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Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up With Depression (vice.com)
People with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to perceived inequality, according to a study published this week in Nature Human Behaviour. From a report: Simply, in experiments where participants were tasked with playing a game with a strong element of unfairness, those participants with higher levels of brain activity in depression-linked brain regions -- as recorded via fMRI scans -- were more likely to later demonstrate signs of clinical depression. This is a new test of an old idea, one that's been demonstrated in previous research. People with depression commonly demonstrate increased concern for others, or for the perspectives of others. More precisely, prosocial attitudes predict depression, which is in contrast to individualist attitudes. Individualist here basically just means selfish, or relatively selfish. The researchers behind the current study hypothesized that they would be able to observe these tendencies at the level of actual brain activity. Fortunately, there are some tried and true methods of testing prosocial behavior. One of these takes the form of what's known as an ultimatum game. The general idea is that participants are offered rewards that are to be shared among a group. Each offer differs in how much the participant gets in relation to the rest of the group, with prosocial participants more likely refuse larger personal rewards in favor of larger rewards going to everybody else. Individualists take the offer that best benefits them, while prosocial people are more concerned with other people in the group.
I got mine! Don't care about you and yours.
I give and I give, lots of great comments, and then people say I'm an AC and worth less than nothing.
If you don't care, you can't get depressed. Only selfish people would need to research this because it's unknown to them. And that makes me sad.
#DeleteFacebook
Nice guys appear to not only finish last, but end up homeless and needing anti-depression drugs, too. Greeeaaaaattt. CEO psychopaths will inherit the Earth!
I'm a helpful person my nature, but recently I've started to wonder if it's worth it, as too many times it gets thrown back in my face, or people simply don't say thank you.
It shouldn't bother me, but it does, and as such I'm starting to help people out less and less, because that way their ungratefulness can't affect me.
In the "ultimatum" model, the rewards are shared and no one is personally motivated to do anything.
Life isn't like that, and it shouldn't be like that.
If you rate yourself based on other people's outcomes compared to your own (basing your self-esteem on parity or superiority), you will always be vulnerable to depression. The only thing worse than this is equating money with happiness and / or satisfaction in life.
Want to be happy? Rate yourself on your own progress in life. Make yourself a little bit better each day. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
FTA: The differences in later depression indicators could not be explained away by demographics.
I wonder if they included religious belief/affiliation as a demographic because the game they played is based on economic (i.e. temporal) gains. If everyone was an atheist, this study would hit the nail on the head.
More importantly, IMO, FTA:
The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a "greater empathic concern for others," in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.
The takeaway is much more about generous people being upset about others getting screwed over than, "nice guys end up depressed more than selfish guys."
"People with depression are more likely to feel bad..."
... prosocial participants more likely refuse larger personal rewards in favor of larger rewards going to everybody else. Individualists take the offer that best benefits them, while prosocial people are more concerned with other people in the group.
I consider myself an individualist, meaning that the collective should not trample the rights of the individual. A person gets to enjoy individual rights: freedom of speech, association, sexual or religious preferences, etc, even if their government disagrees. I 100% disagree with the collective model of some countries, e.g, China, which tramples the individual in favor of a collective common choice.
I would still absolutely try to fairly distribute some unearned rewards among the group, even if my decision was to be made in secret and no one would know about it. Just because I believe the collective should not run roughshod over minorities or individuals, that does not mean I am out to screw over anybody else! We can still believe in fairness for all. That's part of what individualism means.
So before everyone tells us selfishness is better - when you play a skewed and unfair game, it will make you unhappy. Whereas if you're selfish asshole, you're totally OK with playing an unfair game because you have no problem screwing other people over as long as you come out on top.
It's like capitalism ... the greedy assholes who are willing to step on everyone around them with no concern do quite well. You pretty much have to look at the douchebag the US has as a president or that pharma bro guy to see this -- pretty much the extremes of selfish and narcissistic.
Oddly, being aware you're playing a rigged game doesn't lead to happiness. Unless you're entirely comfortable with playing a rigged game ... which I also suspect indicates you're willing to cheat, lie, and steal to win at it.
Which, again, pretty much sums up laissez faire capitalism, where climbing over everyone else to ensure you get more is the rules of the game.
I'd be curious how peoples feelings of guilt measure against this spectrum. Does it correlate (higher likelihood of depression ~ more prosocial ~ more guilt)? I'm in therapy after a failed marriage, and I'm terribly co-dependent. I think in bad relationships (with bad people, that I have historically chosen), I can get guilted into depression. I am so guilty, and my narcissistic partner heaps on more shame which I just take. I end up depressed, and I feel amazing when I finally get the cahones to leave (it takes some months, just like I imagine a transition from depression). Ultimately, guilt is my problem, and some people will take advantage of that to get things from me. I don't feel extremely prosocial, but I have always had an overemphasis on fairness which is plain silly. I I wonder if more prosocial people are more susceptible to guilt as well as depression.
Yeah - that's what the frontal lobe DOES, along with giving us the ability to imagine and plan. It largely suppresses the activation of other parts of the brain, so we can have culture and cooperation.
If we didn't hold back, otherwise 'smart' folks would just gather resources, then kill their 'opposing' cohorts. But they don't - because the same things that make them smart also let them imagine the consequences of using their ability to plan fully against others.
