this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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『triggered rant』
I get it, though. The US state and economy are antagonistic to its people. If you're just going to be funneled into bonded labor for some billionaire's vanity project and there is no joy or escape, why live? This is why FOXCONN has anti-suicide nets all around their labor compounds.
The suicide rate in the US is 14 people per 100K and has been steadily rising.You want less suicide, make the world better. Or don't and just hate the game
『/triggered rant』
If you have a right to live then you have a right to die. It shouldn't be taboo to talk about suicide in a not negative way.
Heh. I was depressed in 1974. I wasn't doomscrolling then.
If anything, doomscrolling validates the suspicions I had in the 80s that things are going very, very wrong while my parents, instructors, ministers, etc. are lying to me that they're not.
Maybe it helps that person to talk about it?
I think it is pretty fucked to tell someone not to talk about something they are struggelin with because it could affect someone negativ. What about the negativ effect it can have on a person not being able to talk about that?
How do you weight that?
"Stop talking about killing yourself and the reasons why because you making it harder for anyone to live a good life." Yikes.
I think more people knowing about the state of the world and getting depressed over it could lead to change.
"Just use the ostrich algorithm sad person it will be fine"
Let's skip the news, boy
I'll make some tea
The Arabs and the Jews, boy
Too much for me
I think you misunderstand the correlative relationship between doom content and living a good life (or the inability to do so). Here in the States, 80% of people live in precarity. That is to say we're all either worried about being able to afford a living, about the security of our job, the security of our home, the security of our food, whether we'll still be able to retain contact with family and loved ones, and so on.
For instance, my wife, who has been a high-performance personal assistant for a contractor's executive officer for thirteen years is on the verge of being laid off, because the old boss is retiring and the new boss (whose skills are engineering, not management) doesn't know how to get along with the old way. (My wife knows how to do everything in the entire company, so it's not that she can't be placed.) So for us, it's income precarity. It's going to be an It's A Wonderful Life Christmas in which everything is on the precipice until it falls or she is placed elsewhere.
Why are so many of us in perpetual crisis? This is where doomscrolling comes in. It tells us what's going on that has consequences reverberating in our own lives. Doomscrolling actually helps because it reminds us that we're in these straits not because we fucked up somewhere (which is what we've been taught with decades of personal responsibility rhetoric) but because other things are going on. Considering how I've been trained so often that I'm to blame for my mental illness, it's actually a relief that there are valid reasons to feel crummy about things, and it's not just a neurological anomaly.
(In the case of my wife's company, the Fed raised interest rates, so companies are reticent to borrow and are delaying projects with future returns. They aren't looking to build hotels and townhouses, which is what her company specializes in. But there are public transit projects going up, so there are some prospects with other contractors who will need project proposal writers, which my sweetheart is very good at.)
Most of us aren't living a good life largely because of the high levels of precarity. It'd be super if our government was willing to invest more in social safety nets rather than just military technology and corporate subsidies, but that's not going to happen so long as our federal and state governments are controlled by oligarchies rather than serving public interests. It all ties together, and doomscrolling (in my case, compounded with research in to what are real factors vs. what are rumors) informs me the picture is way bigger than I am, and it's better to come to terms that I may lose everything for completely arbitrary reasons, than to imagine God is watching over me (and not the countless others contending with famine or morbid transmissible disease).
If your ability to live a good life is affected by random internet comments about general world topics it is in all seriousness a good idea to speak with someone about that.
I was depressed in elementary. I didn't even have the internet then.
Doomscrolling didn't make me more depressed but it sure gave it some context.
I've long ruled that I cannot play or win by competition but collaboration. I, for one, believed my parents and teachers and ministers when they suggested we were trying to live in a society rather than a circus of gladiators massacring each other to the delight of elites.
There's a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth in which the announcer (not the principal) expresses well wishes to, and high hopes for those students soon to be graduating, but noting one species who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead... That's us. That's what we do. Jobs are fought over by dozens of qualified applicants, each of whom face hunger, the elements and law enforcement if they lose. We're playing musical chairs like it's a Squid Game.
I refuse to live in a society where, in order for my success and comfort, a dozen others must suffer and fail. I'm not, to paraphrase Vonnegut, a tin solder some rich kid got for Christmas. What greater glory is there in being a disposable, interchangeable, replaceable part in some billionaire's vanity project over choosing my own fate? If anything, the mess my corpse might leave on some state building's marble floor could serve to express that no, the system cannot continue as it does.
As it is, I do have reason to live to see tomorrow. There are people who care about me, who would grieve and suffer if I were to vanish. There are people who depend on me for emotional and practical support when I can't be there financially.
But we all do live in precarity. There are crises being managed in every ring of this circus. And for 80% of the US, this is normal and accepted.
It's is going to be an It's A Wonderful Life Christmas for my household and family in 2023; either things miraculously come together if luck comes and meets our efforts half-way, but we may find ourselves like a trapeze acrobat plummeting through the air unsure if there's a partner to catch us on the other side.
Whether I am caught safely or plummet without a net, the rest of the world will see it as all part of the show.
Yeah, you're misunderstanding what I'm saying dude. Everything you just said is plainly obvious to anyone with eyes. I'm saying that killing yourself and "competing" within the system are the same thing, letting the system win. And you have a third option, which you describe as "collaborating with others" (pretty accurate I might add), by which the system can be defeated. But if you kill yourself or assume the system is infallible, you are complicit in allowing the system to continue to fester and make everyone else miserable.
The working class has always had the power to end this when acting as a collective, but hyperindividualism and decades of propaganda have convinced people that it is impossible. People like you, who could've truly made a difference but ultimately chose to suffer in silence believing it was what was best for their family. Even those who are aware enough to recognize these problems still are crushed under the weight of the sheer number of problems to solve. This is by design, it makes it more intimidating to overcome and prevents anyone from even attempting. Yet the system will crumble on its own sooner or later, it's already an unstable system built on the impossible dream of infinite expansion. We need only exploit this dream to accelerate the destruction of the system, and as a side effect, the liberation of the oppressed.
Yeah, I'm not keen to blame the degradation of either labor power or the communal ethic on the working class when we have actual accounts of organized efforts of the ownership class conspiring to change US culture into the property-is-sacred crap that it is today.
Nor am I going to think of the system as some anthropomorphic opponent who is besting me at sports. The system certainly isn't winning, what with establishment resorting to fascism in order to preserve the current power structures, and meanwhile the species is driving a global extinction event which puts even itself at high risk within the next few centuries.
In the States, every year over 40,000 men and women kill themselves successfully, that is, they die as a result, and we track that it wasn't accidental or homicide. Another 120,000 in the US try and fail but end up in the hospital, or being caught in time. None of these people care about whether the system wins or loses. They care that their own misery stops. And the US and state governments care about as much as 4Chan edgelords that we off ourselves at a higher rate than Japan (though to be fair, Japan is actively seeking to change centuries of culture that regards suicide as acceptable).
Mutualist organization takes time, and it's not going to do anything for people in need today. If not letting the system win works to keep you alive to see tomorrow, that's great. But it's not an argument for why to go on living when our resources have run out and we're now exposed to the elements.