Search the Community

@Inliytened1 I think its a problem, but men cannot see it because society taught them to be hyper independent and we know the current situation of mens mental health as a result of that. Statistically speaking married or long-term partnered men live aprox 10 years longer than single men, they tend to commit less suicide, they are more successful, they are healthier, they have lower cortisol levels. Talking about humans in general, people with strong social and romantic connections have a 50% higher likelihood of survival when compared to those who were isolated or single. The worst thing you can do to a human is to put him/her in solitary confinement, it's funny how little effort men put into relationships given the data. Maybe Im a hopeless romantic but I think there is so much value in having a sacred union, a supportive partner, to help each other grow through life, there is a lot os goodness that was discarded with religion, we threw the baby with the bath water and now wee qre ll suffering in silence and dont even know why.

TL;DR 33M gay/homoflexible engineer (probably AuDHD) trying to figure out what freedom and purpose look like after years of depression, burnout, and a toxic relationship. Therapist asked: "If you had financial freedom for life, what would you do?" Still working on that one. --- Forgive me if this has been posted before — this is my first post and the search bar doesn’t seem to work. So, quick background. 33M, gay/homoflexible (with some pent-up 50-shades-level fantasies... Catholic guilt hits hard). I don’t love labels, but I guess I’d fall somewhere on the “AuDHD” spectrum. Like Leo, I’ve found pretty much every career I’ve tried miserable. Unlike Leo, I haven’t found my calling yet. Being an engineer, whether software or electrical, just isn’t it for me. It sucks. No offense to those who enjoy it. My therapist (straight, no feelings) posed this question as homework: “Suppose you had financial freedom — just enough to be comfortable, think universal basic income, guaranteed for life. What would you do with your time?” To be honest; I'm stumped. One of my biggest issues with traditional jobs has always been the lack of autonomy. I’ve always had a little oppositional defiance in me. Probably still do; it's just transmuted into something else. When I was in second grade, I punched my teacher for not playing by the rules of a game she made up. I also refused to wear my kindergarten graduation gown because I thought it looked stupid (mortifying my parents, I’m sure). So yeah, I was a weird kid. Throughout my 20s I came to grips with my sexuality, and maybe over-corrected a bit. I didn’t get into hard drugs or poppers like many in the gay community; shout-out to D.A.R.E. for working on at least one of us lol. I can't say the same for Scared Straight . Joking aside, I definitely got hooked on “electronic drugs” — Grindr, hookups, porn, the usual. So while Dr. Jekyll was supposed to be building a career, Mr. Hyde (pun intended) was coming out of the closet. By my late 20s, things started to shift. I stopped caring what people thought. I realized I didn’t have acne anymore, I looked good, I was confident. Then, at 31, I dated a narcissist with BPD. After cutting ties I'd sought therapy and my therapist told me exactly what was going on; my ex totally blind-sighted me. That relationship wrecked me. Constant blame, manipulation, and guilt. On one side, I was juggling a toxic partner. On the other, another miserable job. When both finally collapsed, it was like a reset button had been hit and I had zero shits left to give; I was oddly at peace with losing both. Then when I had a falling out with some "friends" turned business partners a few months thereafter; again I was at relative peace (granted; as my therapist would explain to me; one of those partners had a similar personality to my ex, if not worse. But because I'd already processed my ex and the fact that I wasn't sleeping with my business partner, it was a much easier break. Now, for the first time in 11 years, I’m not even remotely depressed (no drugs either unless you want to count Lamictal; which I take for epilepsy) I used to cry daily watching Leo’s videos, basically doing self-help masturbation, while thinking about suicide. I actually attempted twice, both times tied to career despair and identity chaos. Now the only time I bring it up is when I tell people how I survived it. I reconnected with an old friend a week ago (after six years). I think I said "I know I'm not a 10/10... maybe a 7/10, but I know I'm good enough and when I'm ready to date again that person is going to have an excellent partner" and he responded, “No, you look the same... but different. You’re easily a 9.5/10 and you had some sort of glow-up. For once look happy." So tying this all together... so what do I actually do with this hypothetical freedom? Part of me wants to go a little feral. To let loose all the repressed sexual energy and just live without guilt or rules. My ex killed off any real desire for a relationship (for now). More often than not I'd always do solo travel as a means of escaping sexual repression. In fact, the first time I came out was on a tour of Australia after my tour guide found me on Grindr (a dry-run before the real deal). Don't get me wrong, I love nature and that's why I chose Australia for my first solo adventure (perfect blend of nature and hot guys). While I'd love to do more nature travel, I can’t travel to most of Asia or Africa due to medication restrictions. For me, while I'm not super interested in European history (sorry in advance... I guess castles are cool and the food is always great at least) Europe is attractive to me because the guys are hot lmao. Most recently though I did go away to Costa Rica and I brought a friend (actually, my other ex... whom I now consider one of my best friends) and I didn't go for sex for a change and I did genuinely feel grounded and at peace there. I had several bucket-list destinations I'd wanted to visit and Costa Rica was the last one on the list (and possibly my favorite... neck and neck with Australia). Anyway, I know sexual indulgence, while fun, isn’t the real answer. It’s temporary. It’s not a calling. It’s just blowing off steam after years of repression. After eleven years of depression, losing myself in work and relationships, it’s like I’ve been dropped into an empty white room with a blank canvas. I’ve picked up some hobbies, joined a sports league, made new friends, got back in the gym after an injury. But those are just activities. That's not a life calling. I know y'all probably drank that out of a fire hose, but I'd love your take.

