It’s only a guarantee that staying alive indefinitely for a chance at a cure is worth it if if you assume that the value of the pain that they’ll go through until then is zero. Most suicidal people disagree with that assumption. For example, if your depression is so bad that every day is agonizing, is it really worth it to live for a 2% chance of that it would be curable on the day of your 80th birthday?
antenna
Karma: 24
The length of time that the torture lasts is undeterminable by you until the torture is over, every second is agony, and you can tap out at any time and choose to lose out on those happy-years. That’s the offer on the table for your suicidal person. It’s an easy thing to say you would take this offer, but I’m pretty skeptical that the average person would actually be able to make it.
In many cases, you have to claim to be getting better or they don’t let you out. I’ve spoken with multiple people who’ve been committed and had to “fake a recovery” to be released. Personally, the first thing I would do after being released in such a situation would be to cut out of my life whoever it was that committed me, as legally and finally as possible, so that they could never do something like that again.
That’s quite a cruel thing to say to somebody that’s suicidally depressed. When you’re in that state, every single day is agony and there’s little hope for it ever to get better. From that perspective, you are the selfish one for forcing someone else to live in agony for your own pleasure. If you want your suicidal loved ones not to commit suicide, focus on helping reduce the agony, not hurling accusations at them.
As someone who’s struggled with depression and suicidal ideation since childhood (not going to do it, don’t worry) -- the cliche “a permanent solution to a temporary problem” is the opposite of helpful. For many people, it’s not a temporary problem, it’s a lifelong one that you just have to learn to live with (or not). Hearing something like that, for a suicidal person, just reinforces how isolated and misunderstood they feel.
I didn’t know Chris but I think I understand what he was thinking. He was in too much pain to bear, so he looked for ways that he could stop having to bear it. Even at a 5% chance for that at getting a non-depressed version of life afterwards, cryonics would have been a win, since a completed suicide has a 0% chance for that. “Sitting around on this side of the action” would require continuing to bear the weight of existence, which he felt he could not do. If he felt he could, then taking the time to find the right combination of therapy/lifestyle changes/medication to alleviate his depression would probably have the greatest rate of success, better than waiting for cryonics to improve.
I don’t think this one fits. I’ve gotten way more sexual harassment from geeks than from jocks, partly because I’m a woman and a geek, so I spend more time around other geeks, but also because geeks tend to have relatively poor social skills and an underdog mentality. (ie, where they assume that they are the good guys, so what they do is good, while the jocks are the bad guys, because they’re getting the girls they want. I don’t say this to pick on you, just that I’ve found it’s a very common mentality among young nerdy guys.) Marc Lépine certainly wasn’t a jock and most incels aren’t jocks either. “Revenge of the Nerds” (which includes an instance of the nerds sexually assaulting a woman and selling naked pictures of her without her consent) was targeted towards nerds, not jocks. When I was in college, I once had the pleasure of being followed back to my car by a group of CS nerds after a night class, while they loudly discussed amongst themselves my dress and how much they enjoyed gang rape. I also got to listen to rape jokes in the computer lab, as well as discussions about which of the female professors and students they would like to fuck. This was around 2010.
I would suggest a couple possible alternatives for why you may not be seeing a problem with sexism in the nerd corner of culture: first, a lot of this stuff is intentionally orchestrated to happen when no other men (and preferably no other women) are around. Secondly, some of the more minor things may be happening in front of you and you’re just not paying much attention to it.