Black and white thinking. Its like you are saying everyone who is married must be in a loving and happy marriage. Do you understand the point I am making?

Yup. Not everyone is happy so suicide is an answer. Don't have an issue with that. Dont think suicide is wrong in and of itself and think sometimes people are right to do it. EvilSteve points out some good examples.


None of this proves your point about life. That the logical conclusion to life is to commit suicide. If you insert sometimes your black and white thinking might clear up.

ok cool

Why unknowingly?

Whatever reason they may give for committing suicide, like I lost my job, my wife left me or whatever, its a facade. The real problem is life itself, the whole catastrophe. I believe from my own experience, is that life is something you never asked for, but yet are condemned to do something about it, even if its to do nothing and just observe. Its a double bind that causes oscillating, people must do something, and they get more and more involved with life, get into more and more trouble, they get into relationships, they get into debt, more and more mess. Then they wake up one day and ask themselves "why the hell am I doing this for?"........no reason at all, because from the get go life itself hangs over you like a great monster, you fight it you lose, you get involved in it you get tangled up in it, ignore it and you feel disconnected and fearful of it

You get nothing from life, there is nothing to be obtained, nothing to be gained, at best it can be described as a distraction for a short time until death finally gets you.

I'd say that you're incorrectly identifying the problem. The problem is not life itself as you say; it's pain, disconnection, depression, etc.

You can't think about solutions or the possibility of a solution unless you can zero in on what really is the issue at the root.

If your claim were true, then we should expect happy people to be committing suicide just as much as sad and depressed people.

Also, there are two serious problems with your claim. First, you are generalizing from the suicidal impulse of a single case--your own--to the claim that everyone who has suicidal impulses have the same motive as you. That seems completely unwarranted. Second, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem like an unhappy and depressed person. Why should we think that people who are happy and not depressed are sufficiently similar to you that they should have a similarly dejected view of life?

Well this selfishness you display is very typical for the depressed. The need for the world to revolve around you and your view of it. The genuine truth is that people around don't really know what you think and that people for the most part are honest. In all likelihood you have slightly abnormal (though common enough) brain chemistry: Like a person on crutches is somewhat ill-equipped to progress up a stairway, your brain chemistry makes you ill equipped at escaping a depressive state.

It is in itself not the end of the world. A lot of people learn techniques to master it just fine, such as physical exercise (which will give a natural boost in dopamine) and focus, regular sleeping and eating (the last three which make mood swings less severe). This wouldn't work for the ones with the worst cases of clinical depression, but the mere fact that you even bother writing on this board is a pretty good sign you are not one of them.

However, there are no words of motivation I could offer in this direction that you wouldn't see as evidence that you are smarter than the world and able to see through the veil. So I won't bother with that.

Sometimes I think the difference between your post and orp's reply is just simply life-variance. The single spermatozoa made a left turn instead of a right, and that made all the difference.

I know somebody must know what I'm talking about.

What I'm saying is that whatever reason someone will give is in fact just life itself, lost your job.....meh! that's life, wife cheated on you....meh! that's life, lost all your money....meh! that's life, that's what you get. You can't escape suffering or pain, so when it happens we say that's life. So my claim is that life itself takes many versions of pain and you can't get rid of the suffering, so when someone commits suicide they did it for a "that's life reason" which includes every reason you could ever give. So I say from that view point life is the problem.

To your second point, yeah people are happy but what are they happy about would be my question? You might say family, ok cool, so they cling to their family and if they ever should die this person might become depressed. So from my view point is what are people happy about? Things are always changing, always fleeting. If you cling to "something" and it makes you happy but it gets taken away are you not unhappy, if you say no we can still be happy, then again what are you happy about?

In my experience people run around like headless chickens trying to find "something" to be happy about, like a kids bedroom, toys played with for 5mins but then chucked into the corner and unto the next toy. The make more and more mess. From my point of view they are not happy at all, they just have a facade, something to keep them distracted, and if it was ever to be taken away they might also be left in a state of depression and sadness.

So to answer your question, I believe that people don't take my dejected view of life, because they keep themselves distracted with temporarily illusions, take away the illusion and you might see what I see.

I wish I could paste a flow chart, but words might do.

The problem for me is I don't know what I want to do with life because I never asked for it, and apparently only I can decide what I want to do. Double Bind

That's life (never asked for slightly abnormal brain chemistry, doomed to do something about it, don't know what to do about it).

Well, you could have been far more unlucky and ended up blind, deaf or quadriplegic. Your situation (in all likelihood) is by comparison fairly easy to rectify, if you are willing to invest a little effort.

you are under the misapprehension that there is a you that was given the gift of life, that there is something or someone that is living life, making choices.

There is the thought "I need to do something with my life" ( which is most likely a product of your childhood and societal conditioning) , and other thoughts which support this idea, which bring up reasons why its true. Notice what happens when I ask "Is it true that you need to do something with your life", notice how loads of thoughts and ideas come up to show that its true. Imagine if you didnt believe this thought, or that you gave it no weight. Would you be happier and more relaxed if you didnt believe the thought "I need to do something with my life"?

