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Ask HN: Why keep living?

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Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#81
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't live in Silicon Valley where everyone has a six figure salary and the solution for feeling bad is to see a doctor. So many of the reasons why I don't stem from money issues, but also time issues (I'll probably never get days off, vacation time, etc. at my current gig, and that eats up 11-13 hours per day including travel because of the bus system here).

You asked for advice. Seeking medical attention for a medical condition is good advice. What you do with that advice is up to you. You're free to ignore that advice. But you shouldn't dismiss it for bogus reasons; just be honest and say that you don't want to see a doctor.

I'm sorry you think the undisclosed circumstances of my life are bogus and that I am a dishonest person. From a throwaway account to hide my identity, there's no possible defense I can mount against an accusation of dishonesty. But my circumstances aren't as simple as "do I want to see a doctor? [y/n]"

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#82
Life is truly miraculous.

Being able to breathe the air or look up at the sky is truly remarkable. Yet, many people overlook the amazing every day because we have expectations of how life should go.

In our anticipation of the future or recollections of the past we never quite nestle into the present unless we are fortunate enough to realize that true understanding and true contentment come from within.

We all have this amazing experience we are sharing. Life is, indeed, tumultuous, it is not always easy or straightforward, but we all know there is a "better" someplace. That is, generally, what keeps us all going, if we are not with the luxury to coast.

Know that no matter how much you agonize and suffer, the experiences you have are rich and valuable, because you can one day use this to help someone else. We are each like a universe unto ourselves in a way -- we each have (for the most part) a visual field, a sound sphere, a taste, smell, and tactile sense field of sensory immersion. Even if you are hurting a lot, know that things change. This is the truth.

Know also, that to be able to prevent or relieve someone else's suffering is not only valuable to them, but valuable to you, because we are all connected in deep ways, many of which are not apparent to our "thinking" minds.

Before you do anything rash, I would encourage you to try and learn as much as you can about life and its myriad expressions. Go to a nursing home and volunteer for an afternoon. Go to a hospital and hang out with some people with cancer, or even just with a simple boo-boo. Your heart might open, and the truth and beauty of a life lived for others might dawn in your mind.

Really, our greatest purpose, if I may be so bold as to lay claim to one, is to help the brilliance of creativity, joy, compassion, and openness grow and illuminate our world.

Perhaps you have noticed that your attitude and willingness to open up to other people influences how you feel, and this is no coincidence. Look at your own body -- cells pass nutrients and signals along to other cells, and in the end "you" (although where "i" or "you" truly dwell is a deep question) are able to walk around and get some coffee. Something as simple as your afternoon tea takes a chorus of millions upon millions of cells coordinating selflessly in order to happen.

Life is not about monetary success or fame or gain. These lumps come and go, they coagulate and they pass, it is not the truest our life aims can be. Certainly, these can sometimes ease our burdens, and make service easier, but true satisfaction will come when your heart aligns, even in the slightest, with the heartbeat of the universe (multiverse)...

To spend your days contemplating the greatest and deepest impulse of the cosmos in its infinite and unbound expression would not be a waste of your time. It would, in fact, be a great gain, for yourself and others.

Happiness is not a condition, it is a practice. Since we are all connected, the more you aspire to helping others lift up their end of the "net" so-to-speak, the more you yourself will rise. Your opportunity for the most sublime and wonderful unfolding is in this life. Our potential as humans is unlimited. Aspire to the greatest benefit for all, and your arrows of action shall not miss their mark. For every little bit can grow and grow.

Knowing that we all suffer, that it in inherent to life, and that we all wish to be free of suffering is only the beginning. "It is better to travel well than to arrive."

Plant your seeds and help your garden grow.

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#83
Get up, get ready, have breakfast, and start writing. Write in your journal / diary every day (it has to be pen / pencil and paper, not keyboard-based online journal; not sure why it works that way). Even if you think there is nothing to write / say; you will be very surprised once the pen touches the paper. Then take a long walk. This combination helps a lot. It draws out the thoughts that may be under the radar of your consciousness and whose expression provides relief.

Summary : Write. Long walk.

All the best, man. I can only imagine what State-persecution does to a person.

