Quote:
Originally Posted by Plan9
Devil's Advocate'd: *snip*
A: What is more real than your own misery? We are all we can ever claim to know for sure and even that's up for debate. And misery, real or imagined, is still misery, no? Suffering either physically or mentally is still suffering and that's just all bad. How is one person to judge another person's agony?
B: The effect on those left behind obviously doesn't matter to the person who is suffering or matters less than their immediate need to not be suffering.
C: One lost contributor is also one less person in the world to consume natural resources and tie up I-66 into Washington on a Monday morning at 0517.
Who is really impressed by potential? Nobody is going to give me a million bucks for potentially having the cure for cancer. Talent is only useful if you're around to use it. We are what we do, not what we can do, might do or should do. The Japanese certainly see suicide very differently than Americans.
/snip
|
A)With the exception of debilitating disease, misery is temporary, even the blackest of it. Yes, it's real but only someone who really believes no one else's suffering is as bad or that it's hopeless takes the short road out and to me that is selfish. "No one knows what I'm going through" is self-centered and a cop-out.
B) Again, completely selfish. Not to mention infantile. The ultimate beg for attention except if the act is successful, the person doesn't get to relish the attention now given.
C) Now that's just silly.
Everyone has some kind of potential-even it's just the potential to piss off everyone else.
Do you have the talent to cure cancer? I said the boy had talent and from the news articles that followed, he had gobs of it. But because two assholes played some dumb prank on an already confused young man, he took the short road. No one ever heard about the other person involved-probably because he wasn't wallowing in some perceived misery culminating in a life-ending show of desperation.
Depression runs in my family along with green eyes and acne. From my grandmother to my mother to me and my sisters and now my daughter, we all experience it, but for whatever reason, unlike Grasshopper Green's family, we wallow, we seek help, we go on. It would be an interesting study to find out why inherited depression tendencies in one family culminate in suicide while the same thing doesn't in another, but it's kinda hard to interview the dead ones.
The Japanese used to (don't know that they still do) would commit Hari-Kari for really dumb reasons. If anything, wallowing in perceived misery outscores "disgracing" the family name.