It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how fragile we are as human beings. Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.
On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.
there’s a difference between a one or two or even ten off exposure to the brutality of life, where various people in your life will support you and help you acclimate to it
Versus straight up mainlining it for 8 hours a day
I get your idea but in the context of this topic I think you're overreaching
Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.
Even the wording is wrong - those aren’t accidents, it is something we accept as byproduct of a car-centric culture.
People feel it is acceptable that thousands of people die on the road so we can go places faster. Similarly they feel it’s acceptable to traumatise some foreigners to keep social media running.
You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!
> There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
The two largest Vedic religions both have hundreds of millions of followers. Is Jainism that different from them in this regard? I know Jainism is very pacifist but on the question of suffering.
EDIT: If you’re interested what actually happened is that I was missing the prerequisite early childhood experience that enables one to feel secure in reality. If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so. For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke
OP got spooked to stop suffering and love life instead? Is that your cautionary tale?
—Freud
My point really is that you can feel one way for your entire life and then suddenly feel a different way. I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.
The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.
YMMV = not everyone hates life
I’m not sure why people act coy when a straightforward mirroring of their own comment is presented. “What could this mean?” Maybe the hope is that the other person will bore the audience by explaining the joke?
> I don't look up to Freud and psychoanalysis doesn't work for everyone! I don't even necessarily recommend it.
Talking about your infant parental relationship as the be-all-end-all looks indistinguishable from that.
> > If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so.
.
> I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.
Except for people who have “this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism”.
> > For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke
Which must paint everyone who defends “suffering” in the Vedic sense. Since that was what you were replying to. (Saying that reality is suffering on-the-whole is not the same as “I’m depressed [, and please give me anecdotes about how you overcame it]”.)
> > The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.
I don’t know how broad your brush is. But believing in the originally Vedic (Schopenhauer was inspired by Eastern religions, maybe Buddhism in particular) concept of “suffering” is not such a fragile intellectual framework that it collapses once you heal from the trauma when your mother scolded you while potty training at a crucial point in your Anal Stage of development.
> YMMV = not everyone hates life
Besides any point whatever.
And the Vedic version of suffering is all full of love for reality, not wanting to delete it by smashing a button
You trained personally for a few years and yet you make such sweeping statements/strokes that a neophyte is prompted to point out basic facts about this practice (apparently an adequate retelling since you don’t bother to correct me)? You might think this bolsters something (?) but I think the case is the opposite.
It helps to point out exactly what part that you are talking about (apparently not the Vedic gang). In fact this initial reply (just the above paragraph before the edit) seemed so out of place. Okay, so what are they talking about?
> And the Vedic version of suffering is all full of love for reality, not wanting to delete it by smashing a button
Oh, so it’s about the small wish to commit biocide.
It’s a clear category error to talk about love/want/hate when it comes to that statement. Because that’s beside the point. The point is clearly the wrongheaded, materialistic assumption that suffering will end if all life would end by the press of a button. And if you think that life on the whole is suffering? Then pressing the button is morally permissible.
It’s got nothing to do with hate.
It seemed interesting to me that someone would have such a “Schopenhauer” (not that I have read him) view of existence. You don’t see that every day.
> > Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!
> This is coming off as incoherent rambling to me
You do like to gesture vaguely and tell me that "I don’t know what this is". Meanwhile I have pointed out at least one instance where you flat out just contradicted yourself on psychoanalysis. Or "incoherent rambling" (on psychoanalysis) if you will
Join the club apparently. How nice.
> Are you saying that if all life is suffering then ending all life is morally permissible?
Yes. To demonstrate that the original, maligned comment wasn’t about ending all life because they hate life and existence. But in order to minimize suffering.
The premise is wrong from a Vedic perspective because it denies Moksha. But if you believe that Moksha doesn’t exist? Then it’s rational.
And the push-button argument will depend on what your stance on utilitarianism is. Specifically how you can make the choice for every life in existence (instead of them making it). Which addresses your question.
I’m not gonna answer that because that goes beyond the point I was making.
> In that case, what do you do with the life of someone who says they're not suffering?
It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at making things explode, and partly because improvements in metallurgy and electronics made it possible over time to locate targets with extreme precision in real time and then concentrate a lot of firepower directly on them. This, in particular, is why the most intense battlefields in Ukraine often look worse than WW1 and WW2 battles of similar intensity (e.g. Mariupol had more buildings destroyed than Stalingrad).