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#84
post #83

Get up, get ready, have breakfast, and start writing. Write in your journal / diary every day (it has to be pen / pencil and paper, not keyboard-based online journal; not sure why it works that way). Even if you think there is nothing to write / say; you will be very surprised once the pen touches the paper. Then take a long walk. This combination helps a lot. It draws out the thoughts that may be under the radar of…

> it has to be pen / pencil and paper, not keyboard-based online journal

Does anyone know why this is? I've seen this sentiment quite a few times now.

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#85
If you've got even a little bit of love to give to the world, bud, keep giving, keep living. In time, it comes back.

But don't just rely on Hacker News. Seek out others, in the flesh, face-to-face. Get some help. Don't try to feel okay by yourself. There's nothing wrong with feeling like shit. But there are a lot of people out there who've been through what you're going through and who want to help. Find someone objective to talk to -- a therapist, or a support group -- and keep coming back to them until you get to the bottom of what's going on.

As for me -- my girlfriend of many years is gone. I'm alone, working a job I don't like, living in a fairly expensive town with no friends who live close by. Believe me when I say that I've felt like calling it a done deal. I keep going because there are people out there who've invested in me and who care, because I have a dog who needs me to walk him every damned day, because I do have good people in my life, because I do have work to do even if I don't always like it, and because I've been alive long enough to know that, given time, the wheel turns 'round.

I won't tell you to cheer up. That's bullshit advice. I will tell you to dig deep, find something that matters to you, and stick around.

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#86
You may be suffering from depression caused by a neurochemical imbalance. My daughter similarly suffered. It took a frustratingly long time to get everything sorted out but they eventually determined she had a neurochemical imbalance and then it took a frustratingly long time to develop a chemotherapy that worked.

That was a little over a two years ago. Now you wouldn't recognize her because she's so happy and vibrant - very far from when she was found unconscious alongside the road as a result of an attempted suicide and taken to the hospital by a Good Samaritan.

But it hasn't been easy and she couldn't have done it herself. You need friends and family to help you through this and you need to be brutally honest with them. Mental health is the least understood health issue. You're correct that thinking happy thoughts won't make the depression go away. You're correct that thinking positive thoughts won't make the depression go away. You're sick and you need medical help. It's no different from having cancer or an abscessed tooth - you're sick and you need medical assistance, and you need a patient advocate because mental healthcare in the United States is appalling.

Good luck and remember you're not alone. Many people have beat this illness and you can too!

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#87
I never post on here, but as someone who has struggled with these same feelings since childhood, I thought I'd offer my perspective.

I've come to look at it like this: depression is like an Instagram filter. (Wait, just...bear with me.) Go take a picture of a tree outside with Instagram. Now lower the saturation, pump up the shadows, add vignette edges. You'll end up with something that looks like a goth album cover. Is it still an accurate picture of the tree? Yes...but you've chosen which aspects of it to focus on. You've given it an emotional coloring.

Being depressed is like having that Instagram filter on your entire worldview. You're not delusional, you're not just imagining that the world sucks...but your ability to see the full spectrum of things has been limited. And the worst part is, you can't control when that filter gets slammed down on you.

Sometimes it's situational. Here's a hypothetical for you: if somebody showed up at your door tomorrow with a check for a billion dollars and the deed to your own private island where you could go be alone or be surrounded only by people you wanted around you, do you think you would still be depressed? If not, then you know the answer: go find a billion dollars and a private island, obviously. (Go find Peter Thiel and hit him up, he's into big money and private islands these days, I hear.)

But in all seriousness, if your depression seems tied to circumstance, never forget that circumstance can change, either on its own or by your own effort of will. Unless you are actually in prison right now, you can almost always walk away from where you are and find somewhere else to be. Someone else to be, in some sense.

But you have to be honest with yourself and willing to admit that maybe you're not where you're supposed to be, even if you've spent your whole life headed in this direction. Maybe you'd be better served working as a bartender in some roadhouse down on the Gulf Coast, or living in a shit apartment doing sculpture and working part-time as a barista just to afford rent and ramen noodles. I know people who are perfectly content with the idea of never being rich or successful, but just doing what they want and not worrying about whether anybody else gives a shit at all. (I'm becoming one of them myself.)