@Yeah Yeah Hm but why are you so adamant about suicide? I mean not like i'd stop you or anything but WHY do you feel like life is BS? Why do you think existence is just suffering? From my point of view it looks like your perspective is twisted in some way. Wouldn't you need to know how it feels to suffer to know how it feels to be content with your life? To me it feels like your statement about wanting to commit 100% guaranteed suffering free suicide is hiding something else. And i'm just assuming a lot of things here but maybe THERE IS something wrong here? But who knows, maybe you're not normal either and you genuinely get no joy out of life or something. I think you're just trying to cover something by being so adamant about the suicide thing. I don't know what you're trying to cover but it definitely feels like you're not telling the full story here. AGAIN i'm assuming a whole lot here (I'm assuming you're a pretty normal human with an average body composition and an average bio-chemistry, I'm assuming that you might have some sort of mental illness that you're trying to hide with the things you said about the government assisted suicide stuff and i'm also assuming that you actually want an answer that might be able to help you. I don't know you or how your mind works so I unfortunately have to do at least this many assumptions). I would like to know your thoughts on this video from actualized.org tho: curious as to what your answer might be. I also think Leo brought up some interesting points in this video.

The Argument for the Rightful Exit If reason grants us the ability to reflect on existence, it must also grant us the right to end it. The Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and later Marcus Aurelius—saw life as a loan, not a possession; returning it, when its purpose or dignity fades, is not sin but wisdom. David Hume, writing in the 18th century, argued that suicide violates no divine or moral law: it harms neither God nor society if one’s existence has ceased to benefit either. From that lineage comes the claim that civilization itself is incomplete until it acknowledges this right. Just as we developed medicine to prolong life, reason demands medicine to end it peacefully. A synthesized, humane compound—a painless, deliberate “exit”—should be as accessible as anesthetic, under the same reverence we give to birth, surgery, or sleep. Such an invention would not glorify death; it would dignify choice. It would recognize that the will to die, when born of lucidity, is not madness but metaphysical agency—the highest form of ownership over the self.

