Why life in misery?

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Here we find many messages of despair: life, our difficult life, seems sometimes not worthy to be lived. Sex, more than real love, seems to be one source of fuel for going on. Often with sex, comes also some affection and, if so, life is certainly more valuable, decent. Then there is intellectual life, entertainment, fantasy, day dreaming. This may be very important but access to intellectual life is mostly an affair of privilege. For the have-nots intellectual food is poor or non existing. Than there are general feelings of well-being that you experience when you breath pungent fresh air opening your window. And there are memories, sometimes elicited by a smell more rarely by a taste (as in the case of Proust’s madeleine). Many old people live only on memories. When the balance of sufferance or emptiness and pleasure and joy is acceptable? On the whole very few people take their life, even if they live empty, joyless lives. Why are they still attached to living, if they cannot attain Life?

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Unreal city
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over the London bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

T.S.Eliot

Maybe joylessness is not necessarily anti-life, only non-joy? Does Life=happiness always? Perhaps despair is part of life also. Plus there is always hope, and maybe a rich inner life that compensates in some way? Anyone with eyes can see a sunset, smell a flower.
If one is religious then the teaching is that suffering is good for the soul. And how can we know the state of someone else's soul, only the body and their life as it seems to us. Perhaps firstly we should ask what Life is.
Just a few thoughts.
I'm sorry Paolo, I answered that in a theoretical way...did you mean it that way? I hope you are not so sad yourself If so, my reply was heartless.

When I travel through my small town I sometimes meet him. Last time I gave him some money, his nails where long. In his red eyes I saw sadness. Like him, most homeless people are completely disconnected from society. They have no-one who really cares about them, no standing in society, no self-confidence, no joy. Actually, they have nothing to live for. Homeless people have all the reason to take their lives, so why don't they do it? Why are there still so many of them? These people have something, something that almost every human has which keeps him/her going on. Tramps are the living evidence that every human being is an expert of managing their own mortality. It is true: some people commit suicide, but these persons are generally regarded as an exception.

I think the human organism, like all life forms, is programmed genetically to stay alive, regardless of whether there are reasons to live.

Yes tramps and clochards are among the most unfortunate even if I wouldn't exclude that like many of Beckett's tramps, they have found some distillated residual resilient pleasure: the familiarity with a particular public bench. Generally they don't enjoy sociality, thy don't even seach for it. There is not a perfect overlapping between between well being and happiness and largeness of social circles. Sometime social circles have their internal scapegoats or omegas of the groups who prefer some crumbs of degraded sociality to total insulation. And then there are the slaves, sexual slaves above all sold by their families to brothels. They are milllions in Asia and Eastern Europe. But old people in western societies are allotted the harshest fate perhaps. Abandoned by their families, no sociality scarse resourse, arthritis, sordity and poor sight.

A puzzling paradox indeed. The thought of taking my own life brings me enormous relief, I cannot stop fantasizing about it. The thought of my life being taken from me terrifies me, I cannot stop worrying about it. I grow weary of being stuck in the middle...

Probably something to do with our minds not being evolved for the societal conditions we live in...blah blah blah, etc, etc. I suppose it doesn't matter anyway...everyone has their own burden.

In this case, we are wired like all other non human animals. We don’t control the devices of self-destruction. The only chance we have is to “immolate ourselves” like female animals in defense of their descendents, and like males (and often females) in defense of the group or some other “cause”. But the abstract cause is already a human custom. Durkheim pointed out in The suicide, that what he called the anomic suicide (suicide without a “cause”, not obeying a norm, like those relative to honor) was the consequence of a general disintegration of collective norms, what he called the anomie of modern society.

In any case the resilience in front of suffering of living creatures, humans included, is something extraordinary. In terms of evolutionism it is also very easy to understand: the most important thing in survival is the will of survival. So this will of survival tends to reinforce itself with each generation and become a fundamental trait of character.

There are some extraordinary stories of people surviving in extreme conditions. Maybe wandering lost, or injured on a mountain, without water, food etc. Logic might say that there is no hope. But the human will, spirit, whatever it is called, is truly remarkable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes ... v_04.shtml

Another way to think about it is to ask what is different in the minds of people who commit suicide, many of whom are better off than many people who do not?

Mmm, i can think of only of two groups of people.
Those who are utterly desperate, and don't believe the future has anything in store for them.
Those who cannot come to grips with their past and themselves, because of terrible, irreversible things they have commited.
Main thing is: People who commit suicide must have gone through a lot of pain and suffering.

I think people who kill themselves have just lost all hope. Seriously, if you lose hope, what is there to live for ? Would you settle for a life that was 100% guaranteed to be nothing but suffering and pain ? I know I wouldn't.

The only reason why people stay alive is because we are always hoping for something better to come along. If you lose hope, yo lose everything.

Now, how do you keep from losing hope? I have no idea.

Makes me think of these lines:

[...]Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

I've learned to not strive for joy or fulfillment. I strive for freedom of time, in which I can frolic with self-expression. This sets the table for The Muse, who comes to dinner every now and then. Her name is Joy. Often she brings along Fulfillment.

dp

For me it was not my pain but that of my wife (from my system crashes) that gave me the motivation to escape Aspie - http://unlearningasperger.blogspot.com
Very best JC