If you're serious about the world forgetting you then why did you write this post?
I'm a shut-in. This is my story
71–80 of 239 posts
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#72"My name would be Kenneth Luke Erickson. I'd be male. I'd like blue. I would be a Gemini. I would be Christian. They'd chop off some of my penis so I'd never forget that last one." There's a common misconception that circumcision, for Christians, is a religious ritual or a religious requirement. In fact, it's just the opposite. Many Christian denominations (e.g. Catholicism) specifically DISALLOW circumcision, if it'…
The problem is the use of the word Christian. There are many different types each with vastly different views. When making a statement like that people need to be more specific.
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...now be the best person in other people's lives. ...Why? I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one s…
Hi Sir, Thanks for spelling out the truth. For those who are young and impressionable, listen to this man. Let me paraphrase his two points, 1) Being a nice person will not only earn you any affection you crave but the opposite, contempt for being an agreeable person. 2) Professional help is an oxymoron. Psychiatrists waste money and time. In my humble opinion, fundamental human problems involve three things, social…
Thanks. I have just one little quibble: if you want help, a good counselor, therapist, or psychologist can be invaluable. They can see you in ways very different from how you see yourself, and they can communicate with you in ways that nobody else close to you can. So, if you're still at the stage where you want some help, then do go and talk to a few professionals. You might be pleasantly surprised.
On the other hand, finding a good professional takes money and energy and time, and many people lack one of the three. Commanding them to spend money, energy, or time isn't likely to make them do something they can't do.
If you've reached the stage where you no longer want help, then having random people on the internet tell you to go to a professional doesn't do you any good.
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#74I have a logistical question: how/what do you eat?
I presume he orders online. I'm not sure what it's like where you are but here I order online from the largest supermarkets (Tesco, Asda etc.) and have it delivered to my door the next day for a £3-5 delivery charge. It's pretty commonplace.
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#75>Over concerned humans must cause at least some percentage of suicides. Someone needs to compile the stats and do a TED talk stat. Now that's an interesting hypothesis. I have seen a study on how insufficient parental attention increases the risk of suicide in teenagers but not this. Edit: searching for "overprotection and suicide" ("overprotection" is the best keyword I could come up with; I did the search without t…
England has some suicide and deliberate self harm research done by "University of Oxford". (Uh, that's not "Oxford University" or any of the colleges.) You could noodle through their website?
(http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/)
You might remember the reports a few years ago about cortisol levels in children at nurseries, compared to children at home? People said that cortisol was a stress hormone, and thus it's bad to be in the brains of children, and thus putting children in nursery is bad because it causes cortisol to be released. But other interpretations are that children need to learn to regulate their emotions, and that lack of cortisol means over-protection and lack of a chance to learn how to regulate emotion.
Sorry about the lousy links, it's the best I can do at the moment.
(http://www.parentingscience.com/daycare-centers.html)
(http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18633-mom-and-dad-stop...)
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#76I've been struggling with overcommitment for years, too. It's caused a lot of pain and it's a very serious thing. Like you, it makes me tend toward isolation and it... well, it hurts.
"Before long I'm committed to a shit ton of things and I am so stressed out that I cant focus long enough to fake my way through life. Inevitably I implode and disappoint everyone I had commitments to."
First, there's a ton of positivity in your writing, because you're recognizing that overcommitment is really bringing you and (even better) you're taking responsibility for correcting this.
This part concerned me a bit:
"I'm taking all the skills I have learned from learning and applying them to my psyche. I'm going to re-build and re-form my emotional centers from the ground up. I'm going to take my unhealthy mental state and refactor it into a functional vibrant self. I'm re-life-ing"
This is very ambitious!
Not all ambitious goals are a path to overcommitment, but are you being very careful that this ambitious goal won't wind up being yet another overcommitment (leading to yet more pain) on your part?
Perhaps you could set up meaningful milestones along the way? For example, you could count the number of times you stick to a 4-day or 5-day work week each month. Even if the "reward" is just a big green checkmark on the wall calendar, that can be really gratifying.
Best wishes!
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...now be the best person in other people's lives. ...Why? I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one s…
I don't appreciate some self-loathing bitch drafting on my thoughts for misanthropy points. You know what sucks worse than trying to find competent professional medical attention in America? Blowing your head off with a gun and leaving your decomposing meat for someone to find and clean up. Those are the stakes here. This author wrote a novella about watching his life reduce to nothing, then wrapped it in a wordpress…
Of all the people replying to this thread, your responses are filled with the most love. Your anger shows that you care - and I don't think you're too off-base with your assessment, either.
I think I can help you with your message in some small way by noting that social integration is not good because it's 'normal'. It's good because it's vitally necessary for survival. Human society is entirely synthetic, artificial. We are born depending on others. The doctor. The hospital. Our mothers. We are raised depending on others: the teacher, our classmates, our siblings. We live in structures built by others eating food grown by others.
The interesting contradiction here is between Ken's desire to make money and his desire to withdraw from the world. These are totally incompatible desires. One of them has to give. And given that 'not making money' means, essentially, starvation and death, it suggests that perhaps he should rethink the normalcy of withdrawing so completely from the world.
I would only add this argument to yours, not replace it. Thanks for your comments.
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your first paragraph. We're really not very different from one another, but a craving for identity causes us to seek or invent distinguishing features, which have a way of turning into traps. The pattern seems to be that one spends adolescence and early adulthood acquiring this "wardrobe", then later the task becomes to shed it. That is not easy, because by when you get to shedding-time you've lost the a…
fascinating. Are there studies done on this, or is this a well known developmental phenomenon?
Empirical studies? I run across the occasional one that seems tangentially relevant, but haven't kept a list. I feel somewhat skeptical about the possibility of studying that level of experience in a formal experimental way. What I'm saying comes from personal experience, discussion with others, and assorted reading.
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#79I think you're wrong on one point: you constantly repeat how different and strange you are from everyone else. You're really not. As you mentioned at one point: you didn't want to go out and play, but the teacher forced you to do so. This is very common behavior, and teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play. Huge amount of people go through similar experiences to yours. Others start to lapse into an…
I agree with your first paragraph. We're really not very different from one another, but a craving for identity causes us to seek or invent distinguishing features, which have a way of turning into traps. The pattern seems to be that one spends adolescence and early adulthood acquiring this "wardrobe", then later the task becomes to shed it. That is not easy, because by when you get to shedding-time you've lost the a…
Is this why travel is so important? It forces you to have a barebones "wardrobe" and it helps you down the identity-building path?
Re: I'm a shut-in. This is my story
#80I wish there was a web community for shutins like myself who would like to no longer be shutins. It's definitely not Grouper - sorry, "ending loneliness" doesn't mean finding a girlfriend and being judged on your tagged Facebook photos (as someone who is actually lonely, I have no photos tagged, and I assume that's why Grouper never admitted me. You have to be unlonely to join Grouper, in reality.). The only people I…
Don't feel too bad about not being eligible for Grouper. An [introverted, self-proclaimed lonely] friend of mine did one a few weeks ago and said he had nothing in common with any of the women except for one that also worked in tech. She ended up being the one everyone was pining after and because lonely/introverted people aren't the ones that are going to strike up conversations (especially if it means competing against others to do so), he ended up going home and feeling pretty bummed about the whole situation.
Are they really targeting "lonely" people? I thought their model was more about getting people who wanted to do that sort of thing out and doing it without the planning. If they're trying to target people who prefer staying in and playing board games, their homepage does a terrible job selling that.