this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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You can change your (psychological) reaction to everything. All psychological suffering is chosen by yourself and can be stopped if you choose not to suffer.
Of course this is simple, not easy. Almost no one can do it.
Most people I meet don't believe this and hate that I'm saying this.
Purely as a thought experiment, this is mostly just vacuous logic. Sure, you can kill yourself, or kill everything you love or hate, or make sacrifices that are probably infinitely greater than the suffering itself (you could choose to stop caring about human suffering, most would much rather suffer than do that).
In practice however this is even worse than vacuous, it's just wrong and insane. You can't choose to not be schizophrenic, physical and psychological pain aren't two neatly distinct categories, saying it's "a choice" is just drawing a completely arbitrary border on where choice starts, and no shit people get angry at you because unless you heavily qualify this kind of statement further, anyone would think you're doing the purest form of bootstrap victim blaming argument possible. Anyone would think of that one time they suffered the most in their lives and you're saying "you chose that, that's on you".
If I try to be as charitable as I possibly can, I would assume this is an attempt at criticizing self-pity, highlighting that we are often our biggest obstacles to healing and that will plays a greater part in our agency than we recognize. I'd agree with all of that, but that's being really charitable, I don't think your statement makes that case at all.
See :D told ya it's unpopular. Yeah, it's "victim blaming" essentially. You might not believe me, but I have been a victim most of my life in many situations. I also have or have had mental disorders.
In the end, you can only control yourself. And so while it is of course not my fault if I am being abused or whatever (it's the fault of the abuser) it is actually very much my fault if I don't find ways to remove myself from that situation. Of course, every situation is different. The difficulty of "fixing" it, and how to do it, massively differs. But in almost all situations, "suffering" only makes it less likely you'll get out of it. If you feel too bad, most people are more likely to feel powerless, to not think clearly, to be defeatist and so on.
Life literally always has challenges, things that make you feel bad. No matter how good of a situation someone has, you'll always find people that are miserable in that situation. I'm saying you can actually be fine with your situation, whatever it is.
I think the notion of "choice" or "fault" here is a little questionable, I understand your argument broadly (that's what I tried to do in the last paragraph), so maybe it's mostly just a language issue (I don't think saying it is your "fault" or "choice" really means the same thing as saying that it's "up to you").
But I believe you're contradicting yourself when you say that you both have to act and get out of situation such as abuse (not be defeatist) and but also learn to be fine with the situation (which reads like admitting defeat to me). I think this confusion between an actionable scenario (you can change things around you) and a non-actionable scenario (you can only change your outlook) is at the core of it.
Regardless I agree that self-pity is an absolute poison, but I'd tend to believe the way you put it is perhaps more controversial (because of what it implies or leaves out) than the point itself. Choosing not to suffer can also be a form of defeatism.
Yeah but you can not suffer and still act to get out of the situation is what I'm saying.