This will enlighten you!

even genetics are environmentally impacted. The environment played a crucial role in facilitating the combination of those two sets of reproductive material, as well as how the embryo develops and is nourished, as well as what stimuli is encountered by the newborn, and what mental constructs are instilled into its mind, forming its perceptions, affecting its thoughts, actions and choices, throughout its life.

It’s all connected… and i think that if the environment issues (not talking about ecology and tree-hugging…) could be corrected, or at least minimized, we would not have so many issues blamed on genetics, in the process of attempting to defend the system people are taught is both necessary and beneficial, while also being taught to ignore its extremely serious and detrimental flaws.

Genetic malformations would not necessarily disappear in the absence of the systems’ corruption… but if the system wasn’t wrong, i think we would have less issues in valuing more variations in genetics, instead of the current way of shunning everything suboptimal, and blaming people for the conditions of their birth, rather than the system that makes their genetics incompatible with it.

I also agree with the notion of rejecting “mania,” due to the fact that inappropriately embraced positivity, aka “hope,” is notorious for resulting in profound disappointment, even to the point of literally ruining someone’s life in the ensuing devastation and despair. If someone hopes too strongly, for something they cannot attain or achieve… the encountering of that reality can often break them… shattering their mind, rendering them psychologically “disabled.” It is possible to traumatize a person enough to destroy them, even if it doesn’t kill their body.

I think it’s helpful to try to pay attention to your moods, and to get better at identifying what is “mania,” and what is “normal excitement” over valid and actual… parameters, i guess.

@ArtNHeaven:

Think of it like a multiple choice test: you can pick A, B, C, D, or maybe E or F… but you don’t get to choose what choices are included as possible answers to each question. You get to pick one, hopefully the right one, usually the least upsetting one… and in that way, we do “have the power to determine our futures,” but it is not complete, because we don’t write the test. Other people’s choices, in the environments and conditions in which they exist, write the tests for everyone else. In that way, we have no power at all, and are indeed “products of our environments.”

Which brings me back to the idea that people are always arbitrarily arguing over absolutes, pretending that their justification of one or another is “correct,” such as the “nature versus nurture” argument. Why is that even an argument? Isn’t it obvious to any reasonably capable mind, that it’s BOTH? Obviously, some things just are as they are, and are not the result of choosing… but other things are definitely the result of choosing, and could have been chosen differently. Then again, i could manipulate the argument with the fact that nurture IS nature, because nature existed before anything was sentient to make any choices to nurture anything, and that nurture is a result of nature, because we are natural beings, doing what we feel we should do, much of which is to nurture each other, both as a byproduct, and as an evolution, of nature.

Here’s where i’m going with this:

We can look around at all the observable evidence, and say “okay, there is a lot to not like about the current conditions. Should we just leave it as it is? Or should we attempt to improve it for some reason?” I tend to think that when stuff sucks, we should try to make it not suck, you know? It’s really that simple. And so there’s your basic purpose: find what sucks, try to make it not suck, or at least suck a bit less. Meanwhile, try not to let your whole life pass you by, submerged in involuntary suck-ness… because as far as we can figure, this is the only one we get, and may be our only chance to ever enjoy anything. So try to find a way to split your time between “duty to mankind,” and “duty to self.” Because if your duty to mankind “make stuff suck less” ends up making your entire life suck, for you… then isn’t that defeating the purpose? 1) make stuff suck less, when/where possible. 2) enjoy what doesn’t suck, when/where possible. 3) ???

Obviously, it can be elaborated, expanded and refined… but that’s basically it.

Unfortunately, this crazy world in which we currently exist, has made BOTH of those basic principles nearly unattainable for far too many people… while so many are taught to ignore the problems caused by those very same systems, which prevents many of us from 1) making things suck less, in any significant way, and 2) enjoying what doesn’t suck, by making it too difficult to reach.

And so… “striving” for what cannot be reached, is what keeps the world going. That’s not really “balance,” which is not what i was saying it was. I was saying it is the IMbalance, and the inability to reach what we would pursue, that keeps things going. The illusory part is when people are raised to think they can “be anything they want to be,” or simply not taught that reality does not simply bend to anyone’s whim, just by wishing or believing hard enough, that it will.

So, there is some self-help that can be useful… but the problem is that it has to be motivated by a realistic and justifiable expectation of achieving something worth the effort required to make it successful, which is often lacking. That’s where the problem lies.

What, of what can actually be reached, is worth reaching for? And if i can’t find a suitable answer to that… what am i supposed to do, if i really just don’t want to do anything else, of what is actually available to be reached? And no one seems to ever have a good answer for that, which is where suicide ends up filling the gap.