I honestly don't understand why people seek that. Doesn't that sadness and devastation hang with you afterwards?
I gave it a try, but now I am trying to avoid these stories at all costs (thanks for the warning) and firmly believe everything important in life can be told with humor, as well.
1 in 5 people dies of cancer, and usually it sucks, no happy ending. I really, really don't see the need to bring more tragic death into your life than what's likely coming your way, anyway.
Do you "enjoy" the sadness and crying? (Honest question.)
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 48. Went through treatment, got fitter than ever, started running 1/2 marathons, traveled the world, did the Coast to Coast Walk in England, and raised money and opened a library full of resources for cancer patients and their families at the hospital where she worked.
Then 10 years after she was first diagnosed, she had a seizure as she walked into her lab at a new job she just started. If she didn’t speed like a maniac, it might’ve happened as she drove on I-95 and not in one of the best hospitals in the country.
Metastatic brain cancer.
At first, it wasn’t clear how much time she’d have left (if any at all). But she woke up and radiation gave her another decent year before the last 6 months that were pretty awful. Eventually, she fell out of bed, broke her hip, slipped into a coma and died in hospice a week later on Christmas 2012.
Was it a tragedy? I don’t think about it that way.
The ending was happy. She wasn’t in pain and she took such great advantage of the last decade of her life, including that last year when she knew it was really the end.
For me, it's because I want to gain some perspective, and in this case in particular, without experiencing it first hand.
For example, I will often read cancer patient message boards, or family members that have watched their kin succumb to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or watching old videos, re-mastered with color on youtube from the turn of the 20th century, and contemplating how their entire lives have gone by. Or the uncovered skeletons of people that died from the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and reflect on how they likely had very important personal matters and concerns. But now there they lie, and the world has long since forgotten them. Their names and stories are long gone.
As a recent example, I stumbled across a young women who died of leukemia almost 10 years ago now. She was a local news reporter, and had a youtube channel[1] and twitter account[2]. She unkowningly documented her demise online with her twitter updates. She even interviewed a cancer survivor in one of her youtube videos and said, "how scary it must be when the doctor tells you that you have cancer!". How very soon she would find out herself. Her videos have about a dozen views, and her tweets went largely ignored. She seemed like such a genuinely sweet woman.
It's both morbid curiosity and a grim reminder of indeed how short life is. What was their mindset in their waning time, and why is mine much different? As fast as time seems to go by, am I all that different? Why wait until your death bed to consider your mortality? Maybe it's right around the corner, or maybe not.
I think the deeper perspective with the original article and the book mentioned by parent is a sense of finding fulfillment in life’s struggles rather than just just blanket sadness.. it’s about finding peace or contentment through struggles. In that sense I think it’s a good thing to understand others and how they have found their version of piece through life's struggles. General idea could be group together as logotherapy- finding meaning to life.
Book by nazi encampment survivor and creator of logotherapy: https://www.audible.com/pd/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-Audiobook...?
But would you agree, you don't need that story over and over dressed up differently? Some people have read/seen more than one of those stories.
Man's search for arbitrary meaning (through suffering and such).
I think that's feeding the delusion that life is somehow fair, or balanced, or something, when really life is just cruel sometimes. Maybe that's the appeal. I just cope with it differently, try to laugh it off.
You can't escape sadness. Life is fundamentally about suffering. Even when you're having a good time, you will still feel sad because you know the good times always end, eventually. I think people seek these stories because it helps them deal with their own sadness. What better way to reassure yourself about your own miseries than to hear the miserable stories of others?
> You can't escape sadness. Life is fundamentally about suffering.
Yeah, no shit. That's why I try to not invite it unnecessarily.
> I think people seek these stories because it helps them deal with their own sadness.
I doubt that. I think it's some form of morbid entertainment I don't need, as indicated by other commenters. Emotionality porn or something. Today the sad cancer story, tomorrow FetLife. (Just kidding; no kink-shaming intended.)
I assume most people will continue their life as if they are not going to die ultimately, afterwards. Or at least I am pretty sure there are plenty of people dying of stress-related disease, which at some point in their life read a sad story about death.
Also the abstract sadness, which comes with these stories is very different to what you experience when really sick and worried - when you disassociate (good) and take life by the day.
Maybe. At least I can not switch off easily and those stories stay with me. I also don't like horror movies. Maybe it's more pleasant, or enjoyable, when you feel differently, or "less".