You refer to ethics as an objective criterion; if it's objective, then it must exist somewhere. So either it's a theological bias—it's written in a sacred book/one you believe in—or it actually just comes from your imagination and is probably just a reflex to generalize your superego, given that it's partly unconscious. Hence the fact that "atheists" who claim to be ethical will say something like, "It's something obvious deep down in each of us", well no, it's not universally obvious; it's just the projection of your own superego and, by extension, the ideas of your collective unconscious. Hence the fact that some cultures (Northern European and Anglo-Saxon countries, Hindus, etc.) have a higher prevalence of veganism regardless of social conditions. Even if you're not religious, if you don't go to church, etc., you have mental structures influenced by religion, and you generalize from that. Besides, Jung said that Europeans/white people are essentially Christian whether they like it or not, because it's ingrained in the collective unconscious. I don't have a moral compass; I don't think in those terms, at least not as much as you and others. It seems so. You are dismissing the solution of aligning the conscious with the unconscious. That is to say, the possibility that your moral compass is faulty. No, your moral compass is both conscious and unconscious (the unconscious part is precisely what motivates globalization under idealistic or even religious language such as "ethics" or "morality"), and your instinctual desires are fundamentally unconscious. Your conflict, on the contrary, is a confrontation between what you have learned, the legacy of your upbringing and the collective unconscious, as I said earlier, which are more or less conscious, and your atavistic desires. I mentioned neurosis somewhere because, without going into the psychoanalytic genesis of the phenomenon—that's not the point—the more neurotic a person is (we all are to some extent), the more they tend to go against their id as if it were good, a right thing, something worthwhile. Everyone exploits everyone else, even when you think you're in love with your boyfriend it's low-key energy business. As I've said elsewhere, even adopting your idealistic paradigm, yes, there are particularly unethical production chains, but they're a minority. Where I live, there's a lot of free-range cattle and chicken farming; many people also keep chickens because it's easy. These animals shouldn't live because they're "exploited"? That's delusional. Most vegans are indeed urban white people who constantly exploit others through their lifestyle; most of your gadgets were produced through exploitation, and not good exploitation at that. When you buy a smartphone, you're buying something from a company (Foxconn) that have suicide nets in their gigantic factories. Why is living a relatively peaceful life outdoors, safe from predators and hunger, before being quickly killed with a bullet to the head to feed people directly or indirectly (through manure), considered wrong? Like, why would that be "wrong"? Especially if, without getting into any of that nonsense, you don't particularly care about other humans. It's a strange delirium; the whole of life is exploitation and power dynamics. It's not ugly, it's just nature; what's ugly is hurting yourself and becoming hostile to others because you're living in a delirium.

Look up pictures of suicide cases a few days before they committed it. People look happy even tho they aren’t. It’s almost expected that you fake happiness in society. And happiness is transient anyways. Those people were both happy & miserable just like you and I. Trading half a dollar for 50 cents.

But the knowledge that is the biggest illusion is still a real illusion. That’s the whole point of the illusion, is to appear real. Why go to the cinema to watch a movie already knowing the characters on the screen are not real? Sorry James but you enjoy the movie you are in that’s why you continue to watch it, rather than try to escape it via suicide. Escaping the movie is also God escaping the movie. It’s all God. God already knows the movie isn’t real, that suicide isn’t real. God already knows the movie because God created it.

No man, it is only a metaphor. Suicide is escape. Surrendering is burning while alive.

Spiritually or ethically — whatever you want to call it — am I actually allowed to end this? We cannot possibly answer that for you. Is suicide an actual escape from this nightmare, or is it just more pain somewhere else? No there's no escape, you will only have to go through the same lessons in the next life until you evolve past that point. So think of it this way, you could be repeating the same pattern for thousands of lifetimes unknowingly. Let nature take its course, if the world becomes too much, you can always wander into the forest or live off-grid and never look back. There are many better options out there. There are billionaires who have done this (let all their material go) and are living much happier lives. I've been through hell and back several times in my life, it ultimately comes down to peace of mind. I realized since i was young that our human spirit was never designed for the world we live in today, especially the modern (artificial world), so to speak, rather its a distortion or disease within consciousness, that's how i've always seen it at least. Your role is to decide what works best for you and follow / live that way. Because man-made laws and rules are there, but they are not universal truths or laws, so there are always ways around that system (without violating its laws / rules) but you'll have to live and train yourself to live quite a different life than you've been brought up with. Its hard but pays off eventually. Give it another 5 - 10 years, the whole modernized world will likely crumble under its own core-rupted-ness.

@ted73104 I'll sign up for government assisted suicide today if possible test me I'll drink their concoction I'm out

@ted73104 My answer to Camus question is yes to suicide as the fundamental question before anything else, I'm ready. Yet he won the nobel prize and there is no talk beyond a yes only the no to rebel against life but I'm not going to rebel against an indifferent void that leaves me for interchangeable dust in the end. I personally disagree with life it's BS the whole set up is schitzophrenic madness or as Camus casually calls it "Absurdism". And no the options for a painless death don't seem readily available but I should have the right to exit.

