Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SCD]

1)  In wartime, every body is essential
2)  No one should ever discount themselves before signing up.  That's what the checks and balances are for!
3)  That incompetence is created by enviroment on personality, as opposed to personality alone. 

Besides, worst come worst, there's always a lot of potatoes that need to be peeled for the troops.

[Doom]

We have a Remedies! thread for random questions and random answers, maybe we could use a "School of Hard Knocks" thread to teach people stuff from a source more desirable than over-expectant parents.

[Guild]

I don't mean to trivialize the situation, but this is the fourth or fifth time Cyan's brought this up.

Attention grab? Maybe, maybe not. But the main thing is that either way he's not going to get the help he needs from this board.

You are claiming to know what he doesn't need in the same breath as telling us that we don't know what he needs.

Just thought I'd point that out.

Maybe he just needs to feel heard.

[Mongrel]

He has been repeating himself at semi-regular intervals for months now.

Sure, maybe we're having some effect, but this is not an indication that we are doing him a world of good.

Even if we assume that we're doing some good, our rate of effectiveness can be effectively measured on a 'per year' basis. I'm pretty sure there are better sources of help.

[SCD]

I can back you up on that regard, and Doom seems to shout out the same deal. 

[Guild]

I'm not saying you're wrong about him probably needing professional help. He said he's taking anti depressants, which implies at least some effort toward professional help, however marginal. What I'm saying is, who cares how much complaining about his life he does in a thread he made to complain about his life in? At the very least it's interesting to read. At the very least it's easily ignored.

[Mongrel]

I'm not saying you're wrong about him probably needing professional help. He said he's taking anti depressants, which implies at least some effort toward professional help, however marginal. What I'm saying is, who cares how much complaining about his life he does in a thread he made to complain about his life in? At the very least it's interesting to read. At the very least it's easily ignored.

That's fair. I just read your post as justifying his not taking more serious steps to resolve his issues. Because yeah, we can all agree he needs help.



Anyway, right before you guys replied, I typed all this bullshit up. And I'll be damned if I let my bitter stories go to waste in a thread about bitching!

You know what? Story time.

Back in university I was peripherally associated with a game club. Being a horrible nerd myself, I hung around with them for something to do often enough, but was never really part of their circle. It was a very large and strong community, with a long history at that school and in that town and many former students still lived in town and participated in the community, in spite of having graduated. Now, some of the folks in it really did qualify as the worst stereotypes of nerd kind. You name it, it was there. But not all of them were like this. 

Anyway, I once made a few comments to one of the prominent regulars about the nature of the club. Her response was that the club was an important and positive thing. It gave folks who were otherwise unaccepted and friendless a place to get together and have some fun, without predjudice, ridicule, or shame.

I accepted this explanation at first, but as I spent more time there, I noticed that the club was in fact a horrible place. The members were spiteful to one another, they would carry grudges outside games for things that had happened in-game. They manipulated, used, and abused one another. They were petty spiteful, immature, emotionally-stunted people (or became that way). They grew more and more distant and detached from the everyday world, their social failures slowly being magnified over time, as if they were trapped in some kind of terrible anti-social echo chamber. It was both depressing and terrifying to see good kids who came to that school mostly okay, leaving as terrible maladjusted creatures. Their mental decline was often mirrored by a physical decline, as many of them gained weight and grew slovenly in their personal habits.

Eventually, the sheer awfulness of the personalities involved overcame my boredom such that I drifted away from them entirely, only occasionally hearing horrible things in passing.

Sure, whatever, I'm horribly biased. Arrogant even. A narcissist, a fool, or whatever else besides. But I do not believe in the 'supportive like-minded subcommunity'. I think that's a poisonus and dangerous illusion. It balkanizes communication, justifies misbehaviour, and reduces us to primitive tribesmen.

So yeah 

[Fortinbras]

How does a depressedy-assed kid get too busy to have a job?  How do you be busy without work?

You know all the stuff by now.  Physical exercise, change where you're at in the world, Get A Doctor, OR flights of angels and that jazz.  I lean toward the former options.

There is only one relevant piece of advice left, kid.  You can read it any way you want.

Grow up and get it done, son.

[Brentai]

Basically the way to get out of depression is find something that absolutely consumes your life.

If you're not depressed, this is awful, because you will become depressed.

If you are depressed, this is okay, because it will keep you distracted.

The idea is that if you're actively doing something, at some point you will trip over something else that you would rather be doing, and do that instead.

Something like WoW is a valid choice, but not necessarily a good one.  I would suggest something more constructive, like volunteer work.  Or bodybuilding, if you're too self-absorbed for that.  Or a menial shit job if that's all you can hack.  Just find something to absolutely throw yourself into, even if it sounds horrible, I can guarantee it's better for your psyche than being bored.

(And yes, the military suggestion ties into this - the fact that it's in their best interest to un-fuck you is probably the #1 reason to join, but the #2 reason is because there's plenty to do, and plenty of guys with guns standing around to make sure you do it.)

