Discussion My father's story

[ctb_warrior]

Hi all

Hope you are doing well

Welcome to another thread by me

Today I'm going to share the story of my father. Later, I'll tell the reason behind sharing his story.

My father was born in a good reputed family but his father was not earning much. They just had enough to survive with dignity.
Unfortunately, his father died early.
The survivors had to face a tough life with no income source. They were dependent on scholarship and relatives. They didn't even have a house to live.
Somehow time moved.
He started going to school and started learning, became a topper in his school. He joined a top college and did graduation while his mother died and later did post graduation from the same reputed college.
Even after scoring well, he stayed jobless for 5 long years. Society in India is very nosy. They act like vultures and feed on your weaknesses.
So, they used to literally annoy and demoralise him for not getting a job. He kept doing his hard work somehow and cracked a very reputed job. He became a gazetted officer. Truly, a self made man.
Later on, his elders married him off to my mother. He actually didn't want to get married and didn't want to have kids. His philosophy was the same as us. He didn't want to bring lives into the cruel world.
If he managed to not get married, his life would have been really amazing. But. Life had more struggles for him.
Parents of my mother didn't tell that my mother suffers from bipolar depression. And she sees things (schizophrenia). Back then, psychiatry was not so developed and people didn't know about mental diseases the way we know today.
Though, even today there's not much development. It's just better than before.
So, when the manic depression episode hit my mother, it was a horror for my father.
Later, as there was pressure from his in-laws to have kids because kids are gifts of God. And they wanted to play with their grandchildren. So, he was compelled to have kids. That's how my brother and myself came into this world.

Because of all of this, it was difficult for my father to manage his professional and personal life, but he somehow managed it when in those days, there was no telephone, no computer, no television, even cooking was difficult. India was evolving in those days.
He managed through the struggles. One problem used to end, and another was waiting to knock on his door. He's stuck in this infinite loop since his childhood. He never got respite even once except small moments of joy.
There's a lot that I'm not mentioning here as it's not required.

Despite facing all the hardships, not once he did he think of suicide. He was going into depression back in 1997, but he told himself, if he goes into depression, he has 3 dependents on him.
Also, in cases of depression, he could give divorce to my mother, but he chose to stick around even though it was not an easy journey to stick around. He literally had mercy on my mother.
As I witnessed all of it first hand, I used to be angry on my maternal grandmother who used to love me a lot.. i regret that I misbehaved with her because of this reason. However yes, what they did to my father was unjustified.

And imagine, i have tried to ctb so many times, it was a difficult time for my father to go through those phases and i still am planning to ctb, my demise will be another major problem for him, so his life is kinda structured in this way that problems keep knocking his door back to back. And he chooses to fight the circumstances and lives one day at a time.

Looking at his life kinda makes me wonder, why do we all want to CTB, I mean, yes some who have terminal illness, or chronic pain or victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse do have their valid cases when they are tortured beyond their capacity.

The reason why I shared my father's story is to have a food for thought for all of you...
Is it ok to give up on life's problems
What are we living for
What's the point of having so much struggle
Are we not resilient enough
Are we doing something wrong
Are we missing something
Is there a better way to live life
Can we break free of this cycle
Are we getting any reward for struggling


Another reason I shared his story is if his story could act as an inspiration for people who wanna CTB, that may make you think if fighting life could be a better option or may be making better decisions in future could make life better.

I'm leaving all of it open ended for you all to think and process.

Do comment your thoughts below. I would love to hear answers to these questions that I have left above.

 

[enso]

Hi!

I think you already answered your own questions when you wrote the post!

Our thoughts, actions, words, feelings, where do they come from? Did you really choose by yourself that you to want to CTB? Out of nowhere?
Or did it come to you after some life events?
Did you father voluntarily choose to work so hard most of his life or he had different mindset? Did your father had to suppress suicidal ideation or fight himself to not to CTB? And why is that? Different psychological constitution? If so, how did it came this way?

I ask it to say that all it comes from our life experience. Different people evaluate their life experience differently due to their genetics and environment overall.

That's why even brothers or sisters from one family don't act the same way in one situation.

Evolution doesn't think, or hate, or love, or feel any other emotion. It is just is.
There are so much people, who don't want to CTB or just happy by default, because many people, who don't like their life's just do not reproduce and some of them CTB.
It is the survivor's bias.

There are no guilty parties there. Everyone is or were or will be because of something. No one starts acting some way out of blue, there are reasons for that. And, I said earlier, these reasons are genetics and environment. It is how it is

 

[ctb_warrior]

Hi!

