one kind of person who fully understands that minimizing suffering is not something that should properly be made into a goal is people who have lost a deeply loved partner
-
-
and because human neural adaptation mostly works by dropping what isn’t used, this is a part of them that was literally, physically carved like wood to serve this purpose. so yeah, when they’re gone, that part of them just hurts all the time
Show this thread -
they’re criticized for holding onto this pain. they say they feel like the pain is all of their loved one that they have left, and people tell them no, you have to let go, you have to move on
Show this thread -
*fuck* those people. the part of you that grew into your partner is also where your model of them, which is to say the part of them that lives in you, is sited. you feel like that’s all of them you have left *because it is*. your intuition about your situation is 100% correct.
Show this thread -
so you hold onto that pain as long as you damn well please. now, there are probably ways to rework that part of you to not be raw and to give what’s left of your loved one a comfy place to live in your head
Show this thread -
i can’t tell you how to do that any more than i can learn something *for* you, but maybe you can work it out. but this is very different from “letting go” because people want to coercively minimize your suffering. don’t ever feel you need to knuckle under to that.
Show this thread -
if you’d like to read a gorgeous treatment of this through a blessedly distancing science fiction metaphor, pick up Iain M. Banks’s Against a Dark Background. also has lots of things blowing up
Show this thread -
hey guys i found this cool chart of things that are more important than minimizing sufferingpic.twitter.com/sTOniBXuAk
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Intuitively this makes sense to me, and I've made the same point metaphorically. Do you know of a scientific basis for it?
-
nothing in the line of a study that'd support that specific statement tbh i don't feel like i'm making an unscientific statement, more like if science had noted that rocks fall down when you drop them and i extrapolate to rocks falling on a rock underneath you when you drop them
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.