IMO, suicidal people are stuck between Life & Death as the result of a conflict: Intellect vs Emotions
on a purely rational level, we realize human life is meaningless, especially from a cosmic perspective
whether humans are or not, the Universal Mind will continue to create .. when man has disappeared, I really doubt It’ll pause to think: “wow I really miss mankind :'( Let me recreate man to fill this void I’m feeling”
unfortunately, our emotions get in the way .. thanks to social conditioning
social conditioning says: every life has a purpose ; it will get better ; you wouldn’t appreciate life if it only had ups ; God loves you and has a plan for you ; you’ll offend Him and go to Hell etc
(go to Hell for exiting on your own terms ? as if a Creator that allows cringe-worthy displays of evil (torture, rape, animal abuse etc) to keep occuring is going to “punish” you for exiting this place .. LOL !)
you end up believing suffering has a “meaning” and that you gotta remain hopeful and keep going .. beliefs are very emotionally charged thoughts, so the
belief that suffering has a meaning weighs more than your meager, emotion-lacking knowing that LIFE is meaningless
also, I can’t help but ask: if God never wanted you to kill yourself, why allow the possibility in your mind to consider suicide ? wouldn’t the existence of this possibility contradict his expectation of you to “wait for your time” ? or do we have to blame this one on the “Devil” too ?
you can be confident enough to off yourself when your emotional side has agreed there’s nothing wrong/evil about suicide
as long as your intellect and emotional side aren’t aligned with the right to suicide, you won’t find the courage (?) to leave this wonderful world ♥
29 comments
It’s believed the option to off yourself is an example of freewill. Doing the deed is very difficult, because there is no turning back. Don’t forget that freewill is one of god’s gifts! I don’t see the logic in transitioning through life when you simply don’t enjoy it anymore, all the while you search for reasons to live. Watching others enjoy the numbing routine of the human condition convinces me people like me weren’t meant to go the distance.
It’s witnessed in all levels of nature, every single life form on this planet has a time limit. As humans we know the certainty of death. A few of us embrace it in ways that aren’t the traditional route.
“on a purely rational level, we realize human life is meaningless, especially from a cosmic perspective”
I’m not part of ‘we’ then.
“Watching others enjoy the numbing routine of the human condition convinces me people like me weren’t meant to go the distance.”
I know this too well .. I’m unable to grasp how “normal” people keep doing the same things over and over again and don’t seem to get fed up with it .. I get bored so quickly it’s not even funny, almost every interest I have feels forced .. oh well, my “mistake” was to NOT sacrifice my freedom of thought for a sense of belonging (religion)
I’m glad I was able to find words for this realization I’ve had .. now I gotta work on peeling off remaining layers of social conditioning so I can be confident enough to leave this prison
change that to read: “…life is unnecessary…”
We can give life meaning, we can invent things to tell people, to encourage them to believe that life has an inherent, innate “meaning,” that is “given to us” by whatever…
But ultimately, no one has a good answer for “what is that meaning?”
Tell me why life is necessary.
” “on a purely rational level, we realize human life is meaningless, especially from a cosmic perspectiveâ€
I’m not part of ‘we’ then.”
I’m sorry you were left out 🙁 .. Is there an inherent meaning to life ?
@ClairDeLune, is meaning the thing that keeps you grounded?
I disagree. On a purely rational level, I realize that meaning is meaningless, because it’s created by a mind that’s able to comprehend such a thing, rather than a mind that has no such faculty. But whether meaningful or meaningless, it’s part of the human animal’s set of abilities and I’ll make do with the limitations placed on me by nature. Nothing has an intrinsic meaning. That doesn’t mean that one cannot find a meaning to assign to anything at all. Suffering can then have a meaning, but only if you want it to have one.
Life isn’t necessary for the universe to continue existing. But my life is necessary for my family to be happy.
I agree with clever and lorax on what meaning is about. Without religion there is no inherent meaning, but we can give meaning to each others lives.