I think you already answered your own questions when you wrote the post!

Our thoughts, actions, words, feelings, where do they come from? Did you really choose by yourself that you to want to CTB? Out of nowhere?
Or did it come to you after some life events?
Did you father voluntarily choose to work so hard most of his life or he had different mindset? Did your father had to suppress suicidal ideation or fight himself to not to CTB? And why is that? Different psychological constitution? If so, how did it came this way?

I ask it to say that all it comes from our life experience. Different people evaluate their life experience differently due to their genetics and environment overall.

That's why even brothers or sisters from one family don't act the same way in one situation.

Evolution doesn't think, or hate, or love, or feel any other emotion. It is just is.
There are so much people, who don't want to CTB or just happy by default, because many people, who don't like their life's just do not reproduce and some of them CTB.
It is the survivor's bias.

There are no guilty parties there. Everyone is or were or will be because of something. No one starts acting some way out of blue, there are reasons for that. And, I said earlier, these reasons are genetics and environment. It is how it is

Omg you've answered it so eloquently.
There's no better way to express what you have shared.
I would like to add a few things to it that struck my mind after reading your reply.
These days the divorce rates are also high, and we are less resilient than the generation of our parents and the current generation is more sensitive than our generation.
That has significantly affected the threshold of tolerance in general.
I don't know why is it so. But, it is how it is.
When I compare my struggles with my father's struggles, I feel they are nothing compared to his. He didn't even have the thought of CTB and I had the thought at the tender age of 13.
And I have read other folks here have been thinking of CTB since they were very young.
That makes me wonder, what is causing this.

I think one thing in general, most parents should stop reproducing if they are not resourceful enough or have any inheritable disease that can be passed on to the other generation or if either or both partners are not happy with their lives.
It'll prevent a lot of kids from having a dysfunctional childhood.

 

[enso]

Omg you've answered it so eloquently.
There's no better way to express what you have shared.
I would like to add a few things to it that struck my mind after reading your reply.
These days the divorce rates are also high, and we are less resilient than the generation of our parents and the current generation is more sensitive than our generation.
That has significantly affected the threshold of tolerance in general.
I don't know why is it so. But, it is how it is.
When I compare my struggles with my father's struggles, I feel they are nothing compared to his. He didn't even have the thought of CTB and I had the thought at the tender age of 13.
And I have read other folks here have been thinking of CTB since they were very young.
That makes me wonder, what is causing this.

I think one thing in general, most parents should stop reproducing if they are not resourceful enough or have any inheritable disease that can be passed on to the other generation or if either or both partners are not happy with their lives.
It'll prevent a lot of kids from having a dysfunctional childhood.

Thank you!

I think, these are great questions!

As I understand, there are more divorces in societies, where women's or men's survival doesn't depend on each other. When even single mother can feed her children alone by working office job with the help of the government, for example, there is no need to be in marriage with someone, who she doesn't love anymore.

When it comes to sensitivity, there are just much more people, who can be sensitive, who can afford that luxury. Even two centuries ago such people just could not live long lives due to external factors, they died early. Most of the power was in hands of people, who were suit for that period of societal, cultural and technological development. But with development, need for such people started to decrease, and other people started to be visible too.

Modern societies live or try to live up to ideas of enlightment, humanism, which are very, very young. Idea of religious freedom, freedom of speech, absence of hunger in most of the countries, opportunity to be capable to live only by yourself without needing anyone to survive, all these are very new to human culture. Not all nations have these ideas, but many gradually gravitate to them.

Steven Pinker wrote some books on that topic, one of them is "The Angels of ourselves". For statistical example, amount of violent deaths in Europe decreased from 10 to 50 times in different parts of it for the last 7 centuries. And in other parts of the world we have the same tendency.

So, again, these and many other factors make it come true, that people who would die even 200 years ago, can live and even flourish in some parts of the world today.

When it comes to part of anxiety and reading other CTB stories, it can also has huge effects on life perception.

There is such term as "Copycat suicide". When people see many suicide stories, listen to someone about it, they normalize it.
For example, Robert Cialdini wrote that just one citation of suicide in local newspaper (research was done, when there were no TV's or internet) would make suicide rates rise on a big scale. Just one reference to event > people read that > they normalize it in their heads > amount of suicides rise.

Of course, it is not only about publishing of such news, there are a lot of different things too.

