Comment by Noaidi
Please stop assuming you know what suffering I’ve had in my own body and my own life. I don’t wish to discuss it here, but I don’t think it needs to be discussed. My experience doesn’t matter in the logic of the argument.
Please stop assuming you know what suffering I’ve had in my own body and my own life. I don’t wish to discuss it here, but I don’t think it needs to be discussed. My experience doesn’t matter in the logic of the argument.
I am saying it’s relevant because suffering is suffering. It has the same source so it does not matter if it’s a big suffering or a little suffering. Understanding suffering does not need a degree of suffering. It just needs suffering.
The man in the original article was not suffering at all yet he killed himself. What kind of suffering was that? It’s not that he was suffering. He didn’t wanna suffer at all. He didn’t want to suffer shame. This man knew so little about suffering that he took his own life rather than try to figure it out and the remaining years of his life.
I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people. I don’t have “religious beliefs“. There are things I’ve learned in my rather long life and through my suffering and happiness and reading a lot of different spiritual books as well as a lot of materialist books. (my current fascination is the possibility of tubules being the source of a quantum consciousness.)
All I wrote was a remark about how suffering has the same source. Why do we suffer? Isn’t that an interesting question? Do we need to suffer? Can we have pain without suffering? These are not answers I can tell you. These things people have to understand by experience and observation.
I want saw a Whitetail deer with a compound fracture to its rear leg. The bone was sticking straight out. Probably hit by a car. But there it was walking with its herd, calmly eating grass with the rest of them.
So that’s what I do, I look at my life outside of me and I look at the life inside of me.
Suicide is not evidence someone failed to understand pain; it's often proof they understood it too intimately, lived within it until nothing else remained.
What you've attempted is a philosophical sleight-of-hand that collapses under minimal scrutiny. Your "suffering is suffering" assertion—tracing all human agony back to a singular, universal source is a fallacy of composition. I encourage you to look into this concept, as you seem like a person who would like to be thoughtful in the way you approach these subjects.
The deer example highlights that you are mashing vastly different experiential realities to avoid dealing with the contextual depth of human distress. The resilience of a wounded deer, driven by biological signaling, offers no insight into the psychic anguish, societal shame, or cognitive collapse that is often part of human despair. Pretending these are equivalent is intellectually bankrupt from the start.
Claiming the person noted the article "was not suffering at all" and "knew so little about suffering" is stunningly out of touch.
The issue here is intellectual humility: your personal framework cannot possibly encompass the private hell another person lived with - well, until they couldn't anymore.
If you don't want to talk about it, you can't expect anyone around you to take it into account.
You can leave it unsaid if you aren't going to say it, and either way you claim it isn't relevant.