@Bipolar American: Can you rephrase that? I looked up grounded but that sentence doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.
@lorax
> Nothing has an intrinsic meaning
how would we ever be able to discern whether it does or not, if by definition, you say that any meaning is only because WE endow something with meaning ?
how do u escape the self-referential circle ?
@CDL: grounded as in “centered” or “reasonable.” The opposite of “head in the clouds.”
Hm. So would I go crazy if I didn’t have a meaning? If suiciding counts as being crazy, then yes, I guess.
The question is if the hope to find meaning in your life is a meaning in itself. As in “The journey is the reward”. What I know for sure is that if I didn’t have any meaning in my life and no hope of ever getting any, there would be nothing to keep me grounded.
…and those who don’t stay grounded, tend to float or drift or be swept away…
@duderino: Well, the universe isn’t made out of words, but our thoughts are – it’s one of those inexplicable oddities of reality. Meaning requires words. The universe, on the other hand… not so much.
Here, I shall bequeath unto you dudes a modicum of meaning. For each of you, pi. Therefore, 42.
Good. Now you have meaning.
not all of my thoughts are verbal. Many manifest in the form of ineffable visualizations.
My world isn’t made of words… but my words are indeed made of this world.
Some thoughts form within the mysterious reptile brain – guttural, picture-based, flashes of concepts mapped to colors and shapes… The primitive still exists. 😀 I rather like that part of the brain.
We now know from linguistics that thought is structured in language — that is to say, that our very thoughts are conditioned by the language we speak. Thus, it is not the case, that translation from one language to another is a simple matter of changing the ‘labels’ (ie the specific words) that apply to a given concept (except perhaps in the most trivial of cases) from one language to another.
It is also known, from the (thankfully) very rare cases of extreme child abuse, where if a child is not spoken to, the child’s brain does not develop (thankfully, there appear to be only a handful (at least of documented) cases of this type of abuse. The ‘wild child’ legend from europe is one such case.
Again, if there is an ‘intrinsic’ meaning in the universe independent of ourselves, how would we separate out 1) how we conceive of that meaning (which originates in our thoughts, and, thus, in our language) from 2) the human-independent existence of that meaning. In all fairness, there is a major school of mathematics, called platonic mathematics (to which many of the world’s greatest mathematicians subscribe) that holds that mathematical truths are ‘real’ truths (in the same sense that physical truths are), and that they are completely independent, and are not artefacts, of the language that we use to describe them.
@duderino: I’ve read a lot of that line of thinking when studying interpretative methods – way back in the day when I was doing all hardcore theology and stuff. It’s the basis for a lot of the conceptual/linguistic translations of the Bible (the ones that actually annoy me a lot for some reason 😕 like The Message, ugh..).
As far as mathematics, I’d probably be inclined to agree that there is a basis in the natural world for mathematic functions and principles. Otherwise, how would maths be capable of predicting things with any precision? It would be, at best, only loosely applicable to experimental data unless there was some underlying symmetry between the symbols and the things the symbols are describing. But it works the same way with language – I’d posit that language just isn’t anywhere near so precise as mathematics are. Symbols, in and of themselves, are derived from the interactions of a cogent mind with its environment. They describe reality – and attempt to do so in a concrete, objective kind of way, independent of the observer. But the universe doesn’t demand an observer with such mental faculties must exist to define it.
