Tech Lead from YouTube just published this about the FB employee suicide last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI Posting because, if allegations are true, it only reinforces my belief that our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them.
>our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them
Seeing what people in other countries go through, willingly, sacrificing for their families and persevering in relative poverty, I can't help but feel that sentiments like these come off as weak and entitled. If anything it shows that life in the first world is too comfortable, which understandably makes it hard to appreciate how easy we have it, even in the "roughest" of tech jobs.
> And the information revealed that people in crisis regularly turn their pets over to an animal shelter. I don't know why I assumed they were visiting the animals at the shelter to try to find comfort when I read the headline. The idea of planning to surrender your beloved pet before committing suicide is heartbreaking.
> to try to find comfort
That's what I jumped to as well, the reality really is heartbreaking
One point about suicide prevention that I think deserves a little more mention: people who survive an attempt typically do not ever commit suicide [1]. Lifetime survival rates range across studies, but they hover around 90%. Of course, 10% is much higher than the general population rate for lifetime suicide completion rate, which is more like 0.01%, and things are complicated by severity of attempt (you’re more likel…
I've said it before, but really, assault rifles and bump stocks and what not are the complete wrong thing to focus on. Long guns kill practically _nobody_ compared to handguns. It's the best compromise ever: ban handguns, keep long guns fully legal. 2nd amendment supporters wanting to "prevent tyranny" and hunters still have their long guns, homicides and suicides (which comprise the overwhelming majority of gun deat…
An uncle of mine blew his brains out a couple of years ago after a decade of struggling with mental health issues. I used to get so enraged at him for abandoning his family in that way. For some reason, your post really brought home to me that maybe what he was seeking was a way out, that he couldn't live with what the person he had become was putting his family through and that maybe he did it because to him that wa…
Our current world mostly doesn't have effective solutions for mental health issues. Given that fact, it's easy to feel like death is the only possible escape. I know a few things that can be helpful, though it's still a hard row to hoe. But saying I know anything useful often just gets me called crazy by internet strangers -- just more evidence that our own personal hells are all too often compounded by other people.…
"Our current world mostly doesn't have effective solutions for mental health issues. "
This is not true. "Mental health issues" may be a broad field. I guess US prisons are full of such people, some beyond repair. But I know people who got hospitalized because of health issues and they are doing quite well today.
There is help. There are medications and things can normalize.
I have a friend who developed mental issues and, as far as I know, is roaming homeless in Canada. But this must not be the rule.
More heartbreaking would be if the pets of these suicide owners die of starvation over a period of terrifying, lonely days. It's more heartwarming, if anything, that a person who wishes to end their suffering still holds empathy and respect for the living.
People who feel their lives are so terrible it isn't worth going on are usually not monsters. It's usually someone else in their lives that is a monster. They usually just have too many problems, not enough support and have spent too many years wrestling with it without resolution. If they were monsters, they would probably be planning someone else's death, not their own. It seems all too common that people around th…
It can also be not entirely or to any degree selfish. Depending on the particular state one is in, the world can be like a place where one is only causing harm, no good. Friends and family suffer because of oneself, one is betraying work and society and one is also constantly disappointing the once beloved pet. It really can be an act of "whelp if everyone is better of without me, then...", it can be an altruistic thought in a really twisted way that stems from a highly disturbed sense of selfworth. I have been there, and it was not all about me, I was genuinely convinced I would make the world a worse place in every way, that every person loving me is fooled etc.
If you aren't familiar with the topic, I think you would find discussions around euthanasia interesting - a lot of it centers on when suicide is an acceptable individual choice.
Yes I do find those discussions interesting I was actually scared the first time I went to Switzerland because I was wondering if that was a low key way to off someone
Turned out to be classic American paranoia and I’ve really loosened that up from hanging out with Europeans of the generational wealthier variety. No care in the world!
You seriously think a bunch of citizens with long guns is going to be able to prevent tyranny by the greatest military force the world has ever known?
The most obnoxious part about this comment is how sure you think you are. The important questions to ask are, how does the civilian population split? How do the police, the military split? What exactly do you think civil war looks like? The idea that you have all the answers and some how guns are ineffective, at the very least in hurting those who want to oppress, is so laughable and appropriate for HN. What is going…
> What is going on in HK right now? You think that would happen if they were armed?
No, they'd be dead. Armed conflict with the PLA with no artillery or air power?
(Street protest relies on some unspoken norms that police won't indiscriminately fire on and kill protestors, precisely because the protestors aren't armed. The whole point is to stop short of actual deadly urban combat. This is partly why Tianamen was so shocking; while it's difficult to know what actually happened, it's clear that army units were sent in and simply murdered a large number of people who were carrying out an unarmed protest.)
It's not. The idea that a rag-tag group of citizens with a stockpile of AR-15s could challenge "tyranny" by fighting a modern US military is laughable.
Vietnam beat the US. The Taliban is beating the US. The US was founded when farmers used guerrilla warfare tactics against the current world superpower. South America guerrillas are unbeatable. It's really your position that is untenable.
Vietnam was backed by China and the USSR, the Taliban by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Their most effective weapons tended strongly toward IEDs and RPGs rather than longarms.
Tech Lead from YouTube just published this about the FB employee suicide last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI Posting because, if allegations are true, it only reinforces my belief that our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them.
>our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them Seeing what people in other countries go through, willingly, sacrificing for their families and persevering in relative poverty, I can't help but feel that sentiments like these come off as weak and entitled. If anything it shows that life in the first world is too comfor…
A white collar job can become a mental torture chamber if you are surrounded by bad people. There is an abundance of exploitation, bullying, futility, and lack of fulfillment in current tech culture and very little support structure.
You seriously think a bunch of citizens with long guns is going to be able to prevent tyranny by the greatest military force the world has ever known?
The most obnoxious part about this comment is how sure you think you are. The important questions to ask are, how does the civilian population split? How do the police, the military split? What exactly do you think civil war looks like? The idea that you have all the answers and some how guns are ineffective, at the very least in hurting those who want to oppress, is so laughable and appropriate for HN. What is going…
> How do the police, the military split?
This is exactly the question that makes civilian arms stockpiles utterly irrelevant.
If anything, a well-ish-equipped rebellion would make it easier for the government to avoid that split: "kill them or they will kill you" is the oldest trick in the book for keeping an army fighting on your side.