That must be so. I read Toews’ novel All My Puny Sorrows not long ago and was struck by how painful existence was to the sister who could not bear it. That makes sense to me. Pain is pain and too much pain demands a way out. It isn’t all about intellectual or philosophical justifications. I guess I just haven’t experienced that much pain. But sometimes you hear it talked about in a way that seems to suggest it is a principled thing to do. That is what I cannot wrap my head around. On purely rational grounds, who am I to decide what the minimally sufficient conditions should be for choosing life? Pain makes more sense. It is the hidden premise which motivates anguished reasoning.
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Not always.Sometimes is because of an ilness. Or a combination of those two.In my case with therapy finally it got way better. Although i still refuse to take medication i talk with my counselor even trough the internet and makes me feel at ease.But sometimes when things go from bad to worse it seems like the only solution .As a temptaion kinda thing
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I’m glad you’re keeping your balance through it with your therapist’s help.
Do you like to stop taking medications because of unpleasant side effects? I had Muslim friend who would go off his meds because he felt he deserved to suffer, almost like taking the meds was cheating God’s will. For all its vaunted advantages perhaps that is one potential downside to religious belief?
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If you study christianity and since im an EC here in biologos that would be a foolish to do for . But no thats not the case. A phobia was created for antidepresants because of my aunt. When my uncle died she was devestated. After the medication she was even worse. Like a zombie. Minimal food and minimal water. She would go days without talking to anyone. All the others asure me that there are countless antidepresants or that because it didnt worked for her doesnt mean it wont work for me etc etc but since then i dont want to have nothing to do with them.
Spoken as someone who has clearly always enjoyed a certain degree of privilege and agency. This is not the reality of many people in the world. That doesn’t make suicide the answer, but for many many people, life certainly does suck by most standards. Joy is still possible, but endurance will be a part of their life indefinitely.
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That characterizes one of my main responses to the Chesterton piece I quoted too; the powerful feeling that life is there to at least potentially be grabbed by the horns may be a nice sentiment for the mentally vivacious and those of at least some stimulating means of one kind or another, but it is not a universally enjoyed perspective. Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” is an irreverent poke at all that. Not that this negates all Chesterton’s observations, but I do feel he only got one side of it there.
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A lot of people tell themselves that. But you find only some people doing that in every circumstance from the very richest and most privileged to the poorest, and that is how I know it is just nonsense. The reality may be that life doesn’t give them what they think they want, expect, or think they should have, which is something else entirely. It is like two people going to the exact same movie and one enjoyed it while the other says it sucked.
This is not about judgement. It is about answers. Endurance isn’t an answer. When you have a problem with depression, the solution is not just to “suck it up,” the solution is find a way to get rid of or alleviate the problem of depression. It is really about understanding that life doesn’t suck no matter what your circumstances. Sometime that realization comes from meeting someone in worse circumstances who do not tell themselves that life sucks.
And what privilege is it that I am supposed to have? Would that be the privilege of having 5 toothaches at the same time because I just don’t have the money to do anything about them? Privilege may be the excuse some people use but it is just an excuse. The proof that this is nonsense is that those who say life sucks is found in only some of the people in every circumstance.
I am well aware that people have the agency to convince themselves they have no agency.
One doesn’t require control over life in order for life not to suck. That just sounds like another one of the expectations and excuses people have for telling themselves that life sucks.
Haven’t seen that movie yet. Ah… something else to look forward to…
I like Chesterton’s analysis, but I don’t expect that it would be immediately consoling to a depressed young Christian. Upon contemplation, though, it would hopefully add to reasons to persist. (Psalm 143, on the other hand, exudes empathy.)
So from your perspective life is of course good because we can find a way to fix everything thats going wrong. I dont know if you ever been in a very difficult situation with no solutions but if you havent trust me its not black and white
“Persist”
Ah!!! now that is a word I like! “Endurance” not so much in this context. But persistence is something we need in everything we do.
Empathy is good. Comfort too. Sympathy however… Some people feed on that. They like to play the role of the poor helpless victim. And then what do you do? Give them the sympathy they want or encourage them to find a different role in life? A little of both, maybe?
No, its not black and white!
The privilege of living securely in the first world where you do not face the prospect of starvation, persecution, trafficking, extortion, environmental injustice, and death on a daily basis, as many people do. It is rarely as simple as “just get out of your situation” for the vast majority of humans on earth.
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This is the problem. By @mitchellmckain view these people can go from “hide for your life” to “look how good my life is” in no time. Some do but majority dont.
I don’t believe you.