This is a good question! Oh wait this is my own post ... I'm still ready for government assisted suicide I really have no idea why systems are in place to force people to remain alive like I can't talk to literally no one who respects my decision I want to die, literally people revert to forcing me to remain surviving even if it means hospitalization, forced medications and being labelled mentally deranged. I literally answer Camus number one question before all other philosophical inquiries as to whether or not to commit suicide and my answer is yes suicide is the answer for me personally but after that nothing else with actual assisted methods or respect for such choices - Like what am I supposed to do risk a do it yourself setup and risk botching it like how are you supposed to be born with no fucking exit - fuck that - There are lives out there easily visible that shouldn't be happening like slavery in ancient Rome for example, some cosmic force should have interviewed and prevented that shit, hopefully I don't die and spawn into worse of circumstances - To be born is essentially schitzophrenia madness like god is sadistic and doesn't know itself and a glitching shitty A.I. - To even be alive is madness, seriously, so in other words Camus calls it "Absurdism" which in other words is essentially schitzophrenia madness

Bro I think the life purpose course is gonna change your life You didn't elaborate much on this part but it leaves me very concerned for your mindset : Cognitively, I feel like I have a very clear plan and a path forward right now. I'm planning to work in my current job for a few year, save up some money, start a family. On the side, I would like to explore and start working towards my life purpose, and then eventually make the switch full-time after I've saved up some money and am sure about my life purpose. So really you have no plan and just hope it works out? That's what it reads to me. I don't know what industry you're in but surely you know that there is a huge wave of automation layoffs coming to all industries in the next 5 years? And I don't know how well versed you are in macroeconomics, finance and cryptocurrency but tl;dr the value of most fiat currencies is has been going to shit and is predicted to keep massively doing so over the next 10 years meaning the average job will pay less yearly? I'm very glad you lost motivation for your random job by just hearing about the possibility of a life purpose type orientation for your career. Obviously don't quit your job right away but not starting a business or at least a specialized career in this day and age is financial suicide.

Well it depends on what you call bullshit. I've seen enough videos of people getting killed (murder and suicide) and I have to spend some hours afterwards in shock processing their dumbness. But at the end you laugh at the stupidity. You can hurt others, it is your own choice.

The history of Europe is the history of total war. Until not too long ago, it was assumed that the natural state of nations was war. Periods of peace were merely intervals between wars. Everyone enjoyed themselves with their colorful uniforms, drums, and trumpets, their bows, victories, and defeats, until the First World War arrived. Then the game shifted from a “savage sport of gentlemen” to “absolute horror.” From that cauldron of horror emerged dreadful figures who could only think of the next satanic orgy, while in Asia the Japanese descended into a state of collective madness, their repressed and ceremonial nature erupting into a wave of total aggression. With those ingredients came the Second World War, when the gates of hell opened. Let’s not deceive ourselves: the Americans and the British were simply a better business than the Nazis and the Japanese. And the gray empire that Russia imposed for decades over much of Europe was a sentence to suicidal depression. Thanks to the gods, who gifted us those works of art of destruction called nukes, the satanic orgy did not repeat itself again and again. Now humanity is condemned to understand each other, since the only alternative is annihilation. The law of life, which would have forced us to keep fighting forever for the sake of evolution, has met an absolute limit: the apocalypse. So, only the era of peace remains, one that will inevitably come sooner or later. Perhaps then we will all commit suicide together, out of sheer lack of meaning.

