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Comment by pasteldream | Hacker News Reader

If you accept that “the world and life aren’t particularly pleasant things”, why do you want to prevent suicide?

That implies there's some deep truth about reality in that statement rather than what it is, a completely arbitrary framing.

An equally arbitrary frame is "the world and life are wonderful".

The reason you may believe one instead of the other is not because one is more fundamentally true than the other, but because of a stochastic process that changed your mind state to one of those.

Once you accept that both states of mind are arbitrary and not a revealed truth, you can give yourself permission to try to change your thinking to the good framing.

And you can find the moral impetus to prevent suicide.

It’s not a completely arbitrary framing. It’s a consequence of other beliefs (ethical beliefs, beliefs about what you can or should tolerate, etc.), which are ultimately arbitrary, but it is not in and of itself arbitrary.

I don't mean to imply that it's easy to change or that whatever someone might be dealing with is not unbearable agony, just that it's not a first principle truth that has more value than other framings.

In the pits of depression that first framing can seem like the absolute truth and it's only when it subsides do people see it as a distortion of their thoughts.

I think this is certainly part of the problem. There's no shortage of narcissists in the English speaking world who - if they heard to woes of someone in pain - would be ready to gleefully treat it as an opportunity to pontificate down to them about "stochastic processes" and so on, rather than consider how their lives are.

Of course, only thereby, through being quite as superior to all others and their thought processes as me [pauses to sniff fart] can one truly find the moral impetus to prevent suicide.

Thanks for weighing in gothbro.

Because that's on the whole, but the world isn't uniformly bad - hence the right approach is navigating to where it's at least OK

But naturally, won’t there be people who can’t get to a point where life is okay? Isn’t it deeply unethical to force them to live?

The randomness of the world and individual situations means no one can ever know for sure that their case is hopeless. It is unethical to force them to live, but it is also unethical not to encourage them to keep searching for the light.

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