And there's always the possibility that your depression is, at some point in the stack, hardware-based -- that you've got a chemical imbalance in your head meat. And listen, as a longtime freelancer and contractor who's been doing the startup dance for a real long goddamn time now, I feel you on the medical thing -- hell, I wrote a book about going to Juarez, Mexico to get my wisdom teeth fixed because it was cheaper to do it there, including travel expenses, than to get it done at the dentist down the street. And that shit can be tricky in America, especially if you're not actually indigent but can't afford to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on doctors and medicine. (I think your income level at that point is legally defined as "between a rock and a hard place".)

But there are resources. If you live in an urban area there are almost certainly free mental health resources. You can go and sit in line and find out if you qualify. It sucks and it's boring and it can make you feel like a pathetic crazy person, but never forget: that's not about you, that's about the way the system is set up in this country.

Or look at it another way: if you had diabetes, or a weak heart or your legs stopped working, wouldn't you do whatever it took to figure out why it was happening to you and how to stop it, even if it meant sitting in some overcrowded janky-ass waiting room for a day?

You've got a potentially life-threatening condition that may or may not be caused by bad wiring. If there's a way to fix it, fix it.

Because here's the thing, sir or madam, and please, please take this from someone who has spent more than one night staring at a razor blade or a handful of pills: this is a fucking glorious universe we live in. Really. The moments when depression leaves me entirely are the moments when I'm just alive in the world, looking at how ridiculous and amazing it is. I don't kill myself because I'm not done with the awesome. I'm not done with eating the food and seeing the cities and sleeping with wonderful ladies and watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold and listening to all the goddamn rock and roll I possibly can and just finding nice, quiet places to stare up at the Milky Way and think about whether or not this is all just one great big algorithm, playing out over billions of years.

We live in a mystery, homes, and you'll never come to the end of it. But isn't that worth something?

I hope my advice helps, or at least puts some perspective on things. I don't know you and probably never will, but I'm rooting for you. You can handle this. Don't give up. As the writer Neil Gaiman once put it -- and this is maybe the best advice any human ever gave another -- you don't have to stay anywhere forever.

Vaya con Dios.

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#88
Life is about the journey, not the destination. I'll give you a quote that inspired me lately, I found it somehow after trying to track down a similar Interstellar quote. I like this one better as it describes my nature, that is probably similar to many other people's nature here, and maybe you if you identify in the hacker spirit. The quote is, I think, a better version of a West Wing quote and the person is responding to someone asking what business do we have to continue in our exploration of space:

"But you go to the moon 'cause it's next. We came out of the cave, went over the hill, crossed the ocean, pioneered a continent and took to the heavens. We were meant to be explorers. Explorers, builders and protectors."

I feel I owe it to all the people that preceded us from the cavemen to Einstein; from the strong to the intelligent, from the brave and daring to the prudent caretaker, we owe it to the people that innovated and broke with the past and those that helped preserve it. I feel we owe them to keep pushing forward and upwards! This is our nature.

Take on an ambitious goal and share it with others, or join someone else's goal and try to enjoy the journey. If you find your way whatever it may be you'll look forward to tomorrow!

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#89

Call this number right now. Right now. 1 (800) 273-8255

I will not be calling any strange number until I've found a way to make truly anonymous phone calls (e.g. something in the realm of RedPhone + onion routing like Tor).

Use a pay-phone or buy a burner phone with a pre-paid card

Re: Ask HN: Why keep living?

#90
Find a way to spend time with kids. I find kids are consistently better at knowing how to "be" than adults, and they can help you reset how to perceive reality.

In my shirt pocket, I always carry stickers from a game I'm working on. Whenever I bump into a parent wrangling kids, I offer the parent stickers with this line, "In case these are of some use."

I do not explain they're from my game, nor do they have any branding on them. It's not about that. It's about making a kid happy with a sticker, and it works.

They do all kinds of things with them, from sticking them on themselves to immediately creating stories behind them. The good parents usually remind their kids to "thank the nice man for the stickers" and then they proceed to be good kids and deliver perfectly adorable "thank you"'s.

I've seen and done a lot of things, and it'll sound trite, but not nothing can compare to making a kid smile.

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