Resolve the core issue rather cause more issues by becoming a pariah state the world hates and getting hated on wherever you go as a tourist, sadly. Their not threatened from all sides. Their existence isn't at stake - its not a survival issue but a security issue caused by occupation. In other words - a security dilemma they have created by their own actions and continue to perpetuate rather than resolving the core issue. If a man takes my brother hostage with his gun to his head and arm around his neck - I don't just bomb the both of them. I also don't ask the criminal to step to the side to make space between him and my brother so I can bomb him anyway. If he wants something in exchange - it depends on what he's asking for. If the demand is nonsense and maximalist (such as I commit suicide in exchange for my brothers life ie Israel doesn't exist in exchange for a Palestinian state) then things get complicated and messy. If its a balanced demand (ie they want to exist in a Palestinian state with sovereignty along side Israel) then it should be entertained. If the demand is for a inalienable right the world already has consensus on and that I have little ground in standing in the way of - unless I want to be hated by the world for doing so and gaslight everyone for being anti-Semitic - then it makes sense to let the right manifest. It's called diplomacy and win-win cooperation - something Western hegemony is too arrogant for.

Things in this world can get pretty heavy. Recently a top chess grandmaster and personality i liked to watch to learn about chess died [unconfirmed but most likely due to suicide] based on cheating accusations from Vladimir Kramnik and a whole series of cyber bullying. Be kind to one another and forgive yourself and others.

I feel like there's a lot of context missing here. We don't even know your situation properly so how can we help? You said you budgetted whatever you could and did everything you could, but did you really? I'm not trying to be rude here but are you being honest with yourself and with us? Anyways, my reason for never committing suicide is that your life can always get better. Doesn't matter how dire your life situation is right now, there's always at least SOMETHING you can do to improve your life. And for you it may seem you've tried everything, but as you may know our egos tend to trick ourselves. So maybe there's some ddifferent approach you haven't tried yet who knows? But in the end it's your decision. I've just always viewed suicide as cowardly, at least in the context of emotional suffering like in your case, because how cowardly does one have to be to run away from all their problems in life? Again i don't know your circumstances but that's just how i'd see it if i were in your shoes. And the fact that not knowing what's after death is the only thing stopping you just sounds like an excuse to not take radical action to start changing your life. I'm making a lot of assumptions here because you didn't really give me much to work with, especially considering the limited context you asked this question. I only know that you're 28, live in a moldy room somewhere, have financial problems, and probably lives in the US? Like i don't even know in which country you live. Look man there's always light at the end of the tunnel, even if doesn't seem that way. I truly believe this tho, and i also believe that you can control how you feel about your life. But to end things of i can ask a few questions: In which country do you live? (Different health care systems in different countries) Why do you live in a moldy appartment? (As in what's stopping you from moving to a better place?) Do you have financial constraints? Why? (Can influence your possibilities for getting help or not) What got you to this situation at the age of 28? What past experiences and wvents caused you to feel/live this way? Like if you're going to ask a loaded question as you put it, then at least give the appropriate context so people can actually help you you know? There are just a looot of questions unanswered here, of which the answers to those questions matter a lot on what kind of help you need. Do you have any mental illnesses for example? Are you physivally healthy? Are you not obese? Is your sleep schedule good? Do you have a job? What kind of job and what kind of influence does it have over your life? How much money do you make? Can you make ends meet? Etc. Do you get what i'm saying man? Anyways sorry for the long message but if you're truly considering suicide then get some help brother. And if you can't, then ask yourself why. There's always a way.

@DocWatts they are not joking about driving people to suicide. I was in the hospital for mental health where I met other trauma survivors. Some of them were victims of modern day neo nazis who tried to drive them to suicide after doing the same to their friends. They coerce them into jumping off of bridges to disguise the murder as suicide and they get away with this constantly. This is why the suicide statistics are wrong. As it stands nearly 50 percent of murder cases are never solved. That is not counting the proxy suicide murderers because they are not even being recorded as murders. I am also a survivor of a proxy suicide attempt by my abusive family member. I was being targeted even more because of my severe depression and there was sadistic pleasure on the harm being caused with impunity. The other family members still refuse to admit that abuse is even happening and they tell me I am the problem somehow. I really need to leave, but there are some genuine constraints combined with sentimental bullshit around some family members I love. The point remains is that they are definitely not joking about those suicides. I have met survivors and the legal system is terrible at prosecuting this because they don't take psychological abuse as seriously as physical abuse due to the greater difficulty in proving against plausible deniability without direct words.

