I certainly wish I had killed myself when I was 19 years old and my gf dumped me. And there hasn't been a day in the last 30 years I have felt any differently. Nothing "temporary" about it, and anyone who thinks it is temporary doesn't understand the problem. Would have been glad to have a suicide pill available.

WTF, you should definitely see a doctor about that.

I've attempted suicide before, also lived a very passively suicidal existence. Until my 20's and cleaning up it was almost a goal.

Sentience is weird.

Of course I have seen multiple doctors, therapists, social workers, etc., and been on lots of different medications. Some of it helped and some didn't, but nothing made the general facts of my life any better. I don't even consider myself particularly depressed now; in the past it was much worse.

Even if I knew for sure that starting tomorrow I would be perfectly happy for the rest of my life, I still would wish it had ended a long time ago, or even better that I had never been born. No amount of happiness that could be to come could make up for the pain of the past.

avatar game is spot on

FAKE NEWS

chillrob is your name Rob?

Um, yes... I don't know the avatar game, but I certainly picked mine for a reason.

Twinsies

Depressed Robs are frequent

Another proof that women are the rake of life.

Howard knows whats up

If we consider that Eve is the one that really ****ed everything up the case is clear.

Disclaimer: Those are jopkes.

I'm such a sissy that I had to put that in here.

What do your doctors and therapists and social workers say about the second paragraph?

Honestly don't remember if I ever said exactly that to any of them before, but really none of them ever said anything that was particularly helpful. I don't think I ever went to an "old school" therapist. Mostly they tried to tell me to trick myself into being happy (aka cognitive behavioral therapy). Not useful, as I don't fall for tricks easily.

Unfortunately, (IMO) the truth is that the depressed / pessimistic people are right. The world is a ****ty place, and the lives of most people in it are ****ty. The happy / optimistic / (religious) people are wrong, but their lives are better for it. I wish something could push me to the other side, but it's tough to forget the truth after you've seen it.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/ma...worry-be-happy

One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is the acknowledgement that the world is a pretty crappy place in its current form. So I'm not sure that it's fair or even true to say that (all?) religious people have it wrong.

It's true that people are fully capable of self-deception. But that pendulum swings both ways. You can be as wrong as you believe you're right.

Truth is a reality of the universe pressing in on us. However, the experience of that truth is shaded by our own internal senses and mechanisms. That is, two people can be subjected to the same truth, but have two different reactions to it. It's not that one is right or wrong in some grand sense (beyond the truth that is present), but rather that the way that truth is colored changes how we both perceive and experience it.

You might like listening to the Invisibilia podcast. In this episode, they make the argument that the way that we understand emotions in the US might be at odds with what the science is showing us about emotions.

http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibi...18193/emotions

I was thinking of the religious often accepting their crappy life because they think "it's all part of God's plan" and/or they think they will be rewarded in the afterlife. Opium of the masses.

I will check out that podcast; actually, I recently downloaded all of Invisibilia and have been slowly listening to them.

Personally, I think happiness is strongly correlated to having something positive to look forward to, which is what I think explains chillrob's view on religion being tied to optimism. I.e., if you think you're going to heaven, then you don't feel bad about your current situation.

This is partly why I always plan something fun to do in the future.

Isn't happiness relative anyway? If you polled people 100 years ago, 200 years, 500 years ago to rate their personal happiness on a scale of 1 to 100, what would the mean be? And then compare that number to today. Are people happier on average now than they were 500 years ago?

Presumably we have improved society over time such that it should be (less hunger, disease, war, etc.), but I'm not sure people are "happier" today.

I think that the "tricks" chillrob refers to are what I like to call "bull**** psychology." I've had doctors try this and of course it didn't work. I find that the best doctors push me to actually make changes in my life that they think will help me.

Not exactly. If you're crying tears of joy? You must be very happy. I've been there and it was an awesome feeling. If you're crying tears of anguish? I've been there and it was a terrible feeling.

If you tried to trick me by saying "it's all relative man" then I probably would have ranted on the validity of emotions. Emotions are never invalid as they are our own; they are real to us; whether they are warranted or not is up for debate, but the way we feel cannot be disproved like many things in science.

So how do we change that? I think we change that by doing nice things for people. Maybe you can do something to make your community a nicer place.

also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8Rqvz-Jcg

I think that people tend towards a happiness equilibrium. People are happy when they win the lottery, they return to equilibrium after time. People are sad when they lose someone close, they return to equilibrium after time.

Equilibria are different. Maybe chillrob's equilibrium happiness is lower than mine, and I think it's part of what Bob and I were talking about before that it shouldn't be considered abnormal.

And equilibria can probably change over time, trending upward or downward. I'm not sure whether it has to do with the temporary ups and downs. Like maybe being above equilibrium for a while "pulls" your equilibrium up, or maybe it "pushes" it down. Maybe it does nothing. Maybe being part of a religion or charity group or having regular activities moves it up. Maybe it's different for different people. Technology may help connect people, or it may hurt by isolating people.

What troubles me is that something from 30 years ago seems to have such a lasting impact on chillrob. That's a really long time by most peoples' standards and I'm including people I know who have had some pretty awful **** happen like losing children.

Just last night, I had a very nice, respectful, and seemingly productive conversation with some very conservative minded people on Facebook on the topic of psychiatry and psychology. It made me relatively happy.

Just two days ago, I posted something like, "who wants to make music with me?" and nobody responded. It made me relatively sad that nobody wants to jam with me.

So now I'm happy and sad all at the same time. Thanks social media for playing with my emotions.

Since happiness is a self-reported feeling, it's really hard to objectively measure this. Our emotions end up normalizing to our circumstances anyway, so I'm not even sure that I would expect reported happiness to go up or down over time.

I think I read an article somewhere that the happiest people are those who make more money than their peers (or something like that).

I know someone who had a stillbirth a while ago, and she still celebrates the due date like a birthday. I think it's been about a decade. It has come to define that aspect of her life. To let go of that would be to lose a piece of her identity as woman who lost a child at birth.

At an emotional level, I think she has grown accustomed to that identity and is choosing to maintain it rather than putting in the effort of reshaping it into something else. I'm sure she would say that she "can't" let it go because there are too many things in her life that remind her of the child (but there are lots of things that remind her because she has created a whole bunch of reminders in her world).

It might be similar for chillrob. It might simply have been an identity-forming incident for him.

While I see how you could have inferred that, it's not what I meant. The bad things that happened 30 years ago doesn't really hurt that much now. The much bigger problem is that bad things have happened over and over again for all those 30 years, with almost no good things.

I just don't believe that anything has any meaning and go from there.

best part: that's neither positive or negative.