@lorax
the linguistics stuff that i know has nothing to do with theology, it’s just ‘scientific’ linguistics
wrt to math and reality, i agree with you, even though it seems spooky: i mean why should these concepts, which seemingly WE developed, explain the world so well ?
one of the founders of quantum theory, eugene wigner, wrote a famous paper exactly on this topic called, the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’…it’s online (and not technical, afaik)
It’s more about translating a body of text from the original languages (Koine Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic etc) into modern, “contemporary” English – there are a number of different ways they approach that issue, and conceptual translations aren’t as technical or precise, but tend to allow for a wider range of flexibility with the way the meaning gets carried from one culture to another. I mean, I doubt most people can even imagine how people lived in Ancient Near-East cultures, much less understand the little subtle social hints and tidbits that would be obvious to someone in that culture.
actually when you study this stuff at a micro-level, for instance by describing a simple object, very soon, you can’t describe that object without using words that you’ve already employed; ie you’re going around in circles
but we’re all positive that we understand what that object is ; eg a chair (this argument i heard from a lecture by noam chomsky)
wrt to thought being structured in language, not only does it imply that translation between two languages is at best approximate, but even two people who speak the same language are never communicating 100%, since each one will have heard different words/phrases used in conjunction with supposedly the same idea/concept…it makes you wonder whether true human communication is really possible, at least verbally
It’s a bizarre fact that we’re having this discussion right now, if you think about it. I’ve always been steeped in anthropology – I probably should have studied that in school rather than going into IT. I’m still not sure what I was thinking back then. But just from a cultural perspective, those words/concepts map in clearly different ways, and those maps are shaped by the culture they come from – the social context of language is one of those mind-boggling fields to even glance at for exactly the reason you’ve laid out in your last comment. It’s always been a pet-peeve of mine, agnostic or not, when people take some ancient (translated) text and assume they can just understand it right off the bat, using their understanding of the contemporary words employed by the translators. There’s a damn lot more to it than what’s on the surface.
All I am is a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.
it’s funny you mention anthropology: it was my undergraduate major, but i probably know less about it than almost anything else that i know something about ! (tells you how diligent a student i was)
but this subject is fascinating; one thing i now for sure: poetry is literally impossible to translate, since not only do you have to take into account 1) the surface meaning, 2) the references to the other instances when a specific word had been used before, but also and impossible to translate 3) the sounds of the words involved
movies are a great example of mis-translation (i do some translation of independent cinema between spanish and english), so i’ve become sensitive to the nuances and limitations involved…since so many of may favorite directors are non-american, Ã’ve begun to realize how much i’m missing…but what can you do ?…how many languages can a person learn ?
the famous literary critic harold bloom (he of the photographic memory, that at its peak could read a 1000 pages an hour, and remember every word !; he’s probably read 100,000 books in his life) said that he didn’t trust any of the translations of ancient chinese texts, since the concepts were so different from our own, that what we would be reading would be very misleading
in any case, when you read something in translation, you’re, in the final analysis, reading the work of the translator
a demain…it’s 3:30 am where i am
not all thought is “structured in language,” sorry. Some thought is indeed nonverbal, regardless of any alleged expert claiming any absolutist propaganda.
Maybe a typical person is almost entirely bound by linguistic constraints of their native tongue… but i am not.
Vision existed before language, ergo: we can (capability exists) think in visualizations, without being tied to any language. But it’s probably pretty common for most people to think in structures heavily influenced by their native language.
All this stuff i write on this site… this takes thought. I often have to translate my own ideas into my own language, if that makes sense. Talk about “outside the box” thinking. I often think outside my talk-box, and then have to run my ideas through an internal interpreter, before i can express them to anyone. Some of it begins to feel automatic, due to so much practice and repetition, but i am aware that there is a partially automated, partially manually guided process occurring.
Even though i don’t speak other languages, i’ve certainly researched how other languages function, and i at least understand that “the english way” is not the only way that thoughts become words. My own way of putting my own thoughts into words, requires the precision and versatility of my native tongue. It would take me probably 20+ years to reach a comparable level of acuity in any other language. Essentially, i don’t have time for that.
I like the idea of ideograms used by asian languages. It started out as a concise picture used as a symbol to represent a thing, or sometimes an entire concept. We use phonetics, in which our symbols represent mostly just sounds, and our words are basically just a series of sounds strung together to create a “word” with an often entirely non-semantic meaning.