Morality takes a backseat when you live in a state of war; what prevails is what works. In cases of open war, it's a good idea to treat prisoners well, as this makes them more likely to surrender. But in wars against terrorism, things are different. The US has Guantanamo , in Germany, terrorists committed mass suicide. If you're a Polisario fighter and you're captured by Morocco, you'll have a bad time. And if you're a Kurdish guerrilla and you're captured by the Turks, it's even worse, if you are a Chechen terrorist and you are going to be captured by Russians, better commit suicide

I'm not sure where you got your answers from but when I asked AI (Claude AI) I got this - There's no clear scientific answer to this - individual variation would matter far more than sex/gender. Research on solitary confinement shows that psychological deterioration depends on factors like: Individual differences (regardless of gender): Pre-existing mental health conditions Previous trauma or stress exposure Personality traits (introversion vs. extroversion) Coping mechanisms and resilience Age and cognitive flexibility Situational factors: Duration and conditions of confinement Whether there's any sensory stimulation Previous experience with isolation Access to activities, reading materials, etc. While there are some gender differences in mental health statistics generally (women have higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders, men have higher rates of substance abuse), these population-level trends don't reliably predict individual responses to extreme stress like solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is considered harmful to virtually everyone when prolonged, with documented effects including anxiety, depression, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, and increased suicide risk - affecting people of all genders. The most honest answer is: it would depend entirely on the specific individuals involved, not their gender.

• "Will to Die": His philosophy, influenced by Schopenhauer but far more extreme, centered on the idea that the fundamental driving force of the universe is a "Will to Die" (Wille zum Tode), the reverse of Schopenhauer's "Will to Live." • "God's Suicide": Mainländer theorized that at the beginning of time, a unitary God (or Monad) chose to commit suicide out of a desire for absolute nothingness, shattering itself into the time-bound fragments that constitute the universe. In this view, existence itself is the decaying corpse of God, and all life carries an inherent, unconscious desire for annihilation as the ultimate "redemption." • Redemption: For Mainländer, death was the desired liberation, and the purpose of humanity and all existence was to collectively aim for peaceful extinction, or "cosmic euthanasia."

