Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

Untreated clinical depression. You guys are making me sad that there are so many of you here, willing to just give up without trying. And this condition is probably fixable, too.

chaos_sl said:

willing to just give up without trying.

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Without tryingwhat, is the question? As that article said, if you can objectively point to the ridiculousness, alienation, and overall mental unhealthiness of society, if your mind can objectively look at these facts of reality as they are, does it make any sense to try andadjustto them?

That's actually even more insane.

fanaskin_sl said:

yes it's insane that we don't kill ourselves because life is hard.

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I recommend everyone to read this. It's not about hard, it's about what really is mentally healthy, which is not adjustment to our modern society in any way shape or form. If you have some form of depression, you're probably healthier than most.

The Pathology of Normalcy

hodj_sl said:

Communists aren't allowed to also be nihilists Dumar, its too bleak a worldview.

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Haha real Communists, absolutely. I'm hardly a nihilist. A lot of post-Marxists like the one above deal with the manufactured meanings of life told to us by our (capitalist) society. I consider myself a humanist in the critical theory/Frankfurt school of thought - i.e., the removal of propaganda in all its forms and what truly is best for human beings. There is a point to life, but the radical hedonistic ones shown to us are not even close to it.

If you have the cognitive ability or, shall I say, mental ambition and fortitude to reach that level of thought, and that level includes a breaking down of whatmodern society really is, its constituent parts, and the function of those parts, if you read enough of those kind of books and reach that type of realization, youshouldbe depressed.

Sitting down going through Kapital on a Friday night instead of clubbing with your friends, bringing up the book above during a conversation on fav reads with your pals at Starbucks, these kinds of activities will lead to depression, to alienation, to not being adjusted to what normal is in modern society. You're supposed to read Harry Potter, supposed to get drunk on a Labor Day afternoon (see Araysar's link about this "holiday" in the Political Thread). You're supposed to do these activities and ignore as best you can the truth behind them. Looking at truth, any real truth, puts you to terms with yourself and how you think and why you think that way, and that vis a vis a society that teaches you wrongly in so many ways, is very fucking depressing.

So get depressed. Get clincically depressed. It's good for you to let some truth in your mind.

I'd forgotten that R.E.M. was sort of the Eurythmics of the 90's.

That song and Red Rain by Peter Gabriel are great songs to listen to about once every five years.

fanaskin_sl said:

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I prescribe to stoicism, you can't always control what the world will hand you, life is a journey, emotions are irrational, keep calm and make the best of it.

Meditations by emperor marcus aurellius

Facing Things Stoically: the Stoic recipe for remaining calm

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The book I linked isn't a self-help book or about clinical depression.

It's an introduction to a scientific analysis of society, little by little, and shows with each example how truly insane it is, from money, to sports, to religion, to feelings of love, how utterly insane and mentally unhealthy our definitions and our actions based on those definitions really are.

fanaskin_sl said:

life is a journey, emotions are irrational, keep calm, apply reason and make the best of it.

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Damn straight.

Wisdomandsome rippin' fuckin' geetar solos.

fanaskin_sl said:

yes I agree with you the world is irrational and absurd, but that's 0 reason to kill yourself.

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But to me and others, it's all the reason. I would have zero reservations about seppuku'ing myself, but I would want to do it in some exciting way. I'm probably a great candidate for a clinical depression diagnosis, but I still love to try and feel things, adrenaline from sky diving, seeing another 7 summit, etc. An interesting note is all of these things involve no other human beings or minimal interaction with them.

It makes no sense to try and live a mentally healthy life in a mentally unhealthy society, knowing what you know if you read that kind of literature. After reading so much, it's like a red pill. You can't go back. The illusions all fall away and you're left with reality as it is.

Ever tried to have a conversation about dialectics with friends? It doesn't work. All of these people claim to love learning and reading, but what they love to learn and read is never what's important. They're too plugged in in a society that provides them the answers they need to the big questions, and when you bring those up, it often gets awkward, and I often laugh because people are so absolutely clueless - about everything.

Try asking someone about Labor Day tomorrow as a example test, a Macophile at StarBucks with his Vonnegut and latte, see what he says.

hodj_sl said:

Anyone can look critically at any aspect of any society and declare the whole thing broken and hopeless. That sort of negativity isn't science. Science is about hope, if its about anything, its about the capacity for mankind to take what its been given and turn it into something worthwhile to humans themselves.

We are no more insane or sane than we choose to be based on how we define those terms in the first place, normality is not a fixed point around which everything revolves, rather it is a comparative measure.

Our society has its insane moments but we aren't sacrificing war slaves to make sure the sun rises tomorrow morning so I think we'll be alright the way we are.

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There is an objective definition for mental health outlined in the book I linked above. And our society is not even close.

And we are, but it's not as conspicuous (and less honest actually).