But even our small arms deliver much more energy to the target than their historical equivalents. Bows and arrows pack ~150 J at close range, rapidly diminishing with distance. Crossbows can increase this to ~400 J. For comparison, an AK-47 firing standard issue military ammo is ~2000 J.
It's almost military precision.
On behalf of dead WWI soldiers I find this offensive.
Brutal murder is low tech.
It’s like the original massive scale organization.
(Thankfully in the US we worship the 2A and its most twisted interpretation. So our toddlers do shooter drills. /s)
Or, gather a group of people, tell them to find a rock, and go bash the other sides head.
The ak-47 famously only needs the first item in that list.
That being the key to its popularity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX73uXs3xGU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAneTFiz5WU
As far as cleaning, AK, like many guns of that era, carries its own cleaning & maintenance toolkit inside the gun. Although it is a bit unusual in that regard in that this kit is, in fact, sufficient to remove any part of the gun that is not permanently attached. Which is to say, AK can be serviced in the field, without an armory, to a greater extent than most other options.
But the main reason why it's so popular isn't so much because of any of that, but rather because it's very cheap to produce at scale, and China especially has been producing millions of AKs specifically to dump them in Africa, Middle East etc. But where large quantities of other firearms are available for whatever reason, you see them used just as much - e.g. Taliban has been rocking a lot of M4 and M16 since US left a lot of stocks behind.
And Western supplies are mostly 5.56 for obvious reasons, although there are some exceptions - mostly countries that have switched fairly late and still have substantial stocks of 5.45, such as Bulgaria. But those are also limited in quantity.
So in practice it's not quite so simple, and Ukraine seems to be aiming for 5.56 as their primary cartridge long-term, specifically so that it's easier for Western countries to supply them with guns and ammo.
Soldiering isn’t sexy, it’s digging trenches, cleaning kit, and eating concussive blasts waiting to fight or die.
You don’t sit in a bunker all day waiting to defend a trench and not clean your gun.
They are much less likely to.
We have instinctive repulsion to violence, especially extending it (e.g. if the rock does not kill at the first blow).
It is much easier to kill with a gun (and even then people need training to be willing to do it), and easier still to fire a missile at people you cannot even see.
If you caused enough damage such that someone could not later be recognized, I wonder why you are not in prison.
Funny you mention crossbows; the Church at one point in time tried to ban them because they democratized violence to a truly trivial degree. They were the nuclear bombs and assault rifles of medieval times.
Also, I will take this moment to also mention that the "problem" with weapons always seem to be how quickly they can kill rather than the killing itself. Kind of takes away from the discussion once that is realized.
I used to live in the Disney headspace until my dog had to be put down. Now with my parents being in their seventies, and me in my thirties I fear losing them the most.
I say animal to explicitly include humans. Finding my hamster dead in fifth grade did change me. But watching my mother slowly die a horrible, haunting death didn't make me a better person. I'm just saying that there's a spectrum that goes something like: easy to forget about, I'm able to not worry, sometimes i think about it when i dont want, often i think about it, often it bothers me, and do on. You can probably imagine the cycle of obsession and stress.
This really goes for all traumatic experiences. There's a point where they can make you a better person, but there's a cliff after which you have no guarantees that it won't just start obliterating you and your life. It's still a kind of perspective. But can you have too much perspective? Lots of times i feel like i do
1) I don't have squeamishness about trauma. In the end, we are all blood and tissue. The calls that get to me are the emotionally traumatic, the child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse (which of course often have a physical component too, but it's the emotional for me), the tragic, often preventable accidents.
2) There are many people, and I get the curiosity, that will ask "what's the worst call you've been on?" - one, you don't really want to hear, and two, "Hey, person I may barely know, do you think you can revisit something traumatic for my benefit/curiosity?"
I won’t watch most movies or TV because they are just some sort of tragedy porn.
100% agree. Most TV series nowadays are basically violence porn, now that real porn is not allowed for all kinds of reasons.
What's interesting now is how many patients will say "You're not going to give me fentanyl are you? That's really dangerous stuff", etc.
Their perfect right, of course, but is sad that that's the public perception - it's extremely effective, and quite safe, used properly (for one, we're obviously only giving it from pharma sources, with actually properly dosed solutions for IV).
