Is there anyone worth meeting, anything worth doing?

[Thrasymachus]

I really wonder about these questions alot.

Looking back on my whole life I have never really met a person I would consider worth meeting. If you ask me I would say I have no friends, but compared to many people here I have friends, but I don't define friends like others. I have people that from past association I have become comfortable being around, so I continue to be around them in the future. When I have company from others is usually with the same few people I knew from junior high, high school or have otherwise been around long enough to feel comfort in their presence. But I have nothing much in common with them now, so what is the point of seeing them? All most of them ever want to do is drink beer everyday, smoke weed, watch too much tv/movies and talk about ******** that hardly matters. Seeing them and not seeing them, is much the same, one instance is just as uneventful as the other. I should move past them and head onto the next phase of life, except I have a crappy part-time job, bad social skills, and not much inclination to get to know other people, since they are probably not worth meeting anyway. Probably I am just making excuses since if I had money I would not have as much free time and hide behind that.

This intellectual had it dead on:

...
“I should add…that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive, of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking.”
...

The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974) p. 95–96.

Most leisure activities people do are very base, they just go to work and afterward find several vices for afterward like tv, alcohol, drugs, internet, too much useless gossip on the phone, or leaving one large box only enter another larger box to buy something or pay for entertainment and consider this "going out", etc. I would like to try to spend more time cultivating myself, doing activities that will improve myself in my leisure time but I most often end up sadly moping on the couch, aimlessly wasting time on the internet, watching a movie or sleeping to avoid the dead feeling that is always inside of my chest but can't ever escape. When I see what is in my immediate environment I feel there is no point to bother bettering myself, because the more you become cultivated the more alienated you are from the hoi polloi.

...
So with all the sleep, my memories, reading my crime story, and the alteration of light and darkness, time passed. Of course I had read that you wind up losing track of time in prison, but it hadn't meant much to me when I'd read it. I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words "yesterday" and "tomorrow" had any meaning for me.

One day when the guard told me that I'd been in for five months, I believed it, but I didn't understand it. For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing that I was trying to do. ...
...

Camus, Albert. trans. Matthew Ward The Stranger (Vintage International, 1989) p. 80.

That really summed up my life since I dropped out of high school back in 2000, I feel like some soulless machine of routine in my self-created purgatory. I just know yesterday and tomorrow and nothing else. I am not in prison, but I feel like it because I cannot understand how everyone just participates with such a malicious society, so I just hide myself in my mom's house refusing to emerge much. How can they get up for work so easily? Or pretend they fall in love(when most likely they will end up falling into divorce or stay unhappily together simply because they share a house and kids) and procreate to bring another generation into the misery? Life has been an existential crisis for me, not something immanently liveable, I can't just do, I have to always think and over-analyze everything. To me being alive was never something I could see as a gift, an opportunity, it is more something I have had to suffer through because my parents decided they wanted kids. A curse external from my wishes invited upon me by parents who like most parents, shouldn't have had kids since they didn't know how to raise them, but decided selfishly they wanted them anyway, decided that they wanted to continue ahead and spawn. They separated anyway when I was about five, but I am left to suffer through this cruel world I never want the ability to cope with. If you look at the people who are well adjusted to this horror show, they are most often very banal. They think life is about making the most money, getting the trophy girlfriends, then the trophy wife and procreating to teach their progeny the same base lessons, because for them the unexamined life is the only one possible.

Can anyone here answer:
By what criteria is someone worth meeting?
What makes an activity worth doing?

 

[SophiaGrace]

Have you ever been on antidepressants? I wonder if they might help you.

Stop focusing on the why's of life, and start living.

Oh and congrats on the part time job.

 

[Thrasymachus]

Anti-depressants and the medical psychiatry industry are totally bogus and ineffectual. People go to therapy and take the drugs their prescription pad pimps give them for years and years and nothing changes. I have been there myself and if I started Buddhist meditation or something like Pysch-k or EFT at age 17(29 now) instead of years of therapy, I think I could have overcome my problems before they became mountains that only Atlas could lift. The whole history and foundations of those professions was always sand, but that does not matter because they have spawned huge profitable industries growing every year. It grows because as modernity, technology and capitalism expand they can only do so by making life less humane and hospitable, not because of the false but profitable theory that people are born with brain chemical imbalances that need to be chemically medicated for life. Our mode of life claims more souls every year and leaves hundreds of thousands more vapid broken bodies behind every year. Instead of examining that anything is wrong with the social direction of society, psychology allows us to falsely lay the blame on the increasing hordes of those who cannot adjust. They are unbalanced as individuals and the society is totally correct and just and it should continue its teleological progression till it exhausts every body and green space in its path. How I hate the psychologists, the therapists and psychiatrists and wish to see their damaging professions abolished, so finally things could change, but I don't have such power. Instead I am like a speck of sand caught in the crush of a huge wave.

