to the local euthanasia clinic.. I'm sure I read somewhere a majority of doctors who get cancer don't accept chemo/etc.. But I have no links to back that up.
Wow! Sunshine and rainbows.
This is a ridiculously personal question and just ignore it if not, but it's something I've had in my mind for a while... If your pop had taken the cyberpunk route, and just pissed off during those last 2 months, would you have felt him selfish or do you think you could understand?
It was hard. And both my dad and I knew that he would never have wanted to keep going past his ability to communicate and interact. I don't think he would have minded being bed ridden, but feeling hopeless and helpless and lost, that was hard as hell.
Everybody's got their own take on this, and I have mine. If he had the means and the will to make the choice, and had taken that path, knowing that he had no more meaningful moments left to him for the rest of his life -- I would not have resented him for it and I don't think anyone else would have. But if he was able to be present, even in his weakened condition, I would have been happy to sit there in a room with him and tell stupid jokes for months until he was gone.
He's been gone over 10 years now. But I can tell you now that while I do have that picture of him, its not the one I think of when call him to mind -- I think of all the times we spent at his house joking, playing, laughing. I remember my oldest kid putting a bow on his head at Christmas and him laughing and playing along. I remember my youngest kid sitting on his lap at his 60th wedding anniversary party and him being pleased as punch to just hang out with her. The good memories always win in the end.
Perhaps you mean this one: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-di...
That said, I have never understood why people think that having kids has no effect on your mental health. When we had our child, I thought nothing of it; I was in a partnership and that's what the partner wanted. However, after the year or so larval stage, we began to realize that the experience of having a kid, steadily growing, seeing the world through changing eyes, different from your own: it made us different people. I wouldn't have missed the experience for the world, even if the terrible twos do happen and the teen years can be a trial.
It gave us a sense of purpose within our own lives. The very opposite of a screen or a job or a bucket list! We're very different people from the weird/sad, entering their 60s childless couples we know, every single one. I'll be kind and say they seem mostly ruled by a flat emotional narcissism that's... pretty damn boring. I won't say that that never happens to empty nesters; it does. But the childless couples all seem a bit off.
I wouldn't have a kid with the idea that it would solve any mental health problems I might have, just as having a kid seems to never solve any couple's relationship problems. I just point out that your mental health is going to change with a kid, and I'd not rule out for the better.
Even with those caveats, we've watched a lot of children survive divorce, some ugly. Many of those kids turned out superlatively, and for quite a few the divorce seemed to be a kind of positive stimulus. Not recommending divorce! Same with the death of a parent. Children can be incredibly resilient. It's not always about you, is the lesson. A child has a world that is bigger than the parents.
From my experience, it seems there is a good reason for the stigma. Depressed people with pessimistic worldviews don't make good friends. The worst time for me to make friends is when I need other people the most (such as when I'm depressed), but when I don't need people my interest in them becomes almost nil.
Also, I highly empathize with the idea that when the fear of failure can be linked to the risk of one's life spiraling out of control potentially all the way to suicide, whether or not those consequences logically follow, it takes away a lot of options that might sound common-sense to someone of a healthy mind (aiming for challenging side projects, putting yourself in front of others). For such people, I believe shielding yourself from those signals is a valid option for survival, even if it means having to deceive yourself temporarily.
Doesn't help that all your mrs's intsa-friends are posting bollocks about how great everything is while you've been trying to get your newborn out for a walk for 5 hours and failed.. heh.
Don't overthink that stuff though.. I mean, you kinda know deep down if you've got it in you or not. It's kinda like having a puppy times a million..
That ended our relationship. I think it was good to be up-front about it.
By the time you're in your 40s, you likely have a good idea of whether or not you're a stable enough mind to commit to the minimum 20 years required to uplift a new human adult.
It does seem like a good practical/pragmatic approach to raising a family.
Gives women options.
The earlier you freeze them the more you can get with a single procedure
The normal coupling differences were much smaller typically. (Like 6 years or something).
Being the 40yo guy marrying the 20yo girl is like being the 40yo guy daily driving a Ferrari. Sure there are some pretty big downsides in the practicality department but you're rich enough to paper that over (this sentence is specifically crafted to apply to both parties).
It also won't be long before we have artificial wombs and can create embryos more expressively than the current 1 male 1 female demands of nature.
I see a future where one waits even several hundred years and dozens of careers and lifestyles before choosing to combine their genes and memes with others to spawn and raise a new consciousness, maybe even committing to a hundred years to raise it.
25-35 seems to be the ideal window, where the parents have had ample opportunity to get to know themselves as individuals, and the risks of a severe disability aren't particularly elevated. Afterwards, the risk seems to climb very quickly.
https://www.med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/10/older-fat... https://www.ivf1.com/age-birth-defects/
My parents fought about money all the time, but if they had delayed then they would have been better off. If they were better off then maybe my mom wouldn't have killed herself...
My earliest kid I had at 21; my latest, at 45. Sure, I have more money and emotional stability now. But I was also a lot more active back then, with the ability to deal with sleep deprivation when the kids were infants, and to handle playing tag after work for an hour.
Plus... whatever emotional strength and resilience I have comes in large part from being a practicing father for 20+ years. If I had been childless this whole time, I'd have far less emotional growth.
I'd recommend couples at least consider having kids as soon as they can (a) drag themselves out of poverty and (b) have enough time together that they have some confidence their relationship won't fall apart. Maybe (c) have some 3rd party backup.
Not saying that having children is the cure for severe depression, though - just saying that if you had thought about suicide in the past but are OK today, you shouldn't discard having kids because of that past, kids may even help keeping those things at bay.