Are they more amenable to terminally ill people having access to euthanasia?
Do they cope better after losing loved ones?
Are there other ways we can get a sense of how a more healthy acceptance of mortality would manifest?
Would be interested in this data if it is available.
Do you think that’s what people see in yours?
I'm trying to understand what people mean by 'detachment from reality' and how such a thing is related to 'understanding of mortality', and how a deeper understanding of mortality and acceptance of death would manifest in ways that can be seen.
If 'acceptance of death' does not actually mean that they are more comfortable talking about death, or allowing people to choose their own deaths, or accepting their loved one's deaths with more ease, then what does it mean? Is it something else? Why can't anyone say what it is?
Why it is so obvious to the people stating that it happens, but no one can explain why the questions I asked are not being answered or are wrong?
If this is come basic conflict of frameworks wherein I am making assumptions that make no sense to the people who are making the assertions I am questioning, then what am I missing here?
you seems to be a bit anxious like waiting for the answer of your existential crisis.
> or are wrong?
that’s exactly what we did but you think your questions are actually super smart and we, fools, can’t answer them. Well, go on a quest to find the answers by yourself, young one.
> I'm trying to understand
Wouldn’t people be responding poorly to your questions, because they seem facetious when that’s precisely what people mean? — and obviously so?
Eg, my niece dealt better with pets dying than other kids her age I’ve known since her family regularly slaughters chickens.
> people mean by 'detachment from reality' and how such a thing is related to 'understanding of mortality'
This too is so obvious that people think you’re responding in poor faith — eg, the professional managerial class has destroyed multiple cities by being so detached from reality that they no longer imprison career criminals, resulting in social breakdown not even seen in many third world countries.
That’s why I don’t think it’s Socratic questioning: just you not understanding the basic implications or yourself being unaware of reality.
> no one can explain why the questions I asked are not being answered or are wrong?
I did say why: you come across as arrogant and ignorant by asking seemingly facetious questions about obvious implications — then comparing yourself to Socrates for doing so.
>Are there other ways we can get a sense of how a more healthy acceptance of mortality would manifest?
In concept, yes, I think home family death can also have a similar impact. It is not very common in the US, but 50 years ago, elders would typically die at home with family. There are cultures today, even materially advanced ones, where people spend time with the freshly dead body of loved ones instead of running from it and compartmentalizing it.
Of course that case is probably related to knowing the actual probabilities and the suffering involved. Medicine isn't just "drink a potion and be instantly cured or instantly die", it is a long painful process.
The chefs butcher and serve the fish right in front of you, and because it was alive merely seconds ago the meat will still be twitching when you get it. If they also serve the rest of the fish as decoration, the fish might still be gasping for oxygen.
Japanese don't really think much of it, they're used to it and acknowledge the fleeting nature of life and that eating something means you are taking another life to sustain your own.
The same environment will likely leave most westerners squeamish or perhaps even gag simply because the west goes out of its way to hide where food comes from, even though that simply is the reality we all live in.
Personally, I enjoy meats respecting and appreciating the fact that the steak or sashimi or whatever in front of me was a live animal at one point just like me. Salads too, those vegetables were (are?) just as alive as I am.
Isn't this similar to why people unfamiliar with that style of seafood would feel sick -- cultural views on what is and is not normal food -- and not because of their view of mortality?
Imagine that to cook that pork chop, the chef starts by butchering a live pig. Also imagine that he does that in view of everyone in the restaurant rather than in the "backyard" kitchen let alone a separate butchering facility hundreds of miles away.
That's the sushi chef butchering and serving a live fish he grabbed from the tank behind him.
When you can actually see where your food is coming from and what "food" truly even is, that gives you a better grasp on reality and life.
It's also the true meaning behind the often used joke that goes: "You don't want to see how sausages are made."
The issue most people would have with seeing the sausage being made isn't necessarily watching the slaughtering process but with seeing pieces of the animal used for food that they would not want to eat.
The analogy here would be watching a live cow get slaughtered and then butchered from scratch in front of you, which I think most Western audiences (more than a few) might not like.
I am asserting that you could do all of that in front of a random assortment of modern Americans, and then cut steaks off of it and grill them and serve them to half of the crowd, and most of those people would not have an problem eating those steaks.
