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

Dumar_sl said:

but the types of roads and to where: not culture itself, but the particular one, this one. And this one is pretty awful if you're talking about mental health and freedom of the individual to explore his or her potential.

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Yeah, as someone who is currently majoring in three fields and paying about a 3rd the price of other people to do so because of Pell grants, someone who, by the way, dropped out of high school at 15 (16 legally but I hadn't seriously gone to school in over a year at that point) to party and get high and "experience real experiences", I can assure you, first hand, that the most real experiences I've had have been exploring my true potential, and very little to nothing has gotten in my way of doing that, exceptmyself

It doesn't ignore but incorporates. People aren't sheep because they're sheep, but because they choose to be - it's much more comfortable and beneficial in terms of happiness to be.

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People aren't sheep. They're people. They very concept of calling people sheep, or sheeple, or whatever, is condescending nonsense. It literally says "Your experiences are not valid because they do not fit my conceptions of what they should be". That's unfair, and coming from a person who quotes Marx chapter and verse, really hypocritical point of view to be taking.

Andof courseyou don't experience your own life.

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Oh, of course. You say of course as if its just simply true because you say so. But its not. I cut the cord on my children, separating them from their mother at birth. With my own two hands. I earned my A's and B's in my classes with my own efforts, no one else did that for me. Every time I smoked a joint or drank a beer or dropped a hit of acid, I did that. Someone else didn't do that for me. Every dog I've raised, I raised with my own efforts, and taught them to sit and shake and lay down etc with my own energy and time. No one else did that for me. And just because I may have watched a Superbowl sometime, and been happy that someone made a touchdown that won the game for my team (this is a non true story actually I don't like sports and don't have a team, period, and never care when someone makes a touchdown) doesn't mean that my experiences, both real and by proxy, are invalid.

The proof of this is littered in every part of society. You yourself don't experience getting the touchdown at the game, the crazy finale kiss in the romantic comedy, or sadness at the latest celeb breakup in the tabloids. But you feel something when you see them. It's manufactured for you.

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This isn't proof of anything, at all. Not even a little. You can't take one or two experiences which are manufactured, declare that these are the only experiences in life, and that since they are manufactured, nothing is real and everything is a lie. That's called selective sampling. I don't experience the touchdown in the football game, but I do experience raising two children from babies to nearing teens now, and no one did that for me. We didn't send them to some fucking babysitter, day care, or anything of the like. We did that. That's OUR real experience.

There's no good reason, and it's a terrible tragedy that it does. Manufacturing blankets is wholly different than manufacturing feelings. One of the major defects of modern society is that it manufactureseverything. And this manufacturing has a serious detrimental effect on mental health.

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1. Again, our society didn't manufacture my children. But even if they had, say we had invitro fertilization or the like, would those children's lives be less valid because of it?
2. "And this manufacturing has a serious detrimental effect on mental health" -Citation required, and by citation I mean I want to see real, quantified, peer reviewed studies that show that manufacturing products makes people insane.

It does make it less real and more fake by its very definition.

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No, it doesn't. This is a etymylogical fallacy.

I can't go for a walk in the forest near my condo and find a company's stock, for example.

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These are two unrelated events. First and foremost, that companies' stock isn't being built from fucking supernatural flying spaghetti monster powers. Everything you consume is manufactured from....natural products. But you're really off on a tangent trying to defend what is simply a naturalist fallacy. That because something isn't "natural" by your perception, it isn't real, valid, or moral. Of course, your view is extremely limited, and again, extremely Christianized. Humans are not a force separate from nature. Of course your argument implicitly asserts that humans are above, outside of, and different from the natural world, and therefore, anything we create, even if we create from materials garnered in the natural world, by some magic force, the mere fact that we altered it and touched it, makes it unnatural. This is of course nonsense. You should take some chemistry classes to understand why this is. And read the first like twenty chapters of Genesis in the Bible, to understand where the idea that humans are separate and above nature comes from, because that is what you are arguing. We are part of nature. The ants aren't separate from nature because they built an ant hill, and we aren't separate from nature because we built skyscrapers and went to the Moon.

It doesn't exist in reality outside of humans producing and ascribing value to it

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So? This is literally all humans are and do. They make tools, and ascribe meaning to things. If it wasn't our TV shows, it would be our cave paintings. These exact types of topics and discussions are why I chose to do anthropology, biology and chemistry. It has allowed me a great understanding of how humans interrelate, and ascribing meaning is literally one of the primary defining characteristics of being a human being. There's literally nothing wrong with it. You're engaging in the intellectual equivalent of lamenting the fact that we have opposable digits and walk upright. Take away ascribed meaning, take away culture, all you're left with is, at best, taller, balder Chimpanzees. You're lamenting ourHUMANNESSDumar.