I think alot of my problem might be that I have so many negative experiences in the house where I still reside, that by staying here I have no motivation to do anything worth doing. So I continue my purgatory of moping, distracting myself on internet, etc. The more days I do this, the less esteem I have, and I circle-jerk myself into continued misery.

 

[SophiaGrace]

You do realize I am a psychology major, right?

(Please, do hate me.)

I am sorry you could not find the help you needed.

If you think buddhist meditation will help you, by all means, do it.

 

[Thrasymachus]

That is a bad major. I think most psych majors end up with huge debt and working retail or another unrelated field unless they do what it takes to get into therapy or psychiatry, which is hard because there are so many comparatively majoring and so few positions for those two professions. Even if they do get into the medical psych field it would make them jaded after years because their professional methodologies are totally false or they could up using their skills to help companies produce social manipulations for the rest of the populace.

 

[Doubt The Rabbit]

Nevermind all the psychiatrists and therapists who spend their lives helping rape victims and traumatized patients regain their sanity, no. That never happens.

 

[Thrasymachus]

Modern psychiatry is not effective at all, it has no established guidelines or methodologies either. Their benchmark Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is written by a majority of people who receive funds from the Pharmaceutical corporations. FDA is a customer of the Pharmaceutical industry and their funding for drug testing comes from the company presenting the drug. The pressure is for reviewers to pass the drug as quickly as possible so the big industry does not lose profit. Only five percent of FDA resources goes to drug safety, the majority funds go to drug approval, because industry loses millions per day a drug is delayed. I have been through therapy for many years, I think a large proportion of this forum has too, it is has likewise not helped them, they are still registered and posting afterall. Talking about your problems won't work and finding the root when the problem started won't work. Medication won't either because it does not address the fundamental problem either.

The whole modern medical industry is a fraud. The 1910 Flexner report started what we termed as "medicine" or the modern allopathic system. Far as I know, besides my brother I am the only one else in my family, out of my friends, out of my co-workers that actually looks at the label of the food I consume. This is allopathy at its finest. Everyone just stuff whatever into their mouths, they don't exercise much, they have their vices like smoking or alcohol. Eventually they accumulate a disease often because of their lifestyle and when the disaster happens they run to a doctor for pills or eventually surgery.

In summation you are arguing based on ignorant emotive bunk. "OH THINK OF THE RAPE VICTIMS!" OMG, I am sure they love to circle-jerk spending tens of thousands with the same problems as years before, like every other psychiatric victim.

 

[SophiaGrace]

That is a bad major. I think most psych majors end up with huge debt and working retail or another unrelated field unless they do what it takes to get into therapy or psychiatry, which is hard because there are so many comparatively majoring and so few positions for those two professions. Even if they do get into the medical psych field it would make them jaded after years because their professional methodologies are totally false or they could up using their skills to help companies produce social manipulations for the rest of the populace.

Thanks for the discouragement.

 

[Thrasymachus]

Well the reality in life is alot harder than the plush myths we are taught about how great everything is. That is the problem with our society people want to wallow in the myths which don't exist in actuality. Many college majors don't lead to a real career path or an ethical career, psychology is a major offender, but the universities/colleges could care less, because they will send debt collectors after you even if you end up in low paying jobs. Higher education serves a very sinister purpose as well, it deprecates any learning outside of certified confines, because those who learn outside don't get a relevant degree which tends unlock more higher paying jobs. So people who care about life-long learning tend to get punishment and those who care about social climbing tend to rise in society, helping create social stasis. The type of people that climb in society, could care less if everyone around them rots in starvation. They look at the people at low paying, bad working condition jobs as deserving it for not getting a degree like they did to earn their higher social position which lands them white collar jobs with easier working conditions and higher pay.

 

[Doubt The Rabbit]

You want to talk about reality? Fine, let's talk about reality. I could say without a shadow of a doubt that without therapy, I would indeed be dead by now. There was a time where nothing, and I mean NOTHING would have stopped me from committing suicide over real, brutal domestic violence in my family except my at-the-time boyfriend and my THERAPIST. Shocker, ain't it?

YES, many therapists are capitalistic pharmaceutical advocates pushing pills like puppets. In fact, I had a therapist like that and dropped her like a hot potato. However, to doubt human compassion so much as to say that there is not a single professional therapist that is really out to help their patients just shows how unbelievably jaded and pulled from reality YOU are.

You can keep your article references and statistics; yeah, I'm lonely still, but I was a whole hell of a lot worse than what I am now. A lot of users in this forum will agree. Once you get your head out of the anti-corporate's ass, maybe you can take a look beyond statistics and see people around you that took a leap of faith and sought some help.

