Reading groups were always my favorite threads.

Yeah, I suppose I don't know either. It'd be interesting to see the results of a study, if such a study were in any way feasible. I guess it's hard for me imagine how that bias would feel - just a sense you like the other person but you can't say why?

But, in any case, I think we agree that the desire not to hurt your family, even if condemns you to suffering, seems largely related to their having been close to you, yeah?

In what psychodynamic system is suicidal ideation more of a coping mechanism?

Short answer: a lot of them. Not a healthy coping mechanism, mind you, but a coping mechanism. Nietzsche's got a famous quote about it: "The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."

And there's the less elegant formulation they couldn't stop repeating at the 'hospital' I spent a few miserable weeks at: "the idea of suicide is the idea of peace." (They were 'honoring our pain' in the hopes of leading us to truer greener peace-pastures)

And from experience, it's true. It's amazing how much you can calm yourself down by looking up the nearest bridge of foolproof height, and the train schedule, and promising to yourself you'll do it, for real, on Wednesday. And then on Wednesday, agitated, despairing, you can promise yourself the liberating plunge will really, for real this time, no excuses, come on Friday. And so forth. Some people have likened suicidal ideation to drug addiction. It doesn't seem far off. Tho it's a weird sort of addiction where the promises to quit and the high itself are the same thing.

My intuition is: who knows. What would the phenomenological account of that experience be like? I feel like it'd have nothing to do with genetic kinship.

But what if you knew all of them equally well, but had no idea who you were related to?

Yeah, I almost posed a thought experiment of my dad shocking me or some such when my elbows were put on the table.

Is it ancientness or trauma that makes hurting family so difficult? Let me put it this way. Say you were abandoned, Quasimodo-style, on the steps of a cathedral. Years later, due to whatever circumstances, you found yourself on the TITANIC (!) with a group of people, and, due to previous displays of whatever, found yourself in charge of lifeboat triage. Some of the people had grown up with you, been dear friends, you drank and smoked together and talked about how much you'd like to get a ticket for the TITANIC (!). And there was the priest who took care of you. And the nursemaid. etc etc. And some of the people you had no relation to. And two of the people, unbeknownst to you, were your biological mother and sister. Or they could be your biological father or brother. In any case. Who would you be more inclined to save?

So the thing was the elbows was just that it wasn't of sufficient vintage, basically?

Ok, are you rescinding your earlier claim that not wanting to hurt family stems from habit and convention?

(There are studies showing that most organisms of a certain complexity act altruistically in direct proportion to the genetic material shared with the object of their altruism. Siblings>Cousins etc. So it might make sense to ditch convention and habit and go straight to biology)

No, it's not. Though it feels funny at first.

What makes the latter more deeply ingrained? You mentioned conditioning earlier, but I was certainly conditioned not to put my elbows on the table. So it's not conditioning in-and-of-itself.

Agreed, and being a 'good person' is usually tied, especially for kids, to social signifiers. Pretty gross, but that seems to be the truth of it.

So we're in agreement that not wanting to put your elbows on the table is no less trivial than not wanting to hurt your family through suicide?

I was conditioned not to put my elbows on the table, for sure. Dad gave me very stern looks. I felt v small. I had an unconscious aversion to it for a long time. The stern looks happened, but that's not how it played out psychically for little me. I just knew you weren't supposed to put elbows on tables, and I knew it in my body. I remember silently judging others at school (what a lame second grader, I know.) But then, in 5th grade, made a friend, of better social standing than my own family's, and they were cool with it. It seemed so weird. They didn't have [unconsciously understood] social marker x, yet the elbows were no big deal. It felt so wrong, but I couldn't quite say why. In fact, that inability to say why eventually led me to confront my dad on the elbow issue.

Is that what you mean? Something you have an instinctive aversion or attraction to, yet can't quite put into words? Like the elbow thing?

Yeah, biology. I made this picture book about photosynthesis in 10th grade. The teacher really liked it, he gave me an A+ and told me I had a knack for selecting funny pictures and recontextualizing them. Thanks Mr. Wyder! I remember the lecture on trivial vs non trivial habits vividly. V captivating. Then we watched Gattaca on vhs until the bell rang. I was crushing hard on x, but couldn't act on it on account of the social anxiety. Ugh.

What makes some things trivial and others nontrivial? I agree that its the stuff you aren't aware of. Why is that?

Have my elbows on the table right now tbh

Like don't put my elbows on the dinner table?

idk - x did y because he wanted money, admiration etc. seems legit to me.

I have a habit of buying coffee every day before work. If Iearned the coffee was made from the blood of orphans, I'd probably stop. So habit in-and-of itself isn't a deterrent. There has to be something more, which makes certain habits more binding (esp when they bind you to constant suffering)

It's being singled out because its the relevant reasonless thing here. I don't think it makes sense for you to say most things don't have reasons bc here is a list of reasons: conquest, sex, security, admiration, victory, comfort, money.

You've mentioned, elsewhere, the big deterrent for suicide for you, is the impact it would have on your family. If life is so awful, it's strange you'd be deterred by something you recogize as mere habit and convention.

I don't think you need a reason either. I think that's what makes compassion compassion and not something else. Though its harder, no doubt, to be compassionate for those who are not themselves compassionate (like anyone who has kids)

ooo I want to read Counsels & Maxims, I didn't know it existed.

Why don't you want to hurt your family?

Yeah I think people like all that stuff. I think a lot people like compassion too.

Don't value compassion or don't value being compassionate?

I think you've answered your question.

How could an empathetic person have a child?... I just can't comprehend thinking that is okay.

Well there's for sure plenty of aestheticized horse crap empathy out there. I don't think ending someone else's suffering is a realistic empathetic goal, if you can even talk about goals in this context. I guess it's more just being able to have a real conversation with someone else, where you begin to actually understand the contours and colors of someone else's suffering. You help if you can (a lot of times you can't, but being understood by someone who can't help you is a lot better than having someone who doesn't understand you trying to help.)

As far as birth goes: I know you've said you have a relatively good relationship with your parents They inflicted an unspeakable horror, and thus must have no actual empathy for you, yet you're concerned not to hurt them. Why's that?

& to follow from that, that old chestnut about not being able to love others unless you love yourself is true. If you can't see yourself as someone who can be cared for, it's difficult to care about others, except in the abstract.

So the response seems to be, 'that can't be right because it's aesthetically displeasing.' Apparently we need to 'do services' to suffering? What does that mean, exactly?

OK, so the truth doesn't make a good painting or philosophy book. But our suffering is apparently now some sort of art object that needs to be cultivated and wept about in the right tactful way.

I don't think that's what I meant, or said. There's aesthetically pleasing pessimism (Schopenhauer, early Cormac McCarthy, Beckett, Laszlo Krasznahorkai) and aesthetically displeasing pessimism (Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq.)

What's bothersome is the sense that actual suffering seems to be grist for the pronouncement of an ultimate truth, for the act of pronouncing, for being one of those who pronounce.

As to doing service to suffering, I really just mean empathy - which isn't empathy unless it attends to the particular. It doesn't much interest me what Schopenhauer says about empathy because he also conveniently theorized a way to separate theory and praxis.

And life's just a bunch of pain, and that's it. There's nothing else, no depth to it or anything that makes it worthwhile.

And then he pounded a beer, gave himself a tattoo, punched his girlfriend, and landed the sickest kickflip any of us had ever seen.

c'mon man. This is is obviously false, even if you think pain far outweighs joy.

You're right, all theorizing loses its luster during the Bad Times. It's just that pessimism, unlike the other approaches you mention, has an irksome tendency to train it sights precisely on the Bad Times, as a means to speak, magisterially (or with magisterial bluntness), a general truth. It does disservice both to the actual suffering of others and to one's own actually suffering self.

(I read some poetic or theological something somewhere, a long time ago, which argued that what's hardest for the denizens of Hell are not the tortures endured, but the knowledge that God's love will exist eternally, always out of reach. I think there's something of that too. The happiness of others is hard to bear when you can't join in yourself. But there's some solace to be found in being the least-duped.

Better to reign in hell.

Doesn't he look like a philosopher?

I haven't read The Stranger since high school and it's mostly faded, tbh, so I hunted down a pdf and re-read the ending. I think it probably is a case of 'borrowing the theistic vision while concealing the theistic spirit.' I think it's important that Merseault qualifies the Universe's indifference as 'benign' and 'brotherly.' Plus there's that goofy ultra-french final sentence "For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration. " It seems like Merseault wants to feel like the equal of the indifferent universe. To be cursed, as the universe is cursed, would be evidence of his success. But he can't help familiarizing the universe, just a bit.

But, that said, I think you're right, it comes down to the epiphanic and self-transformational. It's only during moments of crises that you gain authentic insight into how you've been hurting yourself and others. The real mystery, to me, is how you get the strength to go about actually changing. ( I think it probably has to do with trusting others)

I have a soft spot for Beckett too. Of the the three, he's the best prose stylist, but also, more importantly, the most genuinely empathetic. Empathy is praised by Schopenhauer, but Beckett's works actually embody it. Plus, as you mention,he's got an immaculate sense of humor. He's lol-level. His Three Novels has (have?) been in my top ten since I first read it (them?)

But, yeah, I didn't think you were trivializing anything. If anything, I'm guilty of trivializing in my last response to tgw, which I don't feel great about.

I guess what I wanted to say, but went about it the wrong way, is that in the depth of a suicidal crisis, all the philosophical stuff appears actually comical. The same way, for a dying officer, memories of parlor conversations re: "war is hell" would seem like a bad joke. I believe, firmly, that most pessimists/antinatlists have experienced agonizing pain, but the theoretical stuff is pure sublimation. It's a way of trying to exert power over the bad stuff by judging it. Often there's some peacockish frills involved. True Detective was cartoonish, but there's nevertheless a lesson to be learned from Rust Cohle who evades painful memories and experiences through monologues about Cosmic Threshers etc.

