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Comment by 9d | Hacker News Reader

There is no escaping stress or anxiety. Life is a nightmare, and the best you can do is accept it as an objective fact and try to make it better for others, since you will never be able to make it better for yourself.

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"[E]verything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

—Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances."

—Mahatma Gandhi, A Cry from Germany

Why did you enclose the E in brackets? Is it really missing in the citation source?

"Another common use of brackets is when you want to capitalize the first letter of a quotation that is not capitalized in the original. As long as the part of the sentence you’re using is not a sentence fragment, you can use brackets around the first letter to capitalize it."

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/punctuation-capitalization/pa...

hey -- I'm not sure what's got you thinking this, but I'd encourage you to consider that the way things seem when we're in emotional states (even long-lasting ones) aren't always reflective of the way things are.

Somewhere in the world right now, someone is suffering immensely, unjustly, and with no hope of relief. This is always true at any given moment. How can we sit back and be happy when these forgotten people die daily? And statistics indicate they're probably living next door to each one of us. The status quo is not good. Do what you will, but I'm not going to pretend this life is a paradise.

Your original framing was "life is a nightmare".

My response was not "life is paradise", but rather a reminder that emotional states can vary your perception of how nightmarish/paradise-ish life actually is.

Having empathy for the suffering in both other people and yourself does not close the door on still finding at least some amount of inner joy or peace. If you can only have any amount of joy when every other living being in the universe is totally free of suffering, then you are doomed to never have even an ounce of happiness.

> I'm not going to pretend this life is a paradise

Who has ever claimed that it is?

Leibniz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds

"I said ... that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. . . . Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection."

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

I've seen this in some other communities... the idea that any suffering outweighs all the joys of life. That life is a nightmare because pain and suffering exist.

I'm personally more inclined to the idea that the joy one experiences can make all the suffering fade away into meaninglessness. Perhaps my wife or child will die before me, and it'll be painful. But still, better they were than were not, and I would smile when thinking of them.

I don't know if one approach can be considered 'correct' over the other... but I know which approach I'd recommend. It may be very difficult to change, though.

Why should I worry about that?

In many cases making life better for others involves making it better for yourself. That’s what true love is in my opinion.

> try to make it better for others, since you will never be able to make it better for yourself.

What is the logic here? Why not?

Unclear on why you can only improve your situation by proxy and not directly.

You can't improve your situation. Others can, but you can't, even by influencing others to, precisely because it would sitll be you trying to improve yours. You can only improve theirs.

And why is that?

No problems inherently cause horror. It's when we feel unloved that the smallest problem can seem like a nightmare. Almost no one in the world truly has genuine, selfless love. So countless people's problems seem insurmountable to themselves. When someone is willing to lift some of your burden, or at least share in it, this is the only proof of genuine love, and even when it doesn't truly solve the problems, it reduces or even removes the horror from them. But it has to be someone other than you, because love must be given and received from an other, and we are not an "other" to ourselves, even if in brokenness we often seem so. I think this is probably best exemplified by Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus Christ carry his cross.

I mean, that's just physical work, Jesus could have carried his own damn cross if he'd been super-strong like Samson. (Possible bible fanfic idea? Make Jesus basically Samson, see how it pans out.)

But you're saying we can't quell our own anxieties. No auto-quelling. This is an interesting insight, although I think you overstate it because some auto-quelling seems to be possible. I am not very social, nor very anxious, but I suppose I take comfort in the output of others.

In fact you can see video games that way: an opportunity to accept other people (game creators) making your life better, relieving your stress and anxiety.

It's not the physical act but the intent behind it that gives it meaning and value and power.

Well the intent behind it wouldn't have been meaningful at all if Jesus had been stronger, so this example doesn't work.

In the entire Passion, Jesus represented every individual person, the weakest, the most vulnerable, the guilty, the poor, the abandoned. However you treat them is how you treat him in that moment. So you can try to make that argument for him in context, but then you'd have to make the same argument for every instance where you could help someone but try to argue that you shouldn't have to. If an old lady falls and breaks a bone, will you call the hospital or blame her for not taking better care of her bone health? If you find a child crying in an alley, will you bring it to the authorities, or leave it there so you can look for the mom and find a way to blame her? People are meant to be helped, not victim-blamed. That's a very large point of Jesus and the Crucifixion. Whatever you do to him, you do to others, and whatever you do to the least in the world, you do to Him.

Well nobody deserves blame for being a scrawny little weakling. However it's still technically possible to get stronger, which puts a hole in your assertion that it's impossible to improve one's own situation. It might very well be better if we help one another rather than trying exclusively to help ourselves (consider what Adam Smith had to say about the division of labor). But self-help and self-reliance still exist, when it comes down to it.

I don't know why you're being down voted.

Life absolutely is a nightmare. We live and struggle and people die horrible deaths for no reason. Children suffer. Then we die.

It's what you do with that. Give up? Or try to make your small part of the bullshit better for yourself and those around you?

Your point is 100% valid.

Don't worry about downvotes here, they don't matter.

Giving up is never the right answer. Life is hard, but if nothing else, this fact becomes an opportunity to make it less hard for others, which in itself is a very worthwhile goal.

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