Number 3, "Give yourself a negative identity," just sounds like "I don't like when people have mental health problems. Get over it already."
Are you practicing number 5? If so, great job!
Habits of Highly Miserable People
41–50 of 321 posts
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#42>Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter. really roughly this is what stoics do, yet somehow they come to the conclusion "actually, what was i fearing? Proceed with adventure"...
I had a sign: Act now or homelessness later. Choose.
Homeless shelters here are terrible TBH. I’d rather sleep rough. Living in a van for me is better than a house or apartment because:
- no rent, no mortgage
- no noisy neighbors sans the phony-“tough,” backwards-hat teenager act
- less space to fill it up whth $crap I don’t need
- always mobile
- able to leap tall buildings in a single bound
- dual burner stove and 20 kg propane tank
- all Burner, all the time
- no lawn to mow
- no bills but the basics
- it’s really quiet
- no neighbor from hell to gas you out smoking, using too much lighter-fluid and cooking with their BBQ right next to a fence below you and screaming/terrorizing/trying to intimidate everyone
- indoor nudist as long as I want
- volunteers of the blond varietal tested suspension for squeaks; needs more data
- able to monitor DIY blinker fluid meters closely
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#43I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.
Reader view works in this page and is perfectly readable.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#44Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#45Love the list, hate the attitude
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#46Number 3, "Give yourself a negative identity," just sounds like "I don't like when people have mental health problems. Get over it already."
Not fully. The point (I think) is not letting oneself be consumed by a problem & constantly identifying to be about it. There are way more things to define you.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#47I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.
"14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything."
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#48Number 3, "Give yourself a negative identity," just sounds like "I don't like when people have mental health problems. Get over it already."
If you're telling yourself that you might be falling for a bit of a sneaky misconception about your problems. Take it from me, there's a big difference between realistically accepting a mental health problem and making it into your whole identity and wallowing in it.
There's also a big difference between mental health denial / "get over it already" and making steps to finally stop it from totally dominating your life in the future.
Depression is like a separate animal inside you with its own drives for survival and reproduction. You don't turn your back on it, but you don't let it devour you and steal your name and face either.
If it can manage to, it would love to take control of you and make you believe that there is literally nothing that can help and you're utterly powerless to change anything, and that anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just one of those people who doesn't understand and thinks you can just cheer yourself up out of depression by smiling and going outside or whatever. That's a false dichotomy.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#49I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.
Ugh, no. Don't mess with classic, lightly-formatted HTML.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nostalgia isn't all bad...in fact it's believed to improve your mood.
Yeah, for a short moment. Longer tern it likely leads to not appreciating the present.
Comparing your past self to your present self can be extremely destructive if you think you were in a better place then than you are now.
Maybe sometimes it’s abjectly true - you became homeless and in the past you weren’t so it was better back then. In a lot of cases you’re probably looking back on a high moment while in the middle of a low moment. Either way, the comparison does far more harm than good and it might well hold you back.