It has more to do with imagination than with will-power, I’d say, as the OP so hilariously demonstrates
ya the people in haiti should just imagine they are someplace nice and then it’s basically OK and life is peachy. :rolleyes:
To be fair, the life of a person in haiti does not consist purely of eating mud cookies and getting crushed by buildings
thought I can’t confirm/deny that
Get rid of that whole “life is shit” perspective. I’ve been fighting it all my life, being naturally inclined to negativity. Sure, I am often not surprised when people disappoint and I can often predict the outcome of certain events but in all honesty its a pretty depressing way to look at things. I’ve gotten much, much better at seeing the bright side and I think I’ve reached a happy medium. Still, I see those happy-go-lucky people without a care in the world and I’m a tad envious. Work in progress.
That’s actually a pretty good answer but the mind is not the brain. Diseases don’t stop thought, they only misguide the use of the brain, which is a very physical thing. At death you would be spirit and remember all of your life, as well as the suffering you experienced. To say that the “real” me would be dead at that point is not accurate. Only the body would die. The spirit is everlasting. You might try to use science to prove otherwise, but that discipline is limited to what can be observed only.
Man this could get into a really long discussion from here. I really don’t think I have the energy for that. If you haven’t spent much time thinking about the idea of afterlife, maybe I could suggest considering more basic concepts. Consider the question “What, if anything, is eternal?”. There must be something eternal. We haven’t known matter to be able to create itself, and we don’t have evidence that things come into existence from nothing, so that’s a good thing to debate.
Hope things improve for you soon and you’re able to put a cap on all your suffering. Good luck.
Are you a spirit or a body+spirit?
If you are just a spirit, how do you explain physical diseases destroying knowledge, memories, will-power and personality?
If you are spirit+body, how can you say you will exist after death as just a spirit. This would be like someone telling me they exist after death as just a corpse.
Nothing “comes” into existence. Nothing goes “out” of existence.
Things exist and change.
Thanks but I’m OK. :smokin:
First off, you do know when you change the quote, it’s still a quote right? So by changing what I wrote to your clever “Useless waste of sperm,” it means that I’m calling YOU, the idiot, a useless waste of sperm. Way to have your own comeback fail.
Secondly, to sum up your thread, [media=youtube]oCSdLtNZbaA or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77pQPqFkBgw[/media]. Pick your poison.
I have family in Mexico that are in poverty. My dad got lucky and managed to get a good job here in the USA. These are people that can truly complain about how harsh life can really be, but even my cousins who are in there teens hardly complain about shit. We are living so comfortably that we have to make up excuses to be miserable.
Will-power IS supreme. With enough of its a person can both endure the worst of the worst, and make the GREAT things happen.
Any great improvements or progress that i’ve EVER made in life, was the result of this. Especially in those bitch situations when it seems like everybody i know and their grandma, are telling me to just give up(which is basically all the time).
Get INSPIRED people! Watch a damn rocky movie or something. He’s only a fictional character but the principal is the same, without loads of willpower to drive him forward he would not have been able to succeed at jack shit.
“Sometimes by going that 1 more round, when you don’t think you can, that can make all the difference in your life”- Rocky
I’d argue that if anything, a poor, uneducated person has a simpler view of the world, and would need less mental “tricks” to overcome his obstacles. The stupid farmer in your example would most likely be a religious man, and would take comfort in believing that any suffering he endures in this lifetime will be more than amply rewarded in the afterlife. The evidence doesn’t lie; the less educated and wealthy you are, the more likely you are to be deeply religious. Belief in a God brings them comfort and strength, or if you’re cynical like Marx its a great opiate.
And I wouldn’t really call them tricks either. A trick might help you deal with trivial problems in life, but not devastating ones. Taken from the wikipedia on Viktor Frankl
I don’t think Viktor Frankl was delusional. A lot of things are beyond our control, but our response and attitude toward life are. I’m not saying I’m anywhere near mentally strong enough to survive something like the Holocaust. But if a situation like that were to happen, the only thing that would let me survive it would be all mental. Granted, if I were unlucky I’d be thrown into an oven, but if I were dead it wouldn’t really matter anymore.
Maybe ignorance is bliss, but I don’t believe so.
The point was that we aren’t born with the tools necessary to overcome every problem and form of suffering. It’s not something inherent in us. The farmer had to learn his beliefs and mental tricks in order to overcome his fear of death. He has to understand his identity in a certain way and the nature of life and death in a particular way.
The poster I was replying to simply said, and it’s been said before: “life is only shitty if you ALLOW it to be”.
Yes, there is truth to that, but only to a degree. What you can or can’t allow isn’t simply up to you and your magical-free-will.
You can’t will yourself to just speak a new language. You need the right tools and practice first. Not everyone has access to those tools, so to some, life will just be shitty.
There’s a difference between perceiving a sufficient amount of meaning in a horrible situation so that you can just keep on living (what Victor did), and perceiving a horrible situation to be something actually awesome and good (what a delusional person would do).
Lets say Frankl suffered least in the camps, least out of everyone, not because he was treated differently but because his mind was just so powerful. Even if that is the case, I don’t believe it was simply a matter of him “willing” the situation better. He must have had a whole bunch of mental tricks and training and practice that he learned and developed. This isn’t surprising since he was a psychotherapist who specialized in suicide cases.
Now, imagine Frankl was born into a snobby family where he got everything he wanted and never thought about anything other than riding horses and fucking chambermaids. Would snobby Frankl be able to cope with the camps as well as Psychotherapist Frankl? No. He just doesn’t have to tools necessary to “ALLOW” himself to deal with the situation. In fact, snobby Frankl is conditioned to utterly fall apart in such a situation.
>:[
There is always a way…if you NEED it bad enough. Keyword: Need.
Not want, because any fool can want something. The power to change one’s life comes from a NEED, not a desire.
If you don’t wish to lead a mediocre, unfulfilled life, one can’t afford to take such a defeatist attitude towards things.
Out of the boatload of problems/issues in life that people whine about, only a select FEW are truly concrete and unchangeable. The rest of it can very much be inproved upon/changed, if that particular person NEEDS it bad enough.
Just got to get off your ass, latch onto the problem like a pitbull, and never, EVER give up no matter how many walls you run into…
Yes, but its quite easy to adopt a religion, you don’t need an education at all, in fact, its in your best interest to remain uneducated for maximal effect. This is why I see homeless bums on the street that are ridiculous happy and manage to praise God. Granted, they’re probably doped up and drunk, but still.
Agreed. In most situations though, you can change your perspective and turn an obstacle into an opportunity. Life’s challenges are a way you can improve and keep growing. If you’re not being challenged, then you stagnate. In the case of the kids in Sudan that are basically fucked from birth, yes, there’s not a whole lot they can do, and it sucks. However, the problems facing most people in America are pretty much trivial in comparison.