I often have to reiterate this:
Communication can only work properly when everyone adheres to the agreed upon standards. When people deviate too much from those standards, the potency and fluidity of the language is compromised, which impedes communication, which inhibits cooperation (and thus, symbiosis), and even leads to arbitrary conflicts that otherwise would not exist, if both people had used the agreed upon standards, correctly.
So, if you don’t care about using words correctly, then you don’t care about communicating, which makes you more of an obstacle than anything else. Arbitrarily impeding progress is not an appealing quality, IMO.
@Duderino: If you want a chuckle, go to biblegateway dot com and check out some passages from random chapters in the translation called, The Message. I honestly think that the conceptual interpretation that was done in that translation gutted any original intent the authors had and replaced it with street slang from suburban Kentucky. I’m not pessimistic when it comes to the idea that ancient texts can be interpreted, and translated approximately (and adequately), but I am pessimistic that most of the diluting of the english language will not have a serious impact on contextual clues involving social customs and other implicit messages within the text itself. The idea of authorial intent is something people neglect to even pay lip-service to in many cases.
@clevername: I understand non-vrebal thinking styles are a hallmark of autistic spectrum disorders – have you read anything about that set of tendencies? If not, you might find it interesting – it sounds like you have some of those qualities (and no, I don’t think that’s bad 😛 thinking in pictures and “concepts” is actually a more efficient way to understand the world, imo).
@cn
vision is a very late evolutionary adaptation — sound is a much more primitive one; in fact, there are diseases (such as extreme cases of guillain barre syndrome, where no muscle in the body works, but hearing is still in tact, since hearing is located in a very deep part of the brain); smell is probably the oldest evolutionary sense, fwiw
your point, ‘“the english way†is not the only way that thoughts become words’ is EXACTLY what i’ve been trying to say: that one’s thoughts are structured in the language one speaks: if one doesn’t speak english, then his/her thoughts won’t be conditioned by english
whether IN ADDITION to thoughts being structured in language, thoughts can be structured in a non-verbal way, idk…my only point is that people speaking different languages are not simply applying different labels (ie the words) to the things they’re talking about, but rather that the concepts that they’re talking about are in of themselves structured/conditioned by the different languages they’re speaking
chinese ideograms are indeed very fascinating: it’s the only example of a non-phonetic writing system that i’m aware of
@lorax: oh, i didn’t even see that until now… honestly, i would not be surprised to be diagnosed with some relatively mild form of autism. Then again, i’d be skeptical because the reality is that my environment and the people in it have affected me in ways that may seem similar to some autism traits. I really haven’t studied it very much, mostly because i never felt the need to wonder if i was autistic. But a while back i think someone may have mentioned something about it in passing, or i may have just been spontaneously curious, but i remember investigating asperger’s a while back, and thinking “some of this is kinda similar, but not really…”
I’m pretty sure most of my problems are rooted in my deprived and frustratingly impeded adolescence, and various physical and psychological traumas endured through my life. Most, if not all, of my mental and emotional issues are rooted in physical events and their lasting effects. Exhibit A would be my first c1 area “cranial nerve” injury in my freshman year of high school (which i ended up significantly agitating several more times), which resulted in “scapular winging,” due to loss of some muscle control linked to that nerve. Exhibit B would be 2 years later when i took an illegal “block” in football, which should have drawn a “personal foul” penalty, which resulted in me landing directly vertical… basically got my head speared into the ground, which was not just yet another exacerbation of my previous neck issues, but included a mild concussion. When you take a sudden impact nerve pain like that, there is no control. You either flash out or writhe in spastic, acute agony, until the endorphins kick in. I also broke my ankle TWICE that year… which was also the last year of school i completed. So much was already wrong by my junior year of high school… and that was now half my life ago. So yeah, i might have a few “autism traits,” because i’ve been through some shit, and a lot of it never really went away. I did have a few “good” years, between ~18-22 or so… but god damn, everything goes wrong, all the time, even for someone like