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  • You can change your (psychological) reaction to everything. All psychological suffering is chosen by yourself and can be stopped if you choose not to suffer.

    Of course this is simple, not easy. Almost no one can do it.

    Most people I meet don't believe this and hate that I'm saying this.

    • Purely as a thought experiment, this is mostly just vacuous logic. Sure, you can kill yourself, or kill everything you love or hate, or make sacrifices that are probably infinitely greater than the suffering itself (you could choose to stop caring about human suffering, most would much rather suffer than do that).

      In practice however this is even worse than vacuous, it's just wrong and insane. You can't choose to not be schizophrenic, physical and psychological pain aren't two neatly distinct categories, saying it's "a choice" is just drawing a completely arbitrary border on where choice starts, and no shit people get angry at you because unless you heavily qualify this kind of statement further, anyone would think you're doing the purest form of bootstrap victim blaming argument possible. Anyone would think of that one time they suffered the most in their lives and you're saying "you chose that, that's on you".

      If I try to be as charitable as I possibly can, I would assume this is an attempt at criticizing self-pity, highlighting that we are often our biggest obstacles to healing and that will plays a greater part in our agency than we recognize. I'd agree with all of that, but that's being really charitable, I don't think your statement makes that case at all.

      • See :D told ya it's unpopular. Yeah, it's "victim blaming" essentially. You might not believe me, but I have been a victim most of my life in many situations. I also have or have had mental disorders.

        In the end, you can only control yourself. And so while it is of course not my fault if I am being abused or whatever (it's the fault of the abuser) it is actually very much my fault if I don't find ways to remove myself from that situation. Of course, every situation is different. The difficulty of "fixing" it, and how to do it, massively differs. But in almost all situations, "suffering" only makes it less likely you'll get out of it. If you feel too bad, most people are more likely to feel powerless, to not think clearly, to be defeatist and so on.

        Life literally always has challenges, things that make you feel bad. No matter how good of a situation someone has, you'll always find people that are miserable in that situation. I'm saying you can actually be fine with your situation, whatever it is.

        • It's not reasonable to assume that everyone has that much control in any situation. Removing yourself from a situation is not always possible. What can you do if it's caused by your environment, like family, school, etc.?

          Life does have challenges & there always exists someone who can be miserable in a given situation. That doesn't mean that everything should be normal.

          You can definitely affect some things & you might be able to choose how you see some other things. Still, some things are outside your control or "as they should be".

          • I've never said that anyone "should" have that much control. In fact I literally said almost no one can do it. The controversial thing is me even suggesting that it is possible.

        • I think the notion of "choice" or "fault" here is a little questionable, I understand your argument broadly (that's what I tried to do in the last paragraph), so maybe it's mostly just a language issue (I don't think saying it is your "fault" or "choice" really means the same thing as saying that it's "up to you").

          But I believe you're contradicting yourself when you say that you both have to act and get out of situation such as abuse (not be defeatist) and but also learn to be fine with the situation (which reads like admitting defeat to me). I think this confusion between an actionable scenario (you can change things around you) and a non-actionable scenario (you can only change your outlook) is at the core of it.

          Regardless I agree that self-pity is an absolute poison, but I'd tend to believe the way you put it is perhaps more controversial (because of what it implies or leaves out) than the point itself. Choosing not to suffer can also be a form of defeatism.

          • Yeah but you can not suffer and still act to get out of the situation is what I'm saying.

    • That ability to make a choice is itself a result of being in the right time+place and receiving the correct guidance+education.

      Like someone who read your comment might look into this and slowly learn to be more resilient, but if that same person doesn't read it, never receives any guidance and has to suffer psychological abuse from those around them, would you really blame them for being the way they are?

      • Obviously, yep. We are all victims of our circumstances and if you never get in contact with this concept or are not in a mental situation to want to believe it to be true, you're pretty much out of luck.

        • This really makes me wonder if free will even exists.... I mean, 90% of what we do and what we think depends on environmental stimuli, the remaining 10% depends on genetic makeup and the natural variations/mutations of our brain cells.

          • Makes me think the same. I personally believe that no, the concept in the sense that "anything can change and could theoretically happen" doesn't exist, but... I also believe it doesn't really matter either. If there is free will, then anything can happen, if there is no free will, then not anything can happen and it is determined, but since we currently can't predict the future and determine what's going to happen, both situations have the exact same outcomes.

            For me, most of these philosophical questions that are (currently) not definitively answerable I liked to ponder for a bit, but dismiss relatively quickly. I don't really care if there is a free will or not, if there is any meaning to anything or not, basically whatever. What I care about is the current situation as far as I can discern it, and my actions that I want to take in the current moment based on that. My biology determines that and I just let it happen.

    • You should elaborate a bit, I can get two possible interpretations of this - one which I agree should be a more popular opinion, and one which I believe is nonsense and should be made fun of.

      • If someone betrays you - you can either be upset at this, feel terrible for a long time

        Or you can be thankful for them showing their true colors, thankful for the opportunity to enhance your people-reading skills, i.e. learn how to prevent this better (or identify that it simply happens sometimes, even with good prevention skills), perform the correct consequences (i.e. cutting them out of your life, minimizing your dependence on them), and then move on with the new state of life.

        I'm not saying one won't feel bad at first - but there's no reason to continue with that past the initial automatic reaction, how fast you can "move on" depends on how good you are at this. After handling the situation properly, there's no reason to continue to feel bad, feeling bad about it is just a motivator to do something about it, if there's nothing to do anymore, there's no reason to feel bad anymore.

        You can extend the same line of thinking to literally anything - you get fired from your job, you go hungry, you suffer some debilitating injury/sickness, you get put in a concentration camp due to be executed ("Man's search for meaning" is an example of this).

        Which interpretation is this, and what is the other one?

        • Somewhat in between, more towards the former I guess?

          I wouldn't say it's nonsense nor that it should be made fun of, I simply disagree on calling it a "choice". It's more like a D&D saving throw, and sometimes the DM just makes it mathematically impossible for you to pass it, but I concede that "choice" is less verbose than that.
          I agree that you can change your psychological reaction to everything, and that it's not easy, but it's not, like, an API call to a well documented open-source library, and you don't necessarily have full control over what that change is.

          The other interpretation is basically your opinion, but actively dismissing the fact that it's never not always effortless or painless - I've heard that here and there, by people I'm not really fond of.

        • Yep great examples. And I see a LOT of Lemmy posters just unable to accept any of this. So much doomscrolling and choosing to be pissed/unhappy about every little thing.

    • 100 percent true. But I disagree that almost no one can do it. I think lots of successful people do it. I mean, the ones who went through a LOT of failure before they reached success.

      I personally have done it in my life regarding a few things. Stoicism is a great resources for doing this, in my opinion anyway.

      Basically you can't always control shit that happens to you, but you CAN learn to control how you react to it.

471 comments