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Habits of Highly Miserable People

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Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#171

Post by s-shellfish »

elipsey wrote: post #161
s-shellfish wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known people who have been on upwards of 40 different medications throughout their life. It's a choice, not an obligation. If you have had to cycle through being on 5+ medications all to balance out effects of the others of which, might help, might not, not sure - for decades, and you wind up feeling like 'I don't even know who the fuck I am without all of this', then that's a place to be in life too that can be…

Yep, meds are terrible. My comment is for that small fraction of the population for whom "Just knock it off" is a dangerously wrong but appealing idea -- like curing cancer with coffee enemas. These folks have a high mortality rate. (If you're reading this you know who you are. Stay away from the article :)

Words can be terrible too, from either side. Focusing on one singular thing to blame isn't often the solution. Creating the division between the appearance of sanity and the appearance of insanity - of course that's chaos. But is it really fair to divide the population into people who have defunct minds and functional minds? Is it fair to say 'here's your label' while also saying 'don't identify with it'. Is it fair to listen to someone say 'don't think black and white' while also saying 'you are mentally ill, and I am sane'.

I know for myself, the outside can sometimes look like a selfish lunatic and the inside can be completely without self in a way that intends to be giving, but in a way that is hard on myself enough to know I don't know everything and hard problems are hard. Being told that all I need to do is take my meds and act like a normal person can come across a bit, patronizing, while I've spoken to people in mental healthcare systems who both 'enjoyed how I picked their brain' because I suppose for them, it made some stuff click, and for others, I still blame myself.

Mental health is not easy. I don't know of anyone better to understand how hard it can be than someone who knows it intimately, aside from someone whose studied it so much they don't know if that's part of the reason people become it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentalism_(discrimination)

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#172

Post by make3 »

ModernMech wrote: post #47
kristianc wrote: post #27

I’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."

I thought it was appropriate constructive feedback.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#173

Post by pokemongoaway »

Latty wrote: post #158
RIMR wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were str…

I would seriously hope that modern therapists would do their utmost to push back on any idea of virginity as an indicator of human value - an idea that comes from the idea of women as property and successor machines.

It's a value because the more people you've been with the less likely you'll stay with the one you have. However, therapists should be pushing back on the idea that we need to focus on bad things that happened to us in order to be released from them. It is simple enough to see - and one of the reasons why eastern practitioners still laugh at staunch western scientists.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#174

Post by lkrubner »

jschwartzi wrote: post #109
lkrubner wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goes to identity. Telling people not to do this is pointless unless you can suggest another way to construct identity. A person without a past is... an interesting thought experiment, but not something that exists in the real world. Identity builds up in layers -- what is your nation, your religion, your favorite team, your hometown, your college, your spouse, your child. If you give all of that up, then who are you?…

The key difference between rumination and self-reflection is that rumination doesn't accomplish anything. As soon as you finish examining whatever you were examining, you're right back at square one with no new insights. It's essentially beating yourself up for doing the best you can. Self-reflection seems like rumination, but the goal is to learn something from whatever you're examining. To take a lesson from it, if…

"The key difference between rumination and self-reflection is that rumination doesn't accomplish anything"

The fundamental activity involves reviewing a thought over and over again, sometimes thousands of times over many years. Sometimes this leads to a new painting, a new novel, a new movie script, a new piece of software, or a new insight about something that happened to you as a child. Sometimes a person fails to make any progress.

You write "The key difference" but these are words without meaning. Sometimes you ruminate on a novel you are writing, but you can't figure out the ending, so you accomplish nothing. Sometimes you ruminate on that time you insulted your alcoholic brother and the next month he killed himself, but this time, reviewing the memory, you recall that he'd said he was going to kill himself long before, so it wasn't really your fault.

There is a reason why therapists often want to talk about a person's childhood -- sometimes reviewing the past leads to a new insight. Sometimes it doesn't. You can't judge the value of the activity simply by whether it produces something. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#175

Post by jodrellblank »

matte_black wrote: post #72
dominotw wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this documentary on cnbc about modern day slavery on fishing boats[1]. Ppl are promised jobs, entrapped and sold to shipping vessels as slaves where there are worked to death. When someone falls sick or dies from overwork they simply throw the body out in the ocean. I am still traumatized by this documentary, I can't imagine anything worse that could happen to a human being. I can shop at whole foods that does…

Why wouldn’t the slaves just rise up and mutiny against the captain??

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

Quoting:

> Anyway, perfectly ordinary slaveowner DiCaprio asks a rhetorical question, a fundamental question, that has occurred to every 7th grade white boy and about 10% of 7th grade white girls, and the profound question he asked was: "Why don't they just rise up?"

Kneel down, Quentin Tarantino is a genius. That question should properly come from the mouth of the German dentist: this isn't his country, he doesn't really have an instinctive feel for the system, so it's completely legitimate for a guy who doesn't know the score to ask this question, which is why 7th grade boys ask it; they themselves haven't yet felt the crushing weight of the system, so immediately you should ask, how early have girls been crushed that they don't think to ask this? But Tarantino puts this question in the mouth of the power, it is spoken by the very lips of that system; because of course the reason they don't rise up is that he-- that system-- taught them not to. When the system tells you what to do, you have no choice but to obey.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#176

Post by pokemongoaway »

nikkwong wrote: post #122
RIMR wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were str…

[redacted]

"...that it is impossible to ever build their own identity" Sounds like a pretty poorly prescribed incantation.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#177

Post by pokemongoaway »

xexers wrote: post #163
DoreenMichele wrote: post #104

Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me…

There is a school of thought in psychiatry that some people would do better to simply move on and forget about it. There was a good podcast on this topic here: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-193-fck-feel...

Similar to the many thousand year old schools of eastern thought!

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#178

Post by tomc1985 »

drngdds wrote: post #155
tomc1985 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So shrink your browser window, tilt your phone to the side, or switch to reader mode

Alternately, you could make a website that has a good user experience by default for people using some of the most popular platforms instead of sticking with arbitrary standards from decades ago

Users these days, so spoiled...

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#179

Post by pokemongoaway »

elipsey wrote: post #134

PULIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: author trolls the mentally ill in standard way, says they're doing it for attention. If you have serious psych diagnosis like BP etc., please avoid this content; your loved ones know you're trying and only a handfull of contrarians strike this pose. Get some exercise and a good night's sleep, and stay on your meds. I'm rooting for you. P.S. This trash should not be on HN. It has nothing to…

How could it kill somebody? And can you link to where the ill are being trolled?

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#180

Post by vkou »

robotrout wrote: post #142
vkou wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's because I would figure out how to call someone I know to come and get me. You don't end up homeless when you have someone to call to come and get you. You end up homeless when you've burned through that bridge.

Hopefully that's not the only reason. Even absent of help from a friend, you likely wouldn't be there for long.

Depends on the economy, the cost of living, my health, and my skills.

Those factors are not under my direct control. Some of them may have been in the past, but not in the present.

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