This is inconsistent with what you said before. There you said this:

"Whatever reason they may give for committing suicide, like I lost my job, my wife left me or whatever, its a facade. The real problem is life itself, the whole catastrophe."

You start by claiming that it is not the particular problems that cause suicide, but rather that fact of life, that we live in this vale of tears. But now you are acknowledging that these particular problems are the cause of suicide (at least, in some cases), but that they should be understood as part of the problem of life itself (i.e. not as just a facade). If by "life" we mean everything that happens to us and the things that make us what we are, then of course I'll agree that "life" is what causes suicide--"life" causes everything that we do, including our living full, contented lives.

Second, there is no more reason to say that life is suffering than to say that life is pleasure. We experience both, with some experiencing more of one than the other. So you say that we can't escape suffering and pain, and I think that is true, but I also think we can't escape happiness and pleasure. And while lost your job, wife, etc. is part of life, so is getting a promotion, falling in love, and so on.

See, you think that the happiness of others is an illusion because you are depressed. For you, only the negative emotions seem real or justified. But that is just as much an "illusion" as the experience of a happy person. Emotions are not things that are in the objects or events of the world around us. Rather, they are our affective responses to those objects, events, ideas, and so on. As such, they don't need justification, and can't be illusory (what are they pretending to be but themselves?). Sure, we can think we are happy when we are not, but we can't have an illusion of happiness (i.e. the experience or feeling of happiness when we are not).

Why does it matter?

Look, no one is guaranteed happiness. I am not claiming that there is a way to live your life such that you can be certain that you will always be happy. But that doesn't mean that happiness, when it is there, is not real. This should be super obvious.

Here's what you should actually do: realize that your depression has made you incompetent to make these judgements about other people's happiness or lack thereof.

This is what I mean

Very good point. I totally agree, they are responses to those objects and events of which I have no control over. So if I respond negatively to life, there ain't much I can about it I guess.

But , if you realise that everything is a response to those objects and events, including your thoughts and emotions, then you can realise that those thoughts and emotions arent as important as you believed, and that they also dont define "you", since they are automatic and happen whether you want them to or not

edit: by "they dont define "you" " , I mean, they arent you, you arent them, you arent doing them, they are just programmed responses to objects and events.

Robin- This probably sounds strange but from my perspective you are on the right track. The fact that you are aware and more importantly that you are not allowing yourself to lie or be in denial about life's struggles and the emptiness of conventional wisdom means you are headed in the right direction. The next step would be getting past the feeling of resignation that there is nothing that can be done about it.

Interestingly, I just bought a book yesterday on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), "Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life, The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy" by the creator of this therapy, Steven Hayes. Here's the beginning of the into:

I'd recommend you look into this therapy, either with a professional or a self-help book. You can accept having your pain without being depressed or feeling that there's no point to living.

That is untrue. If you had said "there ain't much I am willing to do about it" I'd totally agree.

You stubbornly hang onto false beliefs about what makes people happy in spite of all evidence to the contrary. I'd be willing to bet that you haven't taken and applied any of the advice given (go see psychiatrist for meds*, go see psychologist** for talk therapy, exercise outdoors daily***, do meditation****, stop whining on message boards about things*****, etc. etc. etc.).

There you go. Several things that you can do that are concrete and completely within your power to do.

You sound a lot like a person complaining that they feel affectively unpleasant because they are hungry who argues that they don't believe in the connection between hunger pangs and food intake, and then rambles on about how hunger is subjective and arbitrary.

*You don't know enough to question the experts, so you just do what they tell you to. Your opinion on the efficacy of treatment, as a non-expert, is not valid.

**Same as first footnote, with the addition that you also attend until they tell you to go away. Your opinion on the efficacy of treatment, as a non-expert, is not valid.

***http://www.health.harvard.edu/newswe...rt-excerpt.htm Again, the experts know more than you do, so you just do what they say until they specifically tell you to stop. Your opinion on it as leading to greater happiness, as a non-expert, is not valid.

****Exercises left prefrontal cortex, which is key to subjective happiness. Again, the experts have already figured it out and your opinion on it is not valid.

*****It is a counterproductive activity that is easily avoidable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumination_(psychology)

There really is no difference in talking to us, a psychologist, or a friend. This is well-documented.

Talking helps, though.

I'm not really surprised at everybody's willingness to medicate this guy. They don't have answers. So this is what they do. They diagnose you. It's all to make them feel better about themselves, really, because they don't have answers worth a damn.

wait theres someone here who defends Islam? I'd love to read these arguments.

How do you reconcile this claim with the fact that I, the only one in this thread actually capable of prescribing psychiatric medications, just recommended talk therapy and a self help book?

It's Doggg. He has previously stated that he has no interest in defending his claims about psychology/psychiatry (which I'm pretty sure he conflates) but merely drops in to launch what he calls"broadside attacks".

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...1&postcount=66

Interesting, seems I never saw that thread even though I got mentioned in it twice.