The depression that happens usually comes about in circumstances like this - where you're in some place you aren't allowed to leave, but care too much to use your power to harm others, even knowing that idiots will win from you holding back. So, you just stay in a loop, doing nothing with your relatively high potential.
Ryan Fenton
I have come across anecdotes about a person's depression being due to them being wrapped up in their own concerns, but when they decided to help other people they discovered that they were also helping themselves because their depression started to lift. As an example of such an anecdote, the start of the semi-biographical movie "Patch Adams" (starring Robin Williams) concerns the main character who enters a mental health hospital due to feelings of depression after his father's death. While there, he strikes up friendships with other patients, tries to cheer them up, and sees that their and his mental health improves. As a result, he discharges himself from hospital and enters medical school so he can have a career helping other people.
So, apparently being unselfish can make you depressed, but it can also help you escape depression. I read the TFM but it is light on details and the main study is behind a paywall. My hypothesis is that feeling bad for the misfortunes of others and doing nothing to ease that misfortune might make you depressed, but feeling empathy for the misfortunes of others and actively trying to help them can give you a sense of purpose, which in turn can bring satisfaction and happiness. As a side effect, working to help others can also increase your social circle and sense of community, which, in turn, are likely to be beneficial for your mental health.
"Life is a comedy to those who think – and a tragedy to those who feel."
Simply, in experiments where participants were tasked with playing a game with a strong element of unfairness, those participants with higher levels of brain activity in depression-linked brain regions -- as recorded via fMRI scans -- were more likely to later demonstrate signs of clinical depression.
Wow, I am shocked, shocked, that someone showing activity in regions of the brain linked to depression, would then suffer from depression. In other news, people who go outside in winter without a coat on are more likely to get cold.
Realizing you can't fix things, for an altruistic individual, could be a huge contributor to depression. Caring about other people and coming to the realization that nothing you do can make any sort of lasting difference would be a huge crushing blow to a lot of people. On the flip side, selfish people tend to me more successful because they only look out for themselves, so maybe the reason they don't get depressed is because their brains don't have to deal with the disappointment. Take it to the extreme -- the psychopath executives of large companies don't succeed by helping their employees out...they succeed by squeezing them as much as they can and taking the profit that results for themselves. They're a special case because they're physically incapable of feeling compassion for others, and the worldly rewards they have access to as a result mute out almost any negative feelings.
For the altruistic among us, religion used to provide a buffer against this depression that occurs when finding you can't fix things or people. Religion lets you say, "it's in God's hands" and teachings of most religions tell people to spend their lives helping others regardless of how much impact they make. That's becoming less of a draw these days, and I don't know what average people are going to do about it. Maybe they'll get more selfish. If you don't believe you'll be rewarded after a lifetime of self-sacrifice, maybe the logical step is to try to get as much out of life while you can.
Link to TFA study...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...but it turns out greed IS good.
Something one of my former landlords told me once always stuck in my head.
He told me: "There are only two kinds of people in the world: The unsatisfied and the ungrateful."
Socialists, or "prosocial" humans, feel sympathy, not empathy. They have likely only seen things from the outside, but think they have some sort of realistic understanding.
Individualists have been in a position where they have been taken advantage of, so they understand, "If you want something done right, do it yourself" and having expectations from/of others is selfish.
maybe the meddlesome do-gooders will kill themselves and leave room for the rational people.
they're probably jews too.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
There you are spamming amazon affiliate links with yet another fake account, you disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!
So, you think you are going to "stay in the leadership forever" by being selfish, you revenue stream hogging bastard?
You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.
Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.
How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????
The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!
You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!
When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!
Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!
Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:
The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!
So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!
Signed:
The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
This completely explains the people I know whose lives revolve around hourly outrage against injustice on social media.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Waking up every day and logging on to deliberately find something to be outraged about temporarily resolves their depression by way of providing a strong countervailing emotion -- righteous anger. This also explains why President Trump is the best thing to happen to them and why our culture created him and why TV ratings for certain shows are up this year: his early morning tweets ARE the morning dose the over-empathizers need to push their depression back for a few hours. But of course, once you hop on the SJW cycle, once the outrage wears off you are faced with the sadness of how impotent you are to fix the thing you were insanely upset about, which sets up the depression cycle for the evening, which then requires late night fake-comedy/fake-news shows like Fallon and Kimmel and SNL which act as the evening dose to make people laugh and smooth it over and shake their heads at the world but feel the salve of shared humor.
Next morning the depression has returned and they wake up once again depressed a.f. and need to hop onto Facebook/twitter to get the morning dose.
It also fits with the logic of this brilliant treatise ( https://www.goodreads.com/book... ) on how most of our actions taken as a result of empathy are often really just symptomatic relief for their own anxiety induced by empathy. That is, empathizers do Stand UP! and Take Action! but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Happiness is tied to self-interest. Conscience is for losers.
Gordon Gekko said it--"greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind."
So go take what you want, the world is your oyster, and if you die with the most toys, you win!
Where's my saint hood?
You can get depressed regardless of how you rate yourself. You can get depressed from being too excited for too long every day.
Serotonin depletion can cause depression, and it doesn't require "sadness" as a root cause. Stress alone (including eustress) can cause it.
But of course, chronic sadness can also cause it. As can a death in the family, or what-have-you.
totally doesn't explain my ex-wife. selfish depressed bitch