My Birthday I have a lot of reasons why I hate my birthday and I want to vent about it. My birthday is the Hindu equivalent of having your birthday on Christmas. I was ever able to celebrate my birthday on the day of even when my birthday fell on a weekend because no could come because there is a handful of holidays always around my birthday. A few years it was so bad that my birthday got delayed to December. My birthday is in October. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to pop out a month early. All it got me was a visit to the NICU and a lifetime of sharing my birthday with my biggest opp, my mother. I have the same birthday as my mom and let's just say that I don't have a good relationship with her. Because I have the same birthday as a family member, I have to spend my birthday with my family whether I like it or not. And that means being forced to hang out with people that I hate. Birthdays always felt really performative. I was depressed for a good chunk of my childhood and birthdays meant forcing a smile around the very people that made me miserable and forcing myself to celebrate. As a result, my depression would be at it's worst at around September and October. Growing up it was also a reminder of how many years I was also depressed. I also don't like presents or cake. Cake is alright, but I pretty much like every kind of dessert more than it. Growing up I would always say that I wanted a pie for my birthday instead of a cake. It was my one request. And my family said I was stupid and weird for wanting that. My boyfriend makes me a pie every year for my birthday and it always makes me cry because he's the only one who ever listened to me or gave a fuck about what I wanted rather than focusing on what would make him feel or look good. I don't like presents because 90% of the time it's something dumb and it shows how much people barely know me. I've also had a lot of family members try to buy my love through gifts so now I have a negative association with it. It feels weird having so much attention on me. I guess part of it may be the fact that I share a birthday. But I just feel awkward and egotistical. I don't like announcing my birthday as it is coming up. Again, I feel awkward and attention hungry for that. Kind of related to point 6&7, but I feel weird about celebrating myself in general even if I did something big. So I feel even weirder for celebrating myself when I didn't do anything at all. As a result, birthdays kind of just feel like a participation trophy for life to me. I don't feel this way about other people's birthdays. I think it's beautiful to celebrating and appreciating someone just existing without having them had done something. I just feel weird when it comes to me. I'm also usually having an existential crisis around my birthday because I'm reflecting on my life as a whole. For a large chunk of my life, that came with depression (see point 4) but nowadays, it comes with just me journalling and thinking a lot. Not necessarily in a negative and ruminating way but it a very neutral way. As a result, I always want a more chill birthday to just be with my thoughts. But then I have people who make me feel bad about it because I don't want to go out and celebrate. I also don't like telling people about my birthday because I don't want to deal with the possibility of them forgetting. I also don't want to plan things out in the fear that everything falls through. I also have a list of negative memories that have been popping up associated with my birthday. This is in no particular order. I had two suicide attempts. The first was the night before my 16th birthday. I was horribly depressed because this birthday marked me being depressed for over half my life and I didn't see the point in living. I put the gun away and the next day I went to school and found out that people made a surprise party for me. I was crying while people singing me a happy birthday and people thought it was tears of happiness but really I was thinking about the night before and how my actions would have affected other people given what they were planning. I had my friends forget about me on my 17th birthday. I was drifting from my friends due to a couple of deaths I had in my family and I was not coping with that grief well. That was not a fun realization to come to on my birthday. Then on my 18th, I straight up didn't have anyone to celebrate with. The second was around my 21st. I finally got out of my bad household and had the room to heal when I was in college but then I got dragged back into that environment because of COVID. It felt like there was no end in sight, both in terms of what was going on with my family but also when it came to the pandemic and how it was affecting the world around me and my prospects. This time I ended up in the hospital. My 22nd was rough too because I felt like I missed a chunk of my 20s to the pandemic and that I'm like this emotional wreck who feels stunted and like she doesn't have her life together. I had a really bad existential crisis. And that was golden birthday. For a while, my birthday was also a reminder of those attempts and that in it of itself was triggering and yet another reason why my depression would flare up around that time. But that has since faded for the most part. Sometimes I still feel like it's partially my fault for having these attempts around my birthday because I essentially tainted my birthday myself. Being forced to be around my aunt and uncle is already upsetting for me. But almost every year, my aunt goes into some kind of disgusting Fox News esq rant during our meal. One time, I took my family out for brunch and she went on this rant on how teachers don't deserve to be paid, that public education is a waste of money because the kids are unruly and demonic, and how they all deserve to be beat.... Yeah.... we had a few tables stare at us with that one. This was my 23rd. My parents got me a chocolate cake for my birthday. A few days later I was craving cake so I went to the fridge to get a slice only to not find it. I asked my mom what happened to it and she told me that she gave the cake away to her students at her school. When I told her that made me upset because she did this without my permission, she said that I'm being too sensitive and selfish and that I need to lose weight anyways. Bruh.. this situation still makes me mad. I had a phase where I really got into cake decorating shows. Even though I don't like cake like that, I wanted to embrace it and make something nice. I had a guy make fun of me and say that I was pathetic, lonely, and embarrassing because I made a cake for myself because if people cared about me, they would get a cake for me. Despite being depressed, my family would force me to do a birthday party because they thought that if they didn't that they would look bad in front of their community and that was more important than how I felt. I also remember getting yelled at on my 10th birthday. It lasted like a couple hours. I have undiagnosed ADHD and instead of getting me help, my parents resorted to the *disciplining your kid out of ADHD approach* which mainly resulted in me getting yelled at for hours or getting hit. Earlier that day, I had something happen at school that was messed up. Back then, I was still happy about having a birthday with my mom because I didn't yet have a super bad relationship with her and when I proudly exclaimed that my mom and I share a birthday, a girl who didn't like me in school told me that she bets that my parents hate me because I was born on my mom's birthday and I ruined that day for her. Yeah, I cried myself to sleep that night. So yeah, I cried myself to sleep these last two nights thinking about the above. Last night I also cried about how dry my social life is right now and how I miss this friend who ghosted me. I also cried after work today. I found out that I was put on phone duty at work on the week of my birthday. I have been on phone duty a lot lately because my team is understaffed and it's been quite stressful because it usually means that I have to work overtime and I'm being micromanaged. I was happy that this was happening on the week after my birthday but then due to a last minute change it's now happening on the week of. I've also been stressing about feeling behind and stagnant in my life because of some goals that I didn't reach this year and because people are side eyeing me because I'm in a relationship for over 3 years with no ring even though I'm not ready to get married yet.

