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?
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.