how could God let people hurt to the point of suicide? how could God create such a pathetic world that disgusts people so much that they have to kill themselves?
or to ask this in some other manner: is it worth viewing negative experiences as opportunities to learn and grow, instead of as pointless or simply undesirable? is it worth staying alive despite reasons one might have not to?
while you might learn sth from sth negative, learning isn’t intrinsically good. you might get involved in a vehicular accident and have your leg amputated as a consequence of this. now the “lesson” of what it’s like to get involved in a vehicular accident and have your leg amputated as a consequence of it, that you’d learn, won’t regenerate your missing limb. won’t necessarily detraumatize you from that experience either.
and while you might grow (socially or in self esteem or whatever) from negative experiences, it’ll make you cast a shadow on others who are littler than you, while you’re standing in the sun, enjoying yourself. there’s the potential that you’ll get your positive out of others negative. and it might turn against you, like it was the case with Australian TV star and former model Charlotte Dawson, who killed herself this year (2014) because she couldn’t take the cyber bullying anymore. growing also isn’t intrinsically positive.
moreover, negative experiences are standing in disproportion to positive experiences. they outweight the positive experiences. imagine the intensity of the most intense pain (apparently that’s being poisoned by a stone fish) and how long it lasts and compare it to the most intense pleasure (an orgasm, for people who are into sex) and how long it lasts.
does this scream chronic depression and pessimism?
as for being depressed,
“psychiatry [...] works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. depression, ‘fear of life’, refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more imediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of anti-biological tendencies. it is not the soul being sick, but its protection (a [...] repression of its damning surplus of consciousness [...] a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living) failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced – correctly – as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential”
-Peter Wessel Zapffe, "the last messiah"
as for pessimism, the classical question "is the glass half full or half empty" can't be objectively resolved, yet is there really something in life to be optimistic about? Arthur Schopenhauer had something to say about this
“optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind”
-Schopenhauer, "the world as will and representation"
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