The question of whether it's bad or wrong is another from how real it is. Manufacturing everything, abstractifying everything into a product to consume, is very mentally unhealthy for individuals in a society.

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1. Citation required.
2. This entire argument is a semantics game at this point. Humans are tool making creatures. If we lived 200,000 years ago, and someone banged two rocks together and made an axe, this argument would play out like this

Caveman 1: "Oh Grogg, this object you've made it is so useful, I can cut trees and make fires and kill animals and prepare them for eating so much easier now!"
Caveman 2: "THIS IS AN ABOMINATION! YOU'VE DISTURBED NATURE AND DESTROYED OUR SPECIES FOREVER!"

I think it was Plato who played this sort of game you're playing, when writing was becoming common place in Greece, some philosopher, maybe not Plato but one of them, argued that this was a terrible thing, if everyone wrote everything down, no one would ever need to remember anything any more, and our entire species would become dumber as a result. We're at the point technologically where memory is virtually not even necessary anymore, we simply use computers to do it for us, and yet we're infinitely smarter as a species even if individually we're slightly dumber, because we offload large portions of our thinking capacity to machines now. This is the Singularity. The future. And its not unhealthy at all. In fact, its evolution at its most succinct and powerful.

What they experience doesn't come from their own life, but from a product bought and sold on a market: they buy the excitement of the touchdown and the kiss, and this is not conducive to living a fully healthy life.

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First, this is repetition now, first of all who are you to say their experiences aren't their own, and secondly, just because someone experienced happiness in someone else's achievement, doesn't mean that their own life experiences don't exist or aren't valid.

This is seen everywhere and to further and further levels of ridiculous abstractified absurdity. I don't even need to communicate with my future partner before I pick her out, know her interests, her physical details, from the internet on sites like OKC. Human beings are products in modern America, and you're sitting here telling me this this transformative process institutionalized by our culture is not fake, is not wrong? My hubris is gigantic because our situation is completely fucked up, wrong, and insane.

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This here is nonsense. First of all no relationship where two people just pick each other out randomly from a website will ever work long term. I've been in the same relationship since I was 17 years old, and I'm going on 34 this coming year, so you can take a guy who has spent about half his total life married before 35's word on that. Secondly, this process isn't fake, or wrong, or a sign our society is on its last legs, its just stupid, desperate people being stupid and desperate. Before the internet they all went to bars, Dumar, and hooked up and banged and shat out kids and before bars they all hung out at the village well and before that Grogg and Og raped the shit out of Thugg because they could because society and law and order didn't exist. This isn't some new phenomena. Stupid people have been hooking up through desperate, pathetic means for as long as prostitution and adultery have existed. Hell even the great apes do this shit out in the jungle.

I never said that. I never said all depressed people see it accurately, or that all people that do perceive reality accurately are depressed. I said if you do seek or see the world as it truly is, then it's likely you'll be depressed and alienated.

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This is an assertion that is simple to turn on its head, which is that if you're a person who tends to negative feelings and thoughts, all you will see in the world, your subjective "truth" will tend towards self selecting only the negative. Its a self fulfilling prophecy. If you seek negativity, you will find it, that will reinforce your conclusions, until you convince yourself no one else can see the world for how it truly is. The world is just a fucking rock, floating in space, with organic material growing on it because sunlight. That's all the world "truly" is. Everything else is solely what you make of it.

You certainly can understand truth and be a happy, social-seeking person, and I have been on occasion as have others. But you feel as if you're lying to your mind: playing some strange game that isn't real, some type of dream where interactions hold no meaning because the interactions themselves are based on things that aren't real (like cheering together at a sports game, for ex). If you can do it, awesome, but I'm not sure why you want to.

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You don't feel this way if you do not have a serious mental illness, no. Most people do not lie to themselves on a daily basis and do not live in a world where they feel their every human interaction is superficial bullshit. The ones that do are either attention whoring women, or people with serious mental illnesses, paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.

If there are objective, healthy physical states for your body, then so equally are there valid, objective healthy mental states for your mind.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Also a false premise. There are not objective healthy physical states for the body. Its all relative. If you're 550 pounds and bed ridden, it is objectively unhealthy for you to get up and try and run a mile, you won't make it, and you'll probably die. Health in every context is subjective and relative to the situation and circumstances at hand in the individual subject under observation.