I think that someone like Soph, who I'm sure has had to overcome difficulties with communicating her own thoughts and emotions, would make a fine advocate for those who also have troubles with communicating themselves, be it a physical obstacle or mental barrier. I, too, am aiming to become a pediatric therapist and child advocate for terminally ill children. And guess what - if I can't FIND a position in the industry, you can bet your ass I'll MAKE one. There's always a way around things; it's the skeptics and the doubtful who are stuck in their perpetual rut of "reality." Write me off as an imaginative twit, I don't really give a ****. I still don't want your so-called reality.

No thank you, sir. No thank you.

-And THAT is a statement FROM a person the low-budget, nameless variety. Don't you make the mistake of believing I don't know how it is.

 

[Thrasymachus]

You don't want to live in the real world. If you didn't kill yourself, it is because you didn't, if that is what you imply, not because of some paid bureaucratic professional to whom your one patient among several dozen they see a week.

If you join allopathic medicine and help someone it will be almost a miracle or better an accident of circumstances. The average general practice doctor sees a patient for 2-5 minutes of actual contact at most, after said patient spend at least a dozen minutes waiting, getting their bill/insurance handled, driving, scheduling the next appointment, etc. They just take your pulse, ask you to stick your tongue out, probe your ear with a light, etc., if you have any new issues, how your old issues are doing, the same old routine over and over on everyone. If you have new issues they will prescribe a script on the spot or they will leave likely because they don't want you to see that they consult a Physician Reference for your symptoms before writing out your script, lol.

 

[Doubt The Rabbit]

Whatever, guy. You keep your head shoved in the brown. Sometimes, all a person wants is someone to talk to - someone to just shut up and listen to what they have to say. I promise you that I am going to dedicate my life to providing that for the people who need it most, whether you like it or not. I'm certain Soph feels the same way.

And those like us, who find that it's more useful to spend our time doing something productive instead of speculating everything from behind the walls of paid articles, graphs and figures, don't really need any approval from someone like you.

Later, bro.

 

[IgnoredOne]

YES, many therapists are capitalistic pharmaceutical advocates pushing pills like puppets. In fact, I had a therapist like that and dropped her like a hot potato. However, to doubt human compassion so much as to say that there is not a single professional therapist that is really out to help their patients just shows how unbelievably jaded and pulled from reality YOU are.

Alas, if only he was jaded, then it'll suggest that he drew his sources from real, if unfortunate information. He's just dogmatic and ironically, just as idealistic in his own gloom. I do wish him luck in his distance from reality.

If you join allopathic medicine and help someone it will be almost a miracle or better an accident of circumstances. The average general practice doctor sees a patient for 2-5 minutes of actual contact at most, after said patient spend at least a dozen minutes waiting, getting their bill/insurance handled, driving, scheduling the next appointment, etc. They just take your pulse, ask you to stick your tongue out, probe your ear with a light, etc., if you have any new issues, how your old issues are doing, the same old routine over and over on everyone. If you have new issues they will prescribe a script on the spot or they will leave likely because they don't want you to see that they consult a Physician Reference for your symptoms before writing out your script, lol.

What do GPs have to do with counselors? Neither is quantity of time immediately conflated with quality of time; I could spend days discussing a legal situation with my mother and get no insight, but half an hour with a certified lawyer would give me the weight of his knowledge and experience.

I'm one of the most realistic and jaded people out there, but your negativity is simply a position set in thin air rather than any real facts. I've been privileged enough to know more than a few physicians and they all generally have some aspect of compassion; and even the one who is pretty much is an ******* has a massive sense of professional responsibility and status.

Meditation is a wonderful thing; I don't agree with many of the aspects of modern medicine as practiced. This doesn't mean that it makes doctors into quacks, though.

 

[Doubt The Rabbit]

YES, many therapists are capitalistic pharmaceutical advocates pushing pills like puppets. In fact, I had a therapist like that and dropped her like a hot potato. However, to doubt human compassion so much as to say that there is not a single professional therapist that is really out to help their patients just shows how unbelievably jaded and pulled from reality YOU are.

Alas, if only he was jaded, then it'll suggest that he drew his sources from real, if unfortunate information. He's just dogmatic and ironically, just as idealistic in his own gloom. I do wish him luck in his distance from reality.

Heh heh. Yeah...shame, innit? But guys like him are what people who are trying to make it out of the hamster wheel have to deal with.

 

[Thrasymachus]

It is not about wanting to help people or not. I thought I read pediatrician last post I replied to. Therapists don't have the toolset or methodology to help people and they see too many to help with their poor tools anyway. No matter your intentions these fundamentals don't change. And subjecting children to the tortures of metal health professionals is beyond the pale, even worse is letting them see psychiatrists and getting brain altering drugs.

