This the fuck I’m talking about.
Perhaps you need to drastically change your mental paradigm?
Yeah you misunderstood that on two different levels.
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“You’re all about the money”, no absolutely not, my point is one person can only do so many things, physically and in time. This idea that one person should go out there and do things just doesn’t scale. What’s a more effective use of time, standing on street corners physically helping old ladies across the street, or sending your money out to do good on behalf of dozens of different organizations? And yes, you can do do both, but which of those things is more effective and reaches more people? I mean it is not even close. Once you have money, the decision becomes clear.
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“He’s saying my analogy is a game and he objects to it”, no, mostly I want to get out of the way so other people can fill buckets, or whatever it is they want to do. Right now I am standing in the way, taking up space, and obstructing other people. Not intentionally, mind you, but I want to get out of the way so other people can do what they need to do.
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Well no, I didn’t say that you were all about the money. I said previously I couldn’t tell you how to help and I wouldn’t be much interested even if I could. You do you, as the kids say.
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Two things. First, you have zero control over what other people do, so why worry about getting in their way? They’ll work around you. Second, the beauty of the whole bucket concept is you don’t really even have to do all that much. Someone accomplishes something, you give them a pat on the back. Good job, you tell them. You’ve put a drop in their bucket, and sometimes that’s all someone needs.
It matters if there are unexplored alternatives to not feeling that way that also involve being here for the duration.
Guess what I like to fill buckets with.
First, drill some holes in them.
I have had several clients struggling with some of the issues mentioned in this discussion, in addition to dealing with some of them myself. As bibliotherapy, I highly recommend the first part of:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U9S6FI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_V6E6zb937BS3V
You can stop reading when you get to the section on logotherapy. It’s not really a much practiced form of psychotherapy nowadays, with no empirical backing. But the first part of the book speaks directly to the question of “Why live in the face of life and life’s pain?”
Parachutes, damn it!
The good news is that I found religion. The bad news is that it’s nihilism.
Is that from a movie? A comedian?
It’s not immediately popping up on Google.
It is just something I was thinking. It’s hard out here for a nihilist.
What do you mean hard? There’s nothing to it!
I? Who is I?
I had no idea that nihilism jokes were a thing. Or nothing.
Edit: Well I figured Louis CK would be a great place to start, but my first result wasn’t quite what I had in mind.
Edit 2: Well, looking for nihilist comedy has been nothing but depressing so far. Don’t watch that unless you want to see a sad nihilist penguin.
This is immediately what I think about when somebody brings up nihilism (NSFW language)
Hi. I’m sorry I was missing. I think I wrote this, but had been in a exhausting loop. Hospital and appointments every day, 1-5 hours a day for 6 weeks. Much of this was trying to find ways to deal with long standing pain issues with my pancrease, liver, lungs, and back. All of it related to my CF and I’d deffered treatment option due to cost and forcing myself to work then collapsing when done. Until that didn’t work anymore and I realized and got scared at how crippling these issues had become and being worried I might not be able to finish because my organs and spine had taken on the properties of a 90-year old.
And we’d been making some progress (I have a wonderful multi-disciplinary team helping and am trying to get on some new experimental meds) but my lungs kinda failed me ended up in hospital because this disease likes to taunt me and it wiped out a lot of my progress. But it’s OK, because I am super lucky to have nice people who are so kind and it gives me tons of drive to not give up :)
I do think the claims of mid-life crisis are probably accurate. But having thought about it a lot more, there’s also something else going on. I’ve always had strong ups and downs emotionally in my life, sort of like this:
You may be completely unsurprised to hear that my first year college dorm nickname was “Rain Man”. In my defense, the movie had also just come out. But yeah, big ups, big downs. That’s kinda me.
Something happens when you have kids, or at least something happened to me. I tried to describe it a while back and I think what I said then is still accurate:
As an adult, you may think you’ve roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You’ve loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.
In other words, children open this supermassive black hole of feeling in you (or at least, in me). Where that was the kinda fairly broad up and down emotional range of things I already felt, now it’s more like this:
The feelings I have for my kids are so much more intense than any romantic or family love I’ve ever felt. It’s fucking terrifying. Not that I don’t love my wife, I absolutely do, but the whole romantic range of feeling seems awfully quaint to me now relative to the new normal my kids showed me. So @vesper that’s another answer to your question.
You can’t really go back once this happens, either. It’s like using the internet on broadband. You can’t return to dial-up without realizing, wow, this is a whole lot slower. This is way less strong, less intense of a feeling. Not that it’s wrong, or invalid in any way, but it kinda stops mattering to you in the context of this other enormous thing dwarfing the horizon.
Once that emotional door was opened in me, once that range was widened so dramatically, everything else in my life kinda sloooowly starts creeping in there over the years, and like in the SNL cowbell skit, “really exploring the space”. This is … not fun. For example. A month or so ago I was driving to the datacenter to do some routine maintenance stuff, which is maybe an hour drive. At least half the time on that drive I was completely bawling my eyes out, just crying like sieve about … I literally don’t even know. I have no idea. I couldn’t even tell you. I just felt so hard and I could not stop. It’s like the normal emotional backstops you have on the high and low range are effectively gone.
If I trace the themes in the original post back to their source, it really did begin when I had kids. I now have feels of a depth that I kinda don’t … want to have at some level? It’s the emotional equivalent of suddenly deciding to take up freestyle BASE jumping. Except you didn’t really want to be a BASE jumper, someone pushed you off the edge and said GL;HF so that’s your new hobby now. I mean, unless you’d rather not be here at all.
And nobody wants that, right?
Sure, man. Far from being ready to die, you’re scared because kids gave you your first REAL reason to fear death. You’ve got joy to lose now.
And since joy is only chronic, its absence is necessarily also chronic. And when it’s absent, there’s now a sense of its loss. And that’s a little foretaste of death. And only a true shitboy would pretend not to be afraid of that.
You don’t like this new dynamic range of emotion. Sometimes, perhaps, you feel an urge to throw yourself into the void, just to break the tension, just to cool the fire of emotion, just to escape the uncertainty you sense everywhere.
Well, let me tell you something about the void. If you haven’t actually been lit on fire, if your kids aren’t actively trying to murder you, if your dick still works reasonably well, if you can still hear music or watch donkey porn or whatever your thing is, the void is not your friend. It is your enemy. If you can’t ignore the void, you should HATE the void for trying to lure you.
Finding a set-it-and-forget-it way to walk along the edge of the void for as long as you can manage is why people fabricate religions and construct an artifice of faith. Not just traditional religions, but any set of beliefs that lets them distract themselves from what’s yawning below them, just off the path. Marxism is a religion. Punk rock is a religion. Intellectual trends and fads are religions. That everything would be OK if everyone smoked weed, wore hemp clothes, and ran their cars on hemp oil is a religion. I know a guy for whom Howard Stern is a religion. Any hobby taken too far is a religion.
But all those roads really are the same road. You either stay on the road, or you leap off.
So if you’re amenable to religion, pick one that engages you! But if you aren’t thus amenable, the problem shifts: how to keep on the road and keep going without having too terrible a time.
The Stoic solution: calm down and keep in mind that there was only ever this road, that everyone else is also on the road, that it’s really nothing remarkably bad being on the road, especially compared with having always dwelt in that void over there. Then try to maximize the number of blowjobs and minimize the number of kidney stones. Or whatever; you fill in the “good” and “bad” blanks there, in a Stoic Mad Lib.
From reading this post, I can imagine another solution for you. I’ll call it “the Conan’s father solution.” You know how at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian Conan’s dad is forging a sword and tells Conan about the Riddle of Steel? You can be like Conan’s dad, making your kids strong to face the void, or Thulsa Doom, or teenage bullies like in every 80s kids movie, or what the fuck ever. Maybe prepare them not to listen to shit music like their square friends. Just make something up!
You can thank me later. JMJ out ----
That whole crying a lot when you have kids thing is real. My daughter just picked Beryl Markham as her Mystery History school person, so we read West with the Night together during November. I spent 1/2 of the time reading choked up, trying not to cry. It’s a beautiful book with vivid tales of adventure, life, love, success, and disappointment. Highly recommended read (just ask @tomchick). Anyhow, the tales in the book put me in a mind space of my child learning those emotions and feeling them in her life. It was a hard read. At the end, I had never been more proud of her for the story she told her classmates. Then she dressed up for their parade and it was awesome. :)
Just before that, I read “The Little Virtues,” by Natalia Ginzburg. Her essays of life and reflections on humanity and raising children were poetic, imbued with loss, sorry, joy, routine, and wisdom. How similar her life and emotions were to yours or mine. Her lessons on child rearing (spoiler: don’t focus on the little virtues, but rather, teach your children virtue at a grand scale) brought to words feelings I’ve had for a long time about how to raise good people. It’s a short read, but worthwhile. The New Yorker talks about it here.
Those books helped me as a person and parent, though. I’ve read West with the Night about 5 times over the past 20 yrs and it always delivers.
The emotions are real, though. Other people ride the same ride as you. It may help to get in their mind space for a bit.
Here’s my daughter as Beryl Markham:
