This thread is really interesting for me as someone 'newer' here. I think it's particularly interesting because personally I feel a sense of urgency to get a solution over and done with, whether that is recovery or ctb. I really feel like I don't want to just be on here all the time, or in that mindset. I am particularly fascinated by this comment:
@Arvinneedstodie :
However, the biggest thing is that with time I got to see and understand more things. Even though I lived as a lonely hermit for most of my life, the internet was my window to this world, to this life and everything. I'm so much more mature mentally than I was when I was 18, time really does mellow people out, and it's really awesome to experience that. The grudges and anguish I once had are now starting to fade into understanding and peace. I guess this is just the natural progression that comes with age, but this is one thing worth experiencing i guess.
I'm on the other side of this experience, it is supposedly yet to come for me and many people have tried to remind me of this in the hope of me finding it comforting. But personally I find hearing this kind of thing really off-putting, it makes me want to accelerate my suicide instead of trying to hang in there. The thought of me spending the next decade of my life rotting in isolation, achieving nothing and letting minor inconveniences getting the better of me already sounds painful enough to me. But then the idea that I will grow up to appreciate that, to not care about it at all and just generally be at peace with being a failure like I've given myself a self-induced lobotomy sounds horrifying and almost doesn't make sense to me. It is kind of a paradox for 20 year old to me to understand that 30 year old me would think that 20 year old me is a complete idiot. I can't help but feel unhappy about the fact that in the future I might be happy despite having been unhappy and not having directly addressed what has put me in that position, if that makes even the tiniest bit of sense.
I noticed that comment too.
I related .albeit as a much older person (almost 60).
I have experienced a similar thing. I began trawling the inrernet for other models of meaning and fringe stuff and for me personally was mildly liberated when I found Ernest Becker via reddit.
He spoke to me with a model of reality I have found comforting and profoundly confronting.
Then I began to reframe my view from a stance of always blaming myself and berrating myself for my "lack of adjustment" to one of informed scepticism about almost every sacred cow in civilization.
My present stance is that civilization ,in it's essence , is a mental illness machine ... from the great leaders and elite shining stars all the way down to the desperately hopeless.
I rewrote my personal life history as one of early life uninformed struggle with limited tools and bewildered ideals (unformed boundaries of personal / collective responsibility ).
I still carried a complete set of childhood flashback baggage that I regularly unpack at every negative event ... but at least , I know I'm doing it (more likely on reflection after the emotionally distraught baggage flinging ... awareness limitations and all that ...)
So I guess my new 'moral relativism' (?) (boooo hissss ?) has let me off the hook a little bit , as at the same time defined more rationally the pit we all exist in .
I fully empathize as much as I am able with both perspectives... although I err on the side of exposing oneself to as many new ways of modeling reality as possible and allowing time for some kind of percolation of acceptance and maybe if one is really lucky , the occasional fragment of those positive vibes that seem so alien.
Sorry for sounding so fucking smug .
The mud pit of stuck rumination still sucks me in often and I am still kind of frozen and resist meaningful traction with the world (jesus sometimes my jargon rhetoric makes me feel like an AI that has pieced this new perspective together together and slaps in worn out phrases as bricks in a new wall.) (Maybe that is all it is when it comes down to it.)
Is there a sweet spot between calm acceptance of our predicament and raging against the insanity ?
