Same here, I agree and relate to every bit you said. I always thought it'd be a bad idea for me to have kids, my childhood/early-adulthood was absolute chaos, abuse, serious depression, homelessness, the works. Met "the one", we wanted kids, a decade later I can see it's the best thing that ever happened to me. My brain can still be a very scary place, but they give me purpose/direction/motivation to do better and make sure they don't grow up how I did.

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'm glad to hear you've found that purpose in your life and here's hoping you get to exercise it for as long as possible.

Living for others even when you know the end is coming and you'd otherwise prefer to end it is true love. You are setting an example of courage for your family that they will remember.

I will remember too. God bless you.

I took the parent comment's point to be not (just) that you could be at risk of slipping back into suicidal thoughts and acting on them, but that this might have genetic causes and you could end up passing these tendencies to your children. At least, I know I've thought/worried about this quite a lot.

I get that concern. Our son is only 8, but he already has a psychiatrist, and a lot of his symptoms are similar to mine (ADHD with significant autistic traits.) Our daughter is 4, she hasn’t been diagnosed with anything yet, but I can see many of the same traits in her, so I would not be surprised if in a few more years she acquires some of those labels too. So definitely I have given them some of the negative aspects of my own genetics. Added to that, I think I am still learning how to be a parent, and so is my wife, and both of us sometimes wish we could go back in time and do things a bit differently with our son, since we worry some of our parenting mistakes may have aggravated his problems.

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.

This is the single most hacker news comment I have ever read

I hear myself in you. I went through some shit. But I have two kids and so I would never...

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?

I mean, I'm a buddhist.. So I'm kind of 'pro universe' but I don't see the point in unnecessary suffering. You're telling me you'd keep on going after losing your family? Years and years of pain and misery? What's the point? There are some things you don't get over.. And even the idea of 'getting over' something like that would make me even sadder than I would have been immediately?

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)

I'm telling you that I _hope_ I would find a way to go on and that I truly hope you would, too. Yes, your life is now empty. But people have their lives ripped apart, all, the fucking, time. Some of them go on living rich and fruitful lives. I would like to think I could strive to become such a person.

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.

Yep it's brutal.

Maybe we just ignore it until it happens. Seems to be a time tested approach ;)

Search string: life is suffering

People have been thinking on this very question since the beginning of people.

Well, I kind of identify with the soto sect of Zen Buddhism, but I actually reject the standard interpretation of the four noble truths (the first if which, as you've said: life is suffering). Life isn't all suffering. Idealistic thinking of life is a kind of suffering, I suppose, but you're not suffering all the time. When you're eating an awesome meal, having some hot sex, seeing your code pass CI on the first attempt, yada -- this is not life is suffering. So I can't agree with the core buddhist noble truths..

If you're invested in another take on them, I would seek out Gudo Nishijimas dharma airs :}

Ah, well I had no intention of implying that all of life is suffering, but the succinctness of my comment can be read that way, sorry. Your take is quite reasonable, IMHO. The gist of a lot of the quotes that search brings up is more or less the same: without suffering, it may be more difficult to understand how deeply good the pleasant experiences of life are. Which for me, would include looking out the window at the rain. (I live in a desert.) My best friend (lives in Belgium) thinks the opposite.

Oh, your friend in Belgium doesn't appreciate what he has, I come from a small island off the west coast of Scotland, where rain is rather common... You could resent it, or you could install roof windows, a log burner and invest on a decent whisky and have the best possible environment for getting deep into a hardback book that possible exists (possible enhanced by a collie dog laying on your feet).

Life is weird. We're all islands until we realise we are the island. Don't take anything too seriously. :)

Anyone who can find joy in a glass of whiskey and a terrific hardbook is going to be fine, is what I think, no matter what obstacle, unless they go too hard on the books.

I've been thinking about this a bit lately. In a discussion about the precept on buddhists not to be intoxicated I wrote this:

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 :)

I went pretty hard on the books during the late... viral disturbances, and I think it was for the better. But the best hardbook experience I've had in... decades? was to finally restart and finish Ulysses, in a 40 year old copy, that I started when I was twenty and had not suffered enough to appreciate.

Had to keep the Lagavulin ecstasies partitioned off for the duration of the read, necessarily.

Dukkha doesn't translate exactly into "suffering". It can also mean "unsatisfactory" or "unpleasant". I interpret it as life is inherently unfulfilling and you'll never be fully satisfied by it. Even if you win at everything.

I'm not even remotely suicidal, in fact I consider myself very lucky to not really understand it (in most circumstances).

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.

Yep. I'm with you. I was chaos and anarchy before becoming a parent. Now if I lost mine in such an accident say, I'd immediately do it. What would be the point of waiting?

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.

As someone who has watched their parent struggle with - and ultimately pass away from - lung cancer, I can say that in my case the memory of them was far from their last days. I still remember them as my dad, the way you do when you’re a kid. The person that is a superhero and strongest person there is/was. FWIW, my dad passed away at home under hospice care, with me there to care for him for the last few days. It was difficult and not easy to see him that way, but I am thankful to have been able to be there for him in his final moments, especially since he’d been there for me my entire life.

I've still got both ahead, I guess I was a bit cocksure about how I would deal with it.. It's a tricky line to find for me between 'letting my kid watch me slowly die' or err.. not..

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?

I watched my grandfather do the slow fade in his mid 80s -- he spent the last year or so not really knowing where he was, not able to open his eyes, rarely knowing who he was talking to.

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.

I would have respected and understood his decision to do so, but would have rather him take whatever money he ultimately left to me and invite me along to his pissing off =). There's no right or wrong decision in this case, but at least for me, I would have loved to spend as much time as possible with my dad before he passed, and was honored to be allowed to care for him.

Cheers, I will think on this.

Alzheimers reduced my father to a lost shell of his former self, but I wouldn't trade any day I ever spent with him for anything. Regardless of the state he was in at the end, he was still my father and I loved every moment we had together. He was the gentlest, kindest, strongest and most thoughtful man I ever knew and that's exactly how I remember him. That's just my own opinion.

edit: Apologies, this is really personal stuff but I'm talking generically here -- please don't take any of the below as judgmental: I'm simply trying to work out my own feeling on the matter: I get you, but how would he have felt about that? I'm so, so uncomfortable with the idea of my kids having to look after me in such a condition that I hope they would understand that doing so is kind of selfish ... hmm I don't really have the words in English, but I guess the closest translation of selbstgerecht is 'self-righteous' but it doesn't really convey what I mean. At some point, the wishes of the remembered personality should be considered no?

That is a fair point. What I can say is that his loss weighs most heavily on my own children who never really got to know their grandfather. However, even though he was on a long, slow decline, he was still around for them to make memories with. Those moments are invaluable and I feel confident my father would happily go through it all again to know his grandkids were able to get to know him, if only a little bit. We still laugh about some of his shenanigans when his mind wasn't quite right.

> 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.

Perhaps you mean this one: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-di...

This. In fact, even having a pet can provide the same incentives not to harm yourself. The sense of being responsible for another life.