I have overcome ASD, crippling social anxiety to the point that I never left the house, extreme morbid obesity, homelessness, drug abuse and depression so bad not only was I contemplating suicide multiple times a day, I spent a significant amount of time researching and planning it. My game setting was extreme hard-mode.
I never gave up, and in the end I overcame it all. Now I've got a body that could make an underwear model jealous, I have an amazing career, I regularly win speech contests, I've got several inventions in the patent process, I'm about 150 pages deep in a book I'm writing, the list goes on.
For every person who endures great suffering, there is someone else out there experiencing incredible joy. You need to be able to experience one in order to have the other - our emotional systems are relative. Furthermore, the freedom that makes it a game rather than a show to be passively observed unfortunately implies the freedom to be nasty to other people. Nasty stuff like natural disasters, killer viruses and painful genetic conditions are unfortunate, but there is so much out there that is wonderful.
I don't want to be preachy, but I've been to the darkest part of the abyss, so maybe I could offer you a little bit of advice. You need to stop paying so much attention to the negative messages floating around in the world and open your eyes to the beauty that is abundant all around you. Additionally, you are stronger than you think, you can take control of your life, you don't have to be a victim.
"The water supply of south Asia comes mostly from glaciers in the Himalayas. They're melting. What happens when they disappear? There goes the water supply for South Asia. Couple billion people in India alone, an estimated 300 million barely have access to water, what's going to happen to them? All over the place. Coastal cities will disappear. Extreme weather events will increase. One person per-second is now fleeing the severe effects of weather -- more than refugees right now. We're seeing a major disaster right now." - Noam Chomsky, not to mention all suffering and torture that has happened in the past
I'm really glad for your cool situation. You are one of the lucky ones.
Maybe it's a simulation created by accident, as a by-product of some other process. That isn't what you're saying. What you're saying is that you think there is a possibility this is a game, or some kind of VR hologram. Your reasoning seems to be that you need to go through bad experience to then feel good ones. Which is completely flawed on its own. Social and cultural relativism has been debunked by science over and over again. We see morals emerging independent of experience. Some people will never know what it means to be a paraplegic, or blind, and on and on. The idea that one needs to pay their dues assumes some kind of karmic balance, which is garbage. Thankfully many people have a good life, but through history, all of this suffering, death, carnage -- no intelligent being alive would think that was worth a dime for your washboard abs. Stop victimising yourself by going with this ignorance is bliss bullshit. It will make you feel good in the short term, but... I think we've gotten personal enough. Let's try to keep it with the simulation thing, eh? I've done some awesome shit too. Wouldn't use that as an excuse to play Dr Mengele though. Kind of messed up.
The need to be able to experience pain to know pleasure isn't about social or cultural relativism, it's a function of how we perceive stimuli. Try putting your hand in hot water for a while, then put your hand in cold water, and repeat the procedure without first putting your hand in hot water. The cold water will feel much colder going from the hot water. Research has also demonstrated that pain that doesn't change in character or intensity is noticed less over time. Our perceptions are not based on some absolute scale but relative to other perceptions.
My argument is that in order for a game or story to be compelling, the outcome must be uncertain, and the possibility of loss or failure must exist. Nobody wants to play a game that is basically "push start to win" and nobody wants to read a story that is basically "a long time ago, in a land far far away, everybody lived happily ever after".
I'm happy to stay out of the personal, you were the one that brought up your depression. I'll leave that track with the suggestion that maybe it is worth entertaining the possibility that your depression isn't the result of some chemical imbalance resulting from a bad draw of the genetic lottery, but rather a product of your beliefs and thought process.
I don't see how I'm "victimising" myself by recognizing that there is both good and bad in the universe, and put on the cosmic scale, the good massively outweighs the bad.
OMG I'm cured. Thanks Mr Mansplain. Great therapeutic use of passive aggression! I can't tell you how useful this has been! All my own doing! Of course! You should write a monograph on the subject: "Depression is existential angst in people with whom one disagrees: how I created a universe of suffering and lifeless rocks in order to provide relative validity to my own thoroughly dealt with existential angst, which I am in complete control of, and for which is certainly not the reason for having created said universe in the first place."
I never gave up, and in the end I overcame it all. Now I've got a body that could make an underwear model jealous, I have an amazing career, I regularly win speech contests, I've got several inventions in the patent process, I'm about 150 pages deep in a book I'm writing, the list goes on.
For every person who endures great suffering, there is someone else out there experiencing incredible joy. You need to be able to experience one in order to have the other - our emotional systems are relative. Furthermore, the freedom that makes it a game rather than a show to be passively observed unfortunately implies the freedom to be nasty to other people. Nasty stuff like natural disasters, killer viruses and painful genetic conditions are unfortunate, but there is so much out there that is wonderful.
I don't want to be preachy, but I've been to the darkest part of the abyss, so maybe I could offer you a little bit of advice. You need to stop paying so much attention to the negative messages floating around in the world and open your eyes to the beauty that is abundant all around you. Additionally, you are stronger than you think, you can take control of your life, you don't have to be a victim.