Serious question: are you depressed? So far most negative utilitarians I’ve known were depressed and some stopped being negative utilitarian after fixing a chemical imbalance that hampered their ability to experience good things.
No, I’m not depressed, and I believe I never have been. I understand and appreciate the question if what you describe is your prior experience of people who identify as negative utilitarians. I may identify as NU for discussion’s sake, but my underlying identification is with the motivation of impartial compassion. I would go as far as to say that I am happy in all areas of my personal life, being driven towards unification by my terminal concern for the expected suffering of others.
I have had brief experiences of medical emergencies that gave me new perspectives into suffering from the inside. (In hindsight, much of it was generated by fear and escalating perception, but so it is in real danger.) While those happened years ago, I’ve continued to reflect on them and feel like they’ve changed me, affecting my daily life and priorities since then. For a while, I felt grateful for getting my life back and considered devoting myself to treating acute pain. I since graduated Master’s in Psychology without clinical internship to focus more on research, feeling that my comparative advantage is in channeling compassion for more scalable, theoretical work.
I believe a possible mistake of depressed NUs is to focus on others’ suffering before taking care of themselves (by listening to the foundational motivation of self-compassion). Self-compassion is our value-grounding for extended self-compassion, which leads to universal compassion in the limit.
Serious question: are you depressed? So far most negative utilitarians I’ve known were depressed and some stopped being negative utilitarian after fixing a chemical imbalance that hampered their ability to experience good things.
No, I’m not depressed, and I believe I never have been. I understand and appreciate the question if what you describe is your prior experience of people who identify as negative utilitarians. I may identify as NU for discussion’s sake, but my underlying identification is with the motivation of impartial compassion. I would go as far as to say that I am happy in all areas of my personal life, being driven towards unification by my terminal concern for the expected suffering of others.
I have had brief experiences of medical emergencies that gave me new perspectives into suffering from the inside. (In hindsight, much of it was generated by fear and escalating perception, but so it is in real danger.) While those happened years ago, I’ve continued to reflect on them and feel like they’ve changed me, affecting my daily life and priorities since then. For a while, I felt grateful for getting my life back and considered devoting myself to treating acute pain. I since graduated Master’s in Psychology without clinical internship to focus more on research, feeling that my comparative advantage is in channeling compassion for more scalable, theoretical work.
I believe a possible mistake of depressed NUs is to focus on others’ suffering before taking care of themselves (by listening to the foundational motivation of self-compassion). Self-compassion is our value-grounding for extended self-compassion, which leads to universal compassion in the limit.
Nate Soares has a post about self-compassion as a key part of his wider, 40-post series, Replacing Guilt, both of which I universally recommend (also ePUB-compiled here).
Nod. And apologies for armchair psychologizing which I do think is generally bad form.