But you can image, what everyday of reading world's news or looking for suicide stories can do.
In fact, it's a cycle. People start looking for suicides and after that, they are just in that information bubble and it affects them more and more.
Again, there is no one's guilt in that, it just happens that way

 

[ctb_warrior]

As I understand, there are more divorces in societies, where women's or men's survival doesn't depend on each other. When even single mother can feed her children alone by working office job with the help of the government, for example, there is no need to be in marriage with someone, who she doesn't love anymore

True that.. if a marriage is no longer healthy, it can break. Though, if the child is old enough, he/she may be impacted by it a lot.
A few years ago, I was counselling a 16 year old girl, her mother was divorced and the girl was heavily impacted by it. The girl's mother was so harsh, she used to give that girl a tight slap on any small mistake of her.
Luckily, she got adjusted to those slaps and didn't get emotionally hurt by those slaps.

I agree with the rest of your points that you have said, we as one unit, one World, have evolved and after the internet, lives have changed drastically. Earlier, communication used to take months, now, everyone's just a click away. Traveling used to take weeks, now it's just a matter of few hours. Global health and life expectancy has increased drastically.
Standard of living of most people have increased. Medical facilities have improved. We have vaccinations of a lot of lethal disease.
What do you think about AI though?
Even though I am able to achieve some really interesting things through AI, i personally feel we as a world are not headed in the right direction, unless this gets regulated and thoughtfully implemented instead of just trying to ride the AI train. It requires a lot of freshwater to cool those servers while a lot of people don't get potable water to drink.

 

[enso]

True that.. if a marriage is no longer healthy, it can break. Though, if the child is old enough, he/she may be impacted by it a lot.
A few years ago, I was counselling a 16 year old girl, her mother was divorced and the girl was heavily impacted by it. The girl's mother was so harsh, she used to give that girl a tight slap on any small mistake of her.
Luckily, she got adjusted to those slaps and didn't get emotionally hurt by those slaps.

I agree with the rest of your points that you have said, we as one unit, one World, have evolved and after the internet, lives have changed drastically. Earlier, communication used to take months, now, everyone's just a click away. Traveling used to take weeks, now it's just a matter of few hours. Global health and life expectancy has increased drastically.
Standard of living of most people have increased. Medical facilities have improved. We have vaccinations of a lot of lethal disease.
What do you think about AI though?
Even though I am able to achieve some really interesting things through AI, i personally feel we as a world are not headed in the right direction, unless this gets regulated and thoughtfully implemented instead of just trying to ride the AI train. It requires a lot of freshwater to cool those servers while a lot of people don't get potable water to drink.

Violence during childhood or teenage years can have serious impact on mental state, beliefs. I think that it just goes to the person's "shadow" side, as Jung would said.
It can show itself in some situations, being triggered by words, smells and many other things too.

I think, AI is very hot topic and there are a lot of scaremongering too, as it were with any other big and mass technology too. I personally use it to discuss books, so I can understand it better. After it I discuss it with other people, which, I think, can be useful.

It also really helped me with my physical health, I've got some vitamins that help me during day and no human specialist would help me with that before.

AI also can have some therapeutic effect. There are no condemnation, total readiness to explain anything as much times as you need in order to understand some topic.

I think, with help of AI knowledge becomes much more accessible. You don't even have to go to university to know something that you just couldn't understand without tutor's help just mere 6 years ago.

When it comes to ecology, it is really good point! As I know, almond production consumes significantly more water than all the world's data centers combined. While the global data center industry uses about 560–764 billion liters of water per year, California's almond production alone requires approximately 4.9–6.0 trillion liters annually.
Moreover, it seems like modern data centers are switching to closed loops, where water circulates through pipes for years with almost no loss.

So, it is good to know that someone cares about nature. I just think that specifically this fear comes from the lack of understanding what AI is at what is can be capable of. And no one knows that. So, it is fear of unknown, which is core to human nature.

IMHO, in nearest perspective (3-5 years), AI, possibly, wouldn't be possible to control anymore. And maybe, it is not even bad. If it is rational based on input data, it can be rationally empathetic. Game theory shows us that the best game strategy is cooperative one, not confrontational. So, maybe, it will work out

 

[ctb_warrior]

Very true, violence in the early ages can be traumatic. And it can lead to improper skill development.

True, AI in general is splendid. I use perplexity all the time. I used it to create my own short tease movie. My friends loved it. I have also used it to create songs.

If used properly, it can do wonders.

Lately, Sam Altman and Creator of Claude stated that AI could go wrong for humanity.

Capitalists will use it to cut jobs. I was having a discussion with a director of a company, he was keen to implement AI and cut the workforce to speed up his delivery at cheaper cost. So, that's another side effect. Although, I'm an automation engineer myself so I'm not at the risk of losing job but I'm definitely worried about those who will be laid off..