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Chris Seaton has died

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Re: Chris Seaton has died

#171

Post by mattgreenrocks »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #85
theGnuMe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common actually. Phil Stutz (a famous psychiatrist) calls it the Snapshot. Basically the Snapshot is the misbelief that if we achieve certain things we will be happy. It's a form of wishful thinking. Instead you have to focus on and enjoy the journey because basic reality is pain, uncertainty and constant work. There's a Netflix documentary on Stutz (called "Stutz") with Jonah Hill that is quite good alt…

As someone who suffers dysthymia and occasional major depression on top of it, I'll never stop being grateful that I figured this out early on in life. When I was 11, I got my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. A couple years after that point I grew disillusioned with continuing to practice martial arts altogether because I realized that the achievement didn't make me happy. In some ways, it made my depression worse at the t…

Music is pretty much my primary hobby at this point for the exact reason: it has a near-infinite skill ceiling, highly creative, improvisational, and it can be both a private and public pursuit. It is the ultimate grounding to the present moment, and it provides very good feedback when you start drifting out of it. It demands a very high degree of awareness and rewards you accordingly. Truly magical.

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#172

Post by Barrin92 »

bluerooibos wrote: post #111
swader999 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outpouring of love in the replies on that thread. It is tough to comprehend how that wasn't enough to prevent this.

Yeah. The guy had what appears to be a pretty great life. Looking through twitter, there's photos of him with his kids and wife. I just can't comprehend how someone can arrive at the decision to commit suicide, especially when you have a wife and children, and to then tweet about it. The human mind is an odd thing.

What's always resonated with me is David Foster Wallace's description, thinking of it as a decision is not the right way to look at it.

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#173

Post by renewiltord »

Damn, I hated this guy's HN comments but he seems to have been a fine person who people loved. I probably come off the same way to everyone else here, but the people around me love me.

Makes me wonder if this is a property of the interaction mechanism. Let me set an unacceptable maxprocrast and leave this place alone.

RIP my fellow dude.

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#174

Post by rdrake98 »

GrahamSeaton wrote: post #136
ngd wrote: post #82

When I was 15 I had to move high school after the death of my mother. I started to socialise at school and joined the investment club. It was a tough time for me and I desperately wanted to make friends and fit in. I wasn’t really into investing but a young man by the name of Chris Seaton was building their website and I loved computers so I wanted to help. Chris taught me how to program, first HTML websites, then PH…

As a teenager, Chris (or Kit as some of his family knew him) wrote a computer programme, in his bedroom in Chandlers Ford, he called Password Safe. RIP Kit

So sorry for the loss you must be feeling. I met and talked to Chris just once, after a talk he gave in London, and found him utterly delightful as well as lucid on all things technical. Blessings and comfort to all who knew and loved him.

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#175

Post by skissane »

WhackyIdeas wrote: post #69
starkd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that is very seldom the case. Depression is cyclical. There are moments of joy and content. I think it speaks to a loss of hope in society at large.

There are moments of joy and content, but for myself I always personally know that hell is just over the hill. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy things. But I suppose there comes a time when some people just get too tired of it all. I also personally believe the act of taking your own life is utterly courageous… every cell in our body’s are designed to want to live. Pushing fast fear of the ultimate unknown is something els…

> There are moments of joy and content, but for myself I always personally know that hell is just over the hill.

Is the belief that "hell is just over the hill" rational? Or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe that belief is in itself one of the major causes of that "hell"–and, despite thinking that you "know" that, not genuine knowledge at all, rather a harmful delusion

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#176

Post by benatkin »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #167
moloch-hai wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.

Lol? this is a widely understood perspective.

I think maybe 5% of the time it isn't about love but the other 95% it is. A lot of people really are missing love.

The Netflix Series 13 Reasons Why seems pretty unrealistic except maybe it represents some unusual cases. In that series there are clearly people who cared about her but she was missing the caring of certain people (and I don't fault people for feeling bad because one particular person or a few doesn't like them). A lot of people don't have much loving attention at all though.

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#177

Post by khazhoux »

swader999 wrote: post #91
munificent wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many mental illnesses, depression interferes with your perceptions. It's not that that love "wasn't enough", it's that a person deep in depression can't even accurately see or feel that love.

Yeah and it is especially hard for high achievers to ask for help or even consider that they should ask for help. I think its completely foreign to them.

Citation needed

Sorry, not trying to be a jerk, but unless there is actual comparative evidence, I don't think one can just assert that high achievers struggle in getting help any more than others.

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#179

Post by skissane »

WhackyIdeas wrote: post #81
brigandish wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of hope is the real killer, that's why it's so important to give a depressed person hope. Not optimism, hope.

You can’t give a depressed person hope though. And even if you could box hope up, how would you make it last? At the end of the day, depression is a chemical imbalance and hope isn’t going realistically fix that - maybe that depression is a result of brain injury, like a nasty bump on the head that has permanently damaged the way the brain works… Depression is a long way off being solved.

> At the end of the day, depression is a chemical imbalance

"chemical imbalance" is a myth – https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/ssris-chemical-imbalanc...

In fact, I think it is a very harmful myth. When people become falsely convinced that their depression is due to a "chemical imbalance", it encourages them to see their current mental state as something fixed and unchangeable – and then that false perspective helps to sustain and worsen their depression

Re: Chris Seaton has died

#180

Post by rdrake98 »

wnolens wrote: post #102
pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This part had something about it that stuck out in light of the news (first just a bit, but then it kept going): "My fantastic job with Shopify meets my physiological and safety needs, and the job is rewarding and intellectually stimulating (not many people get to work on their PhD work for so long with a team they’ve built around them and I’m very grateful.) But then what? What are you doing to feel alive and to kno…

Indeed, he seemed to have all the things that generally is believed to combat that trend towards darkness. However, I recall my absolute lowest and the first time I entertained the thought to end it, the 'it' was specifically what it felt like to be in my body. It wasn't a matter of self-worth, it was to stop pain. The strongest reason I could come up with to wait for it to pass was the pain it would cause my mother.…

"The strongest reason I could come up with to wait for it to pass was the pain it would cause my mother."

You got hold of the right reason. And sometimes we need to hold on to that reason - the pain we would cause to others - for dear live. So to speak.

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