Then if you were to scoop up all the leftover, non-steak bits from the ground with shovels, throw it all into a giant meat grinder and then take the intestines from a pig, remove the feces from them and fill them with the output of the grinder, cook that and serve it to the other half of the crowd, then a statistically larger proportion of that crowd would not want to eat that compared to the ones who ate the steak.
I am asserting that the majority of western audiences, including Americans, would dislike being present for the slaughtering and butchering portion of the experience you describe.
I probably also wouldn't want to eat that, but more because that steak will taste bad without being aged properly.
I think you are doing the same exact thing with the above statement as well.
That you insist on contriving one zany situation after another instead of just admitting that people today are detached from reality illustrates my point rather ironically.
Whether it's butchering animals or mining rare earths or whatever else, there's a lot of disturbing facets to reality that most people are blissfully unaware of. Ignorance is bliss.
Recall that this whole thread started with your proposition that seeing live fish prepared in front of someone "will likely leave most westerners squeamish or perhaps even gag simply because the west goes out of its way to hide where food comes from, even though that simply is the reality we all live in." You had no basis for this as far as I can tell, it's just a random musing by you. A number of folks responded disagreeing with you, but you dismissed their anecdotal comments as being wrong because it doesn't comport with your view of the unwashed masses who are, obviously, feeble minded sheep who couldn't possibly cope with the realities of modern food production in an enlightened way like you have whereby you "enjoy meats respecting and appreciating the fact that the steak or sashimi or whatever in front of me was a live animal at one point just like me." How noble of you. Nobody (and I mean this in the figurative sense not the literal sense) is confused that the slab of meat in front of them was at one point alive.
Then you have the audacity to accuse someone of coming up with "zany" situations? You're the one that started the whole zany discussion in the first place with your own zany musings about how "western" "commons" think!
Some things just tickle the brain in a bad way. I've killed plenty of fish myself, but I still wouldn't want to eat one that's still moving in my mouth, not because of ickiness or whatever, but just because the concept is unappealing. I don't think this is anywhere near as binary as you make it seem, really.
Not to mention the millions of Americans working in the livestock and agriculture business who see up close every day how food comes to be.
A significant portion of the American population engages directly with their food and the death process. Citing one gimmicky example of Asian culture where squirmy seafood is part of the show doesn't say anything about the culture of entire nations. That is not how the majority of Japanese consume seafood. It's just as anomalous there. You only know about it because it's unusual enough to get reported.
You can pick your lobster out of the tank and eat it at American restaurants too. Oysters and clams on the half-shell are still alive when we eat them.
In case you missed it, you're talking to a Japanese.
Some restaurants go a step further by letting the customers literally fish for their dinner out of a pool. Granted those restaurants are a niche, that's their whole selling point to customers looking for something different.
Most sushi bars have a tank holding live fish and other seafood of the day, though. It's a pretty mundane thing.
Now, ask a laptop worker to butcher an animal whom used to have a name and to literally turn its meat into sausages and see what said worker’s reaction would be.
There is a lot of skill going in to it, so I couldn't do it myself. You need guidance of someone who is knowledgeable and has the proper tools and facilities for the job.
It is also ridiculous how people think every soldier's experience is like Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket. I remember an interview with a WWII vet who had been on omaha beach: "I don't remember anything happening in slow motion ... I do remember eating a lot of sand." The reality of war is often just not visually interesting enough to put on the screen.
What can I say? People like to live dangerously.
Not being aware of this is also a cause of traffic accidents. People should be more careful driving.
I've seen the crumpled metal of a car, I don't need to see the people inside to know it is not good.
You don't have to excessively see hours upon hours of such footage.
But a single harsh and gruesome traffic death footage sure as hell made me more careful in traffic. No amount of crumpled car metal was going to properly internalize in me how sudden and unexpected death can be and how fragile life really is.
Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods.
Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason.
I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.
It's also part of almost every American cop and military show and movie. Of course it's not real but it looks the same.
I beg to differ. TV shows and movies are silly. Action movies are just tough-guy dancing.
The organizer is even called a "fight choreographer".
And I wasn't talking about action hero movies.
Society would be a very different place if everyone had to do customer service or janitorial work one weekend a month.
Living in other Asian nations where there are often defacto invisible caste systems can be nauseating at times - you have parents that won't allow their children to participate in clean up efforts because their child is 'above handling trash.' That's gonna be one well adjusted adult...
I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it."
I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.