there’s a difference between a one or two or even ten off exposure to the brutality of life, where various people in your life will support you and help you acclimate to it
Versus straight up mainlining it for 8 hours a day
I get your idea but in the context of this topic I think you're overreaching
You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!
EDIT: If you’re interested what actually happened is that I was missing the prerequisite early childhood experience that enables one to feel secure in reality. If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so. For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke
OP got spooked to stop suffering and love life instead? Is that your cautionary tale?
My point really is that you can feel one way for your entire life and then suddenly feel a different way. I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.
The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.
YMMV = not everyone hates life
I’m not sure why people act coy when a straightforward mirroring of their own comment is presented. “What could this mean?” Maybe the hope is that the other person will bore the audience by explaining the joke?
> I don't look up to Freud and psychoanalysis doesn't work for everyone! I don't even necessarily recommend it.
Talking about your infant parental relationship as the be-all-end-all looks indistinguishable from that.
> > If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so.
.
> I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.
Except for people who have “this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism”.
> > For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke
Which must paint everyone who defends “suffering” in the Vedic sense. Since that was what you were replying to. (Saying that reality is suffering on-the-whole is not the same as “I’m depressed [, and please give me anecdotes about how you overcame it]”.)
> > The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.
I don’t know how broad your brush is. But believing in the originally Vedic (Schopenhauer was inspired by Eastern religions, maybe Buddhism in particular) concept of “suffering” is not such a fragile intellectual framework that it collapses once you heal from the trauma when your mother scolded you while potty training at a crucial point in your Anal Stage of development.
> YMMV = not everyone hates life
Besides any point whatever.
> There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
The two largest Vedic religions both have hundreds of millions of followers. Is Jainism that different from them in this regard? I know Jainism is very pacifist but on the question of suffering.
Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.
Even the wording is wrong - those aren’t accidents, it is something we accept as byproduct of a car-centric culture.
People feel it is acceptable that thousands of people die on the road so we can go places faster. Similarly they feel it’s acceptable to traumatise some foreigners to keep social media running.
On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.