Also Mongrel thank you for explaining what it is about this place that makes the Bay Area members like to quit dramatically.

[Mongrel]

You have no idea how much I wished I spent less time on Forums and more time doing something - anything - else.

[Brentai]

Without WFE I would burn myself out in a flurry of uncontrolled productivity.  No, seriously.

[Guild]

im have you tried trolling :D :D

[Mongrel]

im have you tried trolling :D :D

wtf is this shit no u

[Mongrel]

Anyway, In cyan's favour, have any of you ever known someone with really totally cripping depression? See, all these comments of 'man up and go do it' assume that the affected person has enough agency left to do that.

I know at least two people with depression so crippling that they cannot do anything.

One of them copes by simply placing himself at the disposal of other people 24 hours a day. He has coped by literally making himself into a slave. This keeps him busy, employed, and able to continue life, but left to his own devices he basically dies. When he was away at university, he spent literally a year and a half, sitting in his room, leaving his room once a day to eat (the SAME MEAL for a YEAR AND A HALF) until he was kicked out for never having attended a single class after the first month. Now he's a cripple, one marginally able to function, but who has lost all capacity for acting on his own.

I know another fellow in even worse shape. He spent a DECADE living in his parent's living room after high school. He cannot complete even the smallest of goals, always self-sabotaging anything through gross rationalization. He managed to get a job about three years ago, after being mostly sort-of thrown out by his parents. Unable to stand it any longer, he quit a year and a half ago and now lives on his savings from this job (he is so frugal as to make Scrooge McDuck look like Paris Hilton, living on approximately $50-$100 a month, other than rent) He barely eats and lives in his room in darkness 24 hours a day, leaving only to go to the bathroom and to occasionally buy grocieries - which are more like rations, really. Sooner enough, he will have to get another job, at which point the cycle will probably repeat, until he finally loses all moorings and becomes a homeless indigent, commits suicide, or just disappears.

Disclosure: These two people are my oldest friends in this world.

These people are not in any kind of condition to break out of their carefully constructed mental prisons just like that. It's akin to a deep hole. There is a threshold, a depth. Above that threshold, it is possible to combat depression on your own crawling out under your own power, below it you can only be dragged out by powerful forces beyond your control. There is a level of mental illness and depression that will effectively cripple a person more thoroughly than the loss of all four limbs. And it's more common than you think.

I don't pretend to know how deep cyan's personal pit is*.

*_{obvious joke goes here.}

[Fortinbras]

As totally true as that is, it's also true that there's not much we as concerned citizens living inside a box on his desk can do except give good advice and then encourage him over and over to take that advice.

[Doom]

I get the feeling that quite a few cases of such terrifying depression could be solved with the assistance of a true soul-mate, whether best friend or love of life. But yeah, certainly not alone.

I dunno the level of my own hole, truth be told. I just know that sometimes I'll go to work and be thoroughly consumed by an endless loop of everything I've done wrong and suspicion that everyone in my life wishes I was dead and that I will never accomplish anything. I still do perfectly competent work during all this.

Speaking of help from others, it reminds me of the greatest thing I ever read in "How To Make Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie.

"Yet I know, as you know, people who wold think they had committed a crime if they let their families or employees go for six days without food; but they will let them go for six days, and six weeks, and sometimes sixty years without giving them the hearty appreciation that they crave almost as much as they crave food."

Print that quote out and frame it. There are quite a few others in the book too.

I think I've said some variation of this, whether truthfully or in a smart-ass tone since he joined the boards and first complained about his life, but here I go again: cyan, get a job or do something constructive while pursuing your hobbies until you develop the craft, poise, technique and confidence to hopefully do something you love.

I consider procrastination to be my greatest sin and enemy in life.

[Fredward]

I love the last part of this thread. "YOU'RE A WORTHLESS SACK OF SHIT! BUT DON'T KILL YOURSELF! "

Yeah, kid, if you're going to kill yourself, don't do it because a bunch of nerds on the internet told you to, or told you not to. And don't do it because you're depressed. Do it because it's the only thing in your life you can really control, and you've exhausted everything else. And if you don't think you have exhausted everything else, you probably shouldn't. Or maybe you still should. What the hell do I know?

[Doom]

Haha. It'd be nice if he got himself together, but I think at this point we're just generally discussing depression as something to discuss. I was just irritated that even as a joke he'd write to "throw myself in front of a car so that some other jackass gets charged with manslaughter." I'd feel worse that he actually ruined somebody else's life just because he is a baby about his own.

Like, dang dude. I get that your life is devoid of dignity. At least try to go out with some.

Hell apparently he tookignored our advice and has thrown himself into making a Let's Play that I won't watch because it's not on youtube.

[Fredward]

Oh yeah, I completely ignored the last page, because tl;dr and I liked the dichotomy of the responses following his newest sucide threat. Continue.

[Cyan Prime]

Oh yeah, I completely ignored the last page, because tl;dr and I liked the dichotomy of the responses following his newest sucide rant. Continue.