The gentle art of being constantly down

[Fabiano]

Bessy,

o I haven’t lost my mother. She’s still alive and if she would be dead, I don’t think I’d be strong enough to mention this fact. It was just a supposition.

And of course, as you have probably realized from my preview posts, I don’t give a damn to “PhD” or things like that. Thank you for your words.

[Bessy]

Fabiano,

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I do feel that your honesty here is important. There are SO many threads and poems written about those of us who are down. I have lived my life down… but addressing it is the thing and if you do that regularly it will help. I have grown fond of some therapists here, but in real life I don’t trust their judgement any more than my own.

It does seem sad that so many of your quotes are about death and giving up - I don’t know you, but I don’t want you to give up. You have purpose here in life, and you should find it. It might take a drastic change on your part… a divorce, a move out of the country in which you live, change in job, dumping negative people in your life. SOMETHING is dragging you down, and you should try to find it and get rid of it.

May you find peace today, Fabiano

[Fabiano]

I’m sorry that you have never known your mother. That’s painful. I can’t even imagine my life without her close to me- it’d be unberable.

Believe me, Bessy, therapists and psychologists are of no use when you really need them. I have stated that nobody can really help us but ourselves. That’s the plain truth.

What drags me down, Bessy, is not only the fact that my life seems to be meaningless. But also the fact that all our problems, all our suffering is in vain. I feel guilty because I feel the sunrays shining on me and I can’t be happy for being alive, because tomorrow it will be raining again, and everything will be sad- and empty again. I am glad that you used to be depressed but now you are not. Believe me, I don’t like to see people upset and sad. I wish everyone would be really happy. And I think, I believe, that if most people don’t seem to be happy, I don’t have the right to be so. That does not mean that I am going to kill myself briefly (as it may seem) because I feel too tired to kill myself. And I don’t think a change in my life would change the way things are. But life is still here. My heart is still beating. Sometimes it seems to be my curse, sometimes I feel almost…“glad” for that…I think you understand me, don’t you?

[celox]

@Fabiano

All I know, Celox, is that sometimes I feel completely lost and destroyed- a man with no god, no goal, no reason to wake up or to go to sleep, a man with no past and no future. In other words, nothingness.

You look at it as meaningless, I look at it as freedom. No god, no goal, no reason, means that you can do whatever you want – it couldn’t get any better.

I look at other faces and see the same emptiness. Maybe that’s just the way meaninglessness affects us. Who can know how much harm can be brought by the fact that we are useless and meaningless? Our bodies may not reflect that, but and our minds? I see that most of us are unbalnced and sad, as unbalanced and sad as me.

If there is no meaning, but I create meaning, then what do I care if that meaning does not come from God? The fact is that if there was meaning, but I could replace it with my own, I would have done so. Why should I let God decide over my life if I don’t have to (and he doesn’t punish/reward/persuade me)?

You try to point out that waht affects others don’t affect me. As I have already said to Russiantank, that is not true. If you really believe that you could ever live in a sick world without being sick, you must take at reality a more honest look.

If I’m sick, but never feel it, then what do I care? I agree that, in many ways, the world is a horrible place. But if I can live a happy life in this imperfect world, then why not? You may define me as “sick”, but that’s only a subjective definition. I don’t suffer if the world is sick, because the world is not part of me. The closest I would come to defining myself as “sick”, would be when I’m in pain – and it just so happens, that in general, I am not.

There’s no exit for us, Celox. That’s the way I feel. I feel like giving up not only life, but existence. I think that we all ought to do that, that would solve all our problems.

Yes, it would remove all problems. But it would also take away everything else. I prefer to live, and that’s all the reason I need.

Of course, everything becomes easier when we can reduce life to a philosophical problem. But reality is not so simple. Reality does not give a damn to Philosophy

Reality does not conform to philosophy, but philosophy should conform to reality. In reality we want pleasure and happiness, so why not create a philosophy that can bring us that? In reality we can’t feel the pain of others, so why create a philosophical lie that say we can?

So, I can bear life if I take a philosophical look at it (I can chose the best way, will I look at it like Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius or Kant), but I can’t simply bear life if I look at what it really is.

You are not looking at reality, you are looking at your image of reality. You define the pain of others as a problem for yourself, when it doesn’t have to be. You define the behaviour of men as evil, when it’s just behaviour, and evil does not exist.