Working Title

No idea what to put as the title, so oh well.

I’m not 100% sure why I’m posting stuff up here, but sometimes, when you know you can’t go into it with anyone else, it just becomes a “What the heck, why not?” moment.

Now, just for a summary of things, I’m 23. I’m not prone to depression as a relative mental issue, nor am I prone to actual suicidal considerations or tendencies. The last time I even had a properly suicidal thought was in my mid teens, during a period in my life when everything was going completely in the dumper, after a half decade of everything getting continuously and constantly worse. But that streak of hope and positivity was systematically beaten out of me by life, so back I’ve gone.

In general, I tend to be a very positive, hopeful and trusting kind of person. I’m the type of person who’s always there for her friends and acquaintances, who does her absolute best to make people happy, is very jokey and tries to make things enjoyable for people, to the point where in high school, I was helping more people than the school councillor. Part of my problem has always been that that’s to a fault.

Now, I have an incredible multitude of other things that paint a rather incredible picture of crapitude in my life, but I won’t go into detail or I’ll wind up writing War and Peace. This is something that I don’t at all claim to be something only I’ve seen, though. I’ve discussed this topic at great length with a number of non-depressing, non-suicidal people who all generally agree that the sheer multitude and magnitude of what I have to deal with on a regular basis is mind boggling and makes some of them want to kill people. But I’m touching on something very specific in this rant-thinger, disregarding all of that.

Relating to the paragraph above the last, I’ve come to the realization that kindness is something that has become severely lacking in today’s debt-ridden, economically depressed, high-stress and highly competitive world. I’m not someone who hates all life and thinks everyone is a greedy douchebag out to get her. No, I genuinely believe an incredible number of people are genuinely good and positive people, the kind of folks deserving of a kind gesture and an evening enjoying themselves. Unfortunately, today’s society deems genuinely good people to be an expendable asset. Over the past several years, I’ve watched countless cases of the downfall of nice people…

One person, a single father, went from having a decent amount of free time and a relatively good time of things to working 12-18 hours a day, every day, for months, for an employer that cheated him out of money and tried everything they could to smear his reputation, against competitors who sereptitously pushed his young daughter to attempt to commit suicide, herself, and blacklist him for future employment. This was a guy who was kind enough to, of his own accord, spend several days working on something for free just to cheer me up during a rough patch (and it really did help at the time).

Another person, who, in turn for the nice things I did for him, spent numerous hours of his time helping me with things just out of niceness, was turned into a cynical, greedy jerkwad by life. When we met, he was a friendly, jokey, rather jovial kind of guy with an interest in being nice just for the sake of being nice. THat’s when he got kicked around by his work, cheated on and dumped by his fiancee, robbed of some of his money by a friend, and taken advantage of by any number of people, all over a single, six month period. The next time I saw him he was angrily cynical, took my kindnesses with no intention of reciprocating, and was generally an inconsiderate ass. Unfortunately, after a conversation, I discovered it was more out of trying to preserve his own sanity than anything else.

There’s multiple people who are still genuinely nice (the first one mentioned is included in this), but life, through various circumstances, has curbed their ability to be kind to and help people (from the economy leaving them broke and unable to afford to help in any way but talking, to jobs that take up so much of their time they literally have no time for anything but food and sleep, to outside obligations preventing them from maintaining contact). So, even though they still have an inherent kindness, they can’t use it.

I have loads more examples of people in similar situations.

So this is a challenge to all of you people here (except for the ones that genuinely hate everyone and everything) from someone so burned out by life that she’s actually bothered to pop around here. If any of you are feeling like poop or are wanting to finish yourself off or anything like, go out and do something genuinely nice for someone before you do anything serious. That means not dumping your problems on them, not discussing ways to commit suicide, not doing something arbitrary that doesn’t really help anyone and not just sitting there, being the “listener” for someone else’s problems. It means do something actually nice, make someone happy for a bit, help someone lonely have some fun with a friend for once, help someone broke pay for something they’d love or someone without hope live out or imagine their greatest fantasy. Especially if you’re going to actually go through with your wish to die, you might save someone else from going through with theirs.

Lord knows, we could all really use it.