Update on the two moronic Russian encirclements of their propaganda push, looks like the third group held (sort of) but the drones are still stopping any movement. They've tried over many days/weeks to reach these forces now and just keep getting vehicles ripped to shreds by drones. So they've resorted to sending out suicide squads crawling over the ground to try to reach the cut-off units. It wasn't the most costly encirclement of the war, but its turning into it, by them just keeping sending old-styled armored columns, trying to ignore the drones. *This video helps expand the understanding of how drones shape the battlefield control. I can't remember the video now but up in Sumy these tactics are being exploited. Russia will not withdraw from terrain they set foot in, so Ukraine bypasses them and just hits their supplies, over and over and over. They are getting destroyed up there too, and some say routed, because everyone knows what they will do. Rush to a settlement, jump off light bikes or cars, and then try to dig in, with nothing much but small arms. No supplies to speak of.

Leo, imagine you were having the scenario above as a lucid dream at night. And you clearly know that you dream, and that you will wake up at some point. And you experience this dream, and clearly know its just a temporary passing dream. How much would this affect you? The dream would still be very sad, you would probably still cry. But you would clearly know it is a dream. And that this dream won't last forever, and can't and won't change your essence, and is mere appearance. And now you can imagine Enlightenment as being aware that this life and world is just an appearing dream. Including your body, thoughts, I-thoughts, feelings, anything. And this realization is always available, because all thoughts and appearances have become mere lucid appearances "dancing" in Infinite Being. Dreamstuff. Wouldn't it make much more sense to work towards waking up and making the dream lucid (Enlightenment), instead of chasing more dream Aliens and understandings? Because the chasing/grasping is the opposite of resting in choiceless Awareness for long times, which is necessary for waking up. And btw., nobody has said there is no suffering. There is tremendous suffering in this world, and most beings take that as very real, because for them it is not a dream but appears very real, and very dualistic self vs. other, and very much suffering/self-contraction. Did anybody doubt that? Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence: "Suffering, psychological suffering, is not necessary and can be avoided. However, there is certainly pain and that cannot be avoided. Hence the distinction. To enjoy pleasure and suffer pain is part of the package of having a body. Psychological suffering is the most intense of all and it is not necessary. If you don’t want to make a distinction, I cannot explain why psychological suffering is not necessary. Psychological suffering is related to the notion of a sufferer, a person. It is always related to past and future. Consider for instance the case of my friend William Samuel. During World War II he was in China. He was assigned a Chinese interpreter who was a Taoist sage, although he didn’t know it at the time. The first thing that he noticed about this man was that he was always happy, smiling and enjoying. One day they were in great danger. William’s platoon was being pursued by the Japanese who were very close. They were running back towards their lines. There were hills on the horizon and the sage pointed to the purple line of the mountains and said to William, “Look, how beautiful!” William said, “It was the last thing I would have thought about at that moment.” Some time later William discovered that three months earlier the sage’s wife had been raped and killed by the Japanese and that they had also killed his two sons. That’s what triggered his interest in this man, and he eventually became his student. This Taoist sage was free from the past. He may have been in pain, but he was not suffering on account of the death of his wife and children. In seeing the beauty of the purple hills while under enemy fire, he was teaching a wonderful lesson in courage and love. It is hard to imagine more atrocious circumstances." and And why is there evil and suffering? For learning. According to pretty much all OBLers, there is a life review after death. The soul gets reflected from the energies/emotions it caused as evil-doer, and can learn. The soul of the victim can also learn to not do what the prepetrator did. The impacts caused from ones life come back, for learning and reviewing. This can be a quite hellish experience, for example Jürgen Ziewe describes a suicide-bombers afterlife. Not for the faint-of-hearted. I think your view that everbody goes singing with the angels/aliens and becoming Infinity after death is a bit naive and is not in line with thousands of OBElers of the millienia exploring the Afterlife-Realms. I can only recommend you to cause as little havoc as possible with your followers, and lead them in a good direction. It will all come back to you. In the dream called Afterlife-review and Afterlife-realms. Bon voyage!