me who is always obsessively cautious, due to all the shit i know can so easily go so wrong. It was during those “good” years, when i almost drowned after cramping up halfway across a river… due to the lingering effects of my nerve issues, my muscles don’t always do exactly what my brain is commanding them to do, even after some pretty focused martial arts training, which helped more than anything else ever has. But then, about 4 years ago, i flipped my car and thought i was fine, until about 2 months later i started having tingling and numbness in my fingers on one hand, and a dull ache on the other side of my c1-c2 area. If i had to describe it, it feels like a strand of cartilage worked its way between my vertebrae… or maybe there’s a bone chip from an undiagnosed compression fracture. The tingling stopped, but my neck is messed up, which affects everything i do. This is the physical side of what convinced me to stop playing guitar; it was causing acute pain and even migraines, just to hold the guitar in playing posture for even 15 minutes. I had enough. I used to live for guitar. I’m not paralyzed, i still have mobility and motor control, i can move… but i fucking hate moving now, because nothing ever feels right anymore, and i have to be overly cautious just to avoid agitating any of those issues, which can easily ruin a day, and take more than a week to feel “comfortable” again. All this adds up and affects my personality, even my cognitive capacity and tendencies. I could go on and on, there’s a bunch of other things… but that’s the point: too much has gone wrong and stayed wrong for far too long, and i have to say the word “crippled” is actually appropriate. Every time anything ever went wrong, no one helped me recover; it just stayed that way (except for the broken ankle twice… i actually had proper medical care for that… ooh, a cast! so advanced! …).
At some point i realized i needed to refrain from any further potentially damaging physical activities, and that my only chance to survive is to figure out how to earn income without using my body, because my body doesn’t have much mileage left before it quits. But then i realized… i slipped through the cracks and didn’t learn enough to use my mind for anything profitable. I have no qualifications and no one gives a shit about my mental capacity or capability, because i never had access to the means to cultivate it in an evidenced and credentialed way. It’s like i was born and people just waited for me to destroy myself, instead of bothering to help me become self-sufficient. I don’t understand why people who don’t even know how to live, think they can raise kids. Mind-boggling, infuriating, resulted in my life being fucked from the beginning… even though i was actually personally equipped to accomplish far more. It really pisses me off. And so i end up diving into my ironically available distractions, since there’s nothing i can do but ironically wait until i have to finish destroying myself, due to inability to support myself, and soon/eventually having no one left to feed me. But maybe that’s okay, because i kinda hate this world and most of the people i see inhabiting it. I would have liked to actually live, but there’s just too much fucked up bullshit everywhere, in everything.
The autistic traits I was referring to were purely mental – the way you structure your comments also has some hints of autistic quality (again – it’s not a bad thing) in that you don’t use much metaphor or visceral imagery. Your anger towards the world at large is also something that happens with autistic people a lot – I have several in my family who would probably resonate a lot with how you see things (and again – that’s not a bad thing – my cousins are awesome people). But lacking physical abilities due to injuries doesn’t negate the ability to make positive progress towards supporting yourself, if you expand your horizons of what you’re actually capable of – what your strengths are right now (which I can see you have many). Find something that interests you, that’s marketable, and learn everything you possibly can about that subject. IT? Computers? You’d be surprised how many people are dunces when it comes to the technology they use every day, and how much they’re willing to pay someone to repair that technology when it breaks down. I was making a damn nice second income in Florida just by repairing printers for people.
One suggestion I’d make, in terms of temporary fixes, is trying to snag a job driving a forklift. It’s the easiest fucking job on earth, and yet many, many people absolutely suck at it, so gaining raises and promotions along that line of work is simple if you have a functional neo-cortex. When I was doing that work at a carpet warehouse, it boggled my mind how inept a lot of the employees were, but the fact I could identify that allowed me to put myself in a position to get promoted into a supervisory position within a year of starting. A lot of menial, non-physically demanding jobs are like that.