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Habits of Highly Miserable People

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Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#281

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I think this is a better exercise. I stole it from Seneca. Look at the back of your wrists: see those fragile greenish-blue veins? What if tomorrow - while thinking about some problem with money or love - you trip and fall, and a particularly sharp rock on the ground or a shard of glass on the street cuts one of those thin exposed blue-green veins open?

From what I understand about suicide, no little crossways cut on those veins will ever kill you. You have to go up the arm and deep. Humans aren't that fragile really.

You don’t have to cut deep, just enough to make the blood gush. The story says a sharp object to distinguish that.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#282
post #266
post #111

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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…

As a male, people told me I'm a liar and that it's not possible to be raped by a female. I don't bother bringing it up anymore.

It happened to me by a family member. Today She still denies it

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#283
post #111

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…

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…

Validation, acceptance, endorsement, and promotion have murky boundaries. Validation and acceptance are key components to a healthy outcome after a painful experience. It can go too far, and endorsement and promotion can mutate a viewpoint until it culminates as an obsession.

Recovery, however, is hardly ever a straight path. Sometimes people get stuck. Sometimes, people shift their viewpoint to something else that's extreme and unhealthy. In the grand scheme of things, this journey lasts our entire lifetime.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the reaction you're "supposed" to get by thinking about that? I took a moment to think about it and I don't think I got it. My reaction was, "Well then I probably die", but I don't feel particularly different about the present. If that's the thing I'm supposed to feel then so be it, but I feel Seneca intended for some greater profundity, or he would dispense with the mental theatrics. What am I missing? Does…

it's distraction, nothing more. By the way, I recently noticed my veins are not symmetric on both hands. I'm not sure what to think of that either.

It means that one of your hands is actually your twin brothers', whom you ate in the womb. Meditate on that for an hour every day :p

edit: it's impossible to know which hand is yours.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#285
post #30

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Those things never really scared me. Do they also meditate on being sick, in constant crippling pain and come to the same conclusion? I get a stomachache and recognize a bad personality change in myself. I dont imagine id be able to draw on the same mental skills while in that state for prolonged periods.

I think this is a better exercise. I stole it from Seneca. Look at the back of your wrists: see those fragile greenish-blue veins? What if tomorrow - while thinking about some problem with money or love - you trip and fall, and a particularly sharp rock on the ground or a shard of glass on the street cuts one of those thin exposed blue-green veins open?

I'm probably doing it wrong but the first thing I think of is "better do that on a busy street, hopefully there's someone that knows to bind off my wrist or something[0]"

Do I need to imagine that I'll bleed out alone, with everyone walking past me as if I don't exist?

Because 1. I don't like that exercise and 2. it mostly makes me consider to what extent I'm currently surrounding myself with people that dis-compassionate an whether I should move ...

3. does it matter that one of my wrists actually has a huge scar, that's grown with me from when I was 4 years old, jumped off a couch and smashed my tiny right wrist into a glass on the table? I managed to miss both my artery and my tendons, ... or I wouldn't be typing this :D

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#286
post #9

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Historically, the market has been great across the board for as long as most people have been alive (do you know anyone who was alive during the Great Depression and is alive today?). But doom-and-gloom negativity about the economy is a great marketing approach. It hits some button people have, gets them to buy gold or whatever other paranoid nonsense will save them from the Coming Economic Collapse.

I know where you're coming from, but here in the states a lot of real people are struggling to afford real goods and services that they need to stay alive: housing, healthcare, education, etc. I wouldn't say economic anxiety is just 'nonsense fueled by conspiracy theorists.'

I'm not saying economic anxiety is nonsense.

I'm saying scenarios of imminent collapse of the economy are nonsense.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#287
post #91
post #41

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Are you practicing number 5? If so, great job!

not necessarily - he could just be invoking the "do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity" rule It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.

> It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.

I wholly agree with this. There's something deeply insightful, subtle and difficult about recognizing one's own control in a situation. I've thought about this a lot in the last year. The way I phrase it right now is: people don't have a choice until they realize they have one.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#288
Please add lose yourself in your world of unrealistic fantasy. Watch porn, a lot of it. Allow yourself to get consumed by it. See people as objects. Then watch more porn.

Start gambling, with your money first, then with other peoples' money. You are entitled to that money even though it's theirs. Society owes you a lot already.

Even better, combine the two, do online strip poker. Do anything but face the often less colourful reality.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#290
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a value because the more people you've been with the less likely you'll stay with the one you have.

a) You are conflating rape with sex. Why would being raped be the same thing, at all?

b) Everyone I've seen talk about this has been referring to charts showing increased non-marital partners correlates to divorce, but you are talking about pre-marital partners, where divorce rates actually start going down after a few partners.

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