(& yeah there's legit, non-posturing reasons to chill on the forums. I went a bit overboard there.)

heh the very name 'philosophy forums' suggests a vast meadow of mutual masturbation. That's why most people steer clear. What are we all doing here if not reinforcing one another's sense of being v smart, insightful ppl?

I'm not trying to make this a suicidal tendency pissing contest, but I spent a solid month getting drunk every afternoon and spending all night, every night, standing at the top of a parking garage, lacerating myself for not having the guts to jump (I couldn't turn off my imagination and stop visualizing the fall and impact. The only reason I'm not dead is I'm good at imagining pain & what dreams could theoretically come. Put differently: I'm a coward)

Wanting to die every day isn't it. (Especially if you can check it by knowing you shouldn't.)

It's not knowing how not to kill yourself.

I think that's an important distinction.

I think you're wrong about the void and theorizing. Women have the void too (unless they're all lying for attention). They have different ways of coping with it.

You say what you're describing is hard to explain. I don't know, I think I get it. Have you read Edith Wharton's House of Mirth? The word "dingy" comes up a lot, is explicitly treated in a way that makes sure the reader knows they're encountering a bona fide Theme. Dinginess is the creep of that which destroys status. House of Mirth is a fall from grace story. The libidinal hook is what a nice and pure woman and now this is happening. In this sense it's a lot like e.g. Henry James's Daisy Miller, the tragedy of the lady fallen (which uses the same psychic investments, literarily, that, say, kink.com's public disgrace series uses to somewhat different ends.) The thing about HofM, tho, is that it uses this trope as a way to explore desperate placelessness. The language used is rather existential or w/e. Not that different from a sailor lost in heroic dreams who realizes, at a crucial moment, he's failed his ideal and his treasured self-image no longer protects him against the world (Conrad's great theme. It's impossible to really get Heart of Darkness unless you've read Lord Jim. (Seriously, though, if you haven't read Lord Jim, it's fantastic.) )

"they're called pause pocks..."

u guys r beating up a ghost
hes gone

Yeah, I'm aware of those statistics. There are a lot of ways to look at suicide. I think it would be interesting to see what the correlation between philosophical pessimism/antinatalism and suicide is. "It is not worth killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." "I Can't go on, I'll go on." "suicide is a will thing too, you know" Philosophical pessimists tend to be very proud ppl, and suicide is giving in.

(though I do think that part of a certain male virtue signaling and ingratiation toward women involves attributing superior faculties of empathy and reasoning to women in various ways -- e.g thinking men are rigid and hierarchical and platonistic and autistic while women are subtle and complex and empathetic and so on -- obviously there's a shade of that in what you just wrote).

I can see how it could come across that way. Thing is, though, I'm quite sure I'd never say something like that in public, or at a party, and I'm not too worried about ingratiating myself to women on here. I think women think in hierarchical terms as much as men do. As far as autism and gender goes - Well, I mean look at the stats. They're not dissimilar to the ones you cited regarding suicide.

I mean, quite simply, that women don't usually seem to devise theories of everything, while a lot of men seem to be drawn to them. Would you agree with that at least?

to go back to where this started - it does seem to me that women tend not to think in terms of homogenous totalities. I think they're more comfortable with qualitatively different regions or registers of life which don't ultimately fit together smoothly. Pessimism and antinatalism strike me largely as absolute rejections of a totality grasped as a totality. I don't think it has to do with men suffering more.

Yeah, I don't deny all these things exist. I just don't have the general impression, from experience, that woman are basically contemptuous and entitled - at least not any more than men. I honestly don't. Again, it might come down to differences in our respective social milieus, who knows. I get the sense that maybe you think that deep down I agree with you, but won't - or can't - admit it (to you, to others, to myself) for certain reasons. Is that fair to say?

The split between men who confront existential displacement with honesty and authenticity and women who don't, who hate and cheat and feel superior - in some ways, this reminds me a bit of that experience I mentioned when I first went to college (in Boston, FWIW.) How everyone else seemed to be on this other wavelength, excluding, getting one another but rejecting everyone else, not really lonely, and how, as you pointed out and I later realized, this was mostly because I hadn't really gotten to know any of them well enough to know what they were actually like.

Yeah, but I think most of the attitudes they espouse are implicit in the way 'non-polemical' women behave

Why do you think that?

'But it's only a radical minority!' is always the first hurdle.

Sure. But think of all the other unsavory causes that would make this same point. For a non-believer, there's something a little disquieting about this kind of rhetoric

Yeah, but I think most of the attitudes they espouse are implicit in the way 'non-polemical' women behave.

Why do you think that?

But, again, what led you to start frequenting these sites?

It sounds like most of what you read by women is polemical feminist material. I guess that could make it seem like women in general hate men. What's your reason for seeking out this kind of literature in particular? Did you start reading this stuff out of general interest and gradually come to your conclusions?