If you have serious psych diagnosis like BP etc., please avoid this content; your loved ones know you're trying and only a handfull of contrarians strike this pose. Get some exercise and a good night's sleep, and stay on your meds. I'm rooting for you.
P.S. This trash should not be on HN. It has nothing to do with tech and it could kill somebody.
With that said, if the overwhelming majority of readers were miserable not via irreparable mental illness, but from well-worn thought processes, and were capable of growth stemming from realizations about their behavior, might this be a productive exercise for more people than not?
While I agree that the format is not maximally nurturing, that's not the same thing as being devoid of value. To call it trash, and to imply that it exists primarily to troll the mentally ill, are arguments made in bad faith IMO.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery...
There are probably people who really need to hear "your problems are real and you should get help" and also those who need to hear "your problems are mainly self inflicted and you need to deal". This article gives the same advice for both types, and that's pretty dangerous.
A former coworker of mine recently recommended The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. She said she read it in my voice. I couldn't stand it, and I couldn't figure out the source of the dissonance. She needed the thing I do. I need the thing she does (give more fucks). We can't read and grow from the same books.
Really useful mental model here. I'd be interested in anything else you'd suggest as a good read.
SSC is usually fairly interesting for stuff like though, which is why I can remember to link it. For example, later post on the same topic:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-...
The downside of being ill-advised in this way is exceptionally, asymmetrically, high for certain people (and maybe anyone standing next to them). That’s who I was talking to. If you had seen what I've seen you might regretfully do the same. Best regards, sorry for the inconvenience.
This is sort of awkward on HN, because there's a culture of stoic self-reliance that's very helpful for, well, startups. "Create your own destiny" and "you don't have to bear the burden alone" don't mix well.
Where does she say that?
"misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it."
"making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity."
"There’s power in making other people feel guilty."
Sure. But some people feel unhappy all the time. Sometimes for years, sometimes for their entire life. In their case, it is a mental health issue. It's not something they can just shake off when they hear the age-old "you're depressed because you choose to be" argument by a smug author. This approach is outdated and it doesn't work.
Sometimes it is, not always. When I went through long periods of unhappiness it was because of my circumstances and life choices.
If you have had to cycle through being on 5+ medications all to balance out effects of the others of which, might help, might not, not sure - for decades, and you wind up feeling like 'I don't even know who the fuck I am without all of this', then that's a place to be in life too that can be therapeutic and helpful. Not to mention the trends of psychiatric medication offering addictive substances and then basically, punishing you when you become addicted to them, backpedaling and then offering something no more effective than a placebo, then cycling you through groups and various other forms of 'healthcare' that is more comparable to being herded like cattle than it is therapeutic, while telling you 'now you're an addict' and basically laughing when you say 'but yes, because I took the drugs you gave me to get well, and then I got addicted, because they made me well, and I don't know the difference anymore between health and illness mentally'.
The mental healthcare system in many areas of the world are fucked up. You can blame those things for some portion of your life and silently blame yourself for the rest of it. That's what I do anyway. Or be loud about it, on the internet.
Life sucks, sometimes. I'm rooting for you too.
I know for myself, the outside can sometimes look like a selfish lunatic and the inside can be completely without self in a way that intends to be giving, but in a way that is hard on myself enough to know I don't know everything and hard problems are hard. Being told that all I need to do is take my meds and act like a normal person can come across a bit, patronizing, while I've spoken to people in mental healthcare systems who both 'enjoyed how I picked their brain' because I suppose for them, it made some stuff click, and for others, I still blame myself.
Mental health is not easy. I don't know of anyone better to understand how hard it can be than someone who knows it intimately, aside from someone whose studied it so much they don't know if that's part of the reason people become it.