Unlike you folk I have done plenty of investigating into this area which is why I can go into detailed specifics instead of talking about bureacratic professionals who want to help people while making money, so patients/customers pay and get helped, because things are so easy. If life was about intentions everyone would have great friends, great social life, great marriage, etc., because few have bad intentions for their own life. But intentions alone are too weak a force, so life is not like that.

Anyway I have done enough talking as Erich Fromm would say to zombies. If anyone has been to therapy sessions, psychiatrists, etc. and seen for themselves how effective they are not and indeed victimized by them, a good source for why it is based on flawed methodologies is Dr. Peter Breggin who has been a dissident in this profession since the days of their more direct tortures lobotomy and electro-shock till their more subtle ones. His website with links to his books, video interviews, etc.:
http://www.breggin.com/
His radio show downloadable as mp3: http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-dr-peter-breggin-hour/

Enough with this off-topic bs, enough naivety. If anyone is interested in more, I can create a whole thread on resources that show why the mental health professions are a false path and threads on alternatives.

Back to the questions of:
What activities are worthy to engage in?
What people are worth knowing?

 

[IgnoredOne]

Any scientific study would casually contradict you. I have plenty of experience in this area, but you seem religiously devoted to belief that all of modern medicine and therapy does not provide any assistance despite vast evidence to the opposite. I suppose you'll next argue that caffiene is not helpful for improving wakefulness and attention; after all, science is useless.

And those are questions for you to answer for yourself.

For myself, anything that increases knowledge in total is something worth doing. People with knowledge and intelligence, esp. specialist knowledge, are worth knowing.

 

[Doubt The Rabbit]

Mmm...yes, your bull is quite tiring.

In any case, you can't ask other people about worth, because everyone has a different view on worth in itself. For instance, I find my sister, mother, chat friends, psychiatrist, and writing mentor all people worth knowing. For me, drawing, writing, journaling, watching fun shows, and reading fun comics are worth doing. However, you probably couldn't care less about any of them.
What's worth something to you is something you have to figure out yourself. Now if you want to ask people what's worth knowing/doing from a personal standpoint, that's something we can answer.

---

For myself, anything that increases knowledge in total is something worth doing. People with knowledge and intelligence, esp. specialist knowledge, are worth knowing.

Even trivial knowledge like how to fix a hottub? I love talking to people who have a valid knowledge on something (and agreeable evidence to back it up), and happened to be acquainted to a man who was afraid our age difference would give us nothing to talk about.

So I asked him, "Well, what do you like? Tell me something you take pride in and we'll talk about it."

I was interested to find out that he fixes hottubs and learned all about it Totally useless knowledge to me, but it was very nice learning about it.

 

[Thrasymachus]

I don't think family is something worth knowing because most family members aren't from the perspective of self-betterment, looking at life as a techne that should be improved over time. But they are people who should be like the bedrocks of your personal and social life. They tend to be stable, dependable, you should be comfortable with them due to so much previous contact, they are usually the first ones to help you, etc. Personally all my mother wants to do after work, household chores, shopping, is watching hours upon hours of tv. It sometimes hurts me that my mom just want to spend her leisure life watching the stupid box.

I was hinting more from the perspective of life as a techne that should be plied and who is worth knowing or what is worth doing in that context. You could do anything, like watch tv, or meet anyone, people are everywhere almost, it is not really hard to do such things. But that is not what I want from life. Most people who you know will drag you down and the most common activities are also likewise stupefying. I could give a short profile of all my so called friends and show how they drag me down, but I will do that another day I should have started sleep long ago.

 

[IgnoredOne]

Even trivial knowledge like how to fix a hottub? I love talking to people who have a valid knowledge on something (and agreeable evidence to back it up), and happened to be acquainted to a man who was afraid our age difference would give us nothing to talk about.

So I asked him, "Well, what do you like? Tell me something you take pride in and we'll talk about it."

I was interested to find out that he fixes hottubs and learned all about it Totally useless knowledge to me, but it was very nice learning about it.

I'm sure that someday I will be trapped in a desert island inside the crust of a planet with a rum drink, a harem of green-skinned babes, and a nonfunctioning hot tub.

Invaluable specialist knowledge is invaluable.

 

[SkuzzieMuff]

Thrasymachus: Your extreme negativity toward everything is just as bad as the extreme positivity you fight against. It would be best to have a balanced view of the matter so that you could see the pros and cons of everything to determine the individual value of the professional. Yeah, some professionals suck, I personally had a very ****** therapist when I was younger, but I wouldn't let that twist my opinion toward all therapists and psychiatrists. You've obviously chosen to be miserable, and therefore, you get what you ask for. In that case, I don't really think you'll fit in around here, because this site is meant for people who are lonely but looking for a solution, not those who want to drag others into their void of darkness.