I don’t believe that the vast majority of humans on the earth are victims of starvation, human trafficking, and extortion on a daily basis. Death is a part of life, which a lot people like myself remind themselves constantly and perhaps that is one of the reasons we know that life doesn’t suck. Persecution and “environmental injustice” are too relative and a matter of perception, just like privilege and so they sound a lot like excuses to me.
Are some people terrorized and victimized? Absolutely, and that is something for the rest of us to do something about rather than just laze about saying life just sucks for some people.
But I don’t do any such thing. My words above show otherwise. What I do say is that we go from “life sucks” to doing something about it… People hiding for their life are not the people saying “life sucks” quite the contrary!
I said “as many people do,” not the “vast majority of the world.”
Ten percent of the world (736 million people) lives in “extreme poverty.” In sub-Saharan Africa, it’s over 40% of the population. 27% of the world lives with constant food insecurity.
24.9 million people had been trafficked into slavery/forced labor (as of 2017).
One third of the world’s urban population lives in slums (that’s over 1.4 billion people).
100 million people were displaced and became refugees between 2010-2020 due to war, famine, natural disaster, or violent persecution.
Domestic violence affects 12 million people a year in the US alone, and one third of the women worldwide report being beaten or raped by a domestic partner.
20% of the women in the world have been raped.
8% of men and 20% of women globally have been sexually abused as children.
12.6 million people a year die because of the polluted environments they live in (1 in 4 global deaths).
3.6% of the global GDP in 2009 was generated through extortion and organized crime.
The world is really messed up and people are suffering everywhere. Trauma workshops are now the number one service that global development NGOs are being asked to provide.
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Perhaps a big part of the problem here is that this is a matter of faith for me… quoting myself from elsewhere
Around that time my sister attempted suicide and I think that helped more than anything to push me more solidly into the theist worldview with my equivalence between a faith in God and the existential faith that life was worth living.
Trying to convince me otherwise as you have been doing is like trying to convince most of you that God doesn’t exist.
You can add this to your reasons for believing all this crap.
I refuse. Life isn’t just about objective observation. Life is subjective participation. Go ahead and lay down and die with a “life sucks” attitude. I would be dead already with an attitude like that. I simply refuse, no matter what, and that is all there is to it.
Nobody here is saying anything remotely like that, Mitch. I think the gist of the push back here is just to convince you that your own narrative isn’t everybody’s narrative - and that some have a whole lot more obstacles between them and what is commonly seen as “a decent life” than you do, and so a little understanding is always in order if they don’t all survive and push through into the commendable approach to life that you and most of us have learned to embrace. Whatever hardships we’ve all had to face in our own way, the fact that we have the luxury to spend time here on the internet now whining about it with each other already means we had a whole lot more unmerited opportunity thrust our way by our own life circumstances than a great many others in the world. And yes - many of them will survive and do fine. And many affluent people will suicidally leave this life in nihilistic despair. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all claim. It only means you should be able to recognize that some had a lot more to work through than you or any of us here did to survive to any decent life, and that a whole lot of them understandably and tragically don’t survive.
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It kind of sounds like you are proposing that the solution to the problem of evil and injustice in the world is just a manly, take charge, attitude. Glad that worked for you.
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But that is a mischaracterization. I don’t have any such personality. It is more one of simply acceptance and taking what joy you can in things, focusing on the good things rather than the bad. What you are talking about sounds like the “suck it up” attitude which I have been condemning from the beginning.
Acceptance and persistence? Yes. With the word “endurance,” it sounds to me like you are already defeated.
I quite agree. Life is finding your own answer to things. BUT it IS finding an answer – WHATEVER works for you. Just endurance doesn’t sound like an answer at all. A little endurance yes… but that is the same as persistence, isn’t it? Again this is exactly what I have said from the beginning. And that is why the “push back” just looks like an extreme “life just suck, so accept it” response.
If you want to say “life is hard,” then you have my complete agreement. But life SHOULD be hard. If life was easy then we would be sheep.
The word endurance was brought into the conversation in the context of 2 Corinthians 4:17 and the biblical idea of persevering in faith through suffering, so I don’t know why you decided that endurance means being defeated. You implied that no one should need to endure anything; they should leave, fight, or pursue other endless possibilities to change the situation in a path of their own choosing. You insisted everyone had the necessary agency to do those things.
Endurance may not be “an answer” to depression or suffering, but it is going to be an ongoing part of many people’s reality because you are greatly overestimating the level of choice lots of people have in changing their circumstances.
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As one speaker I heard said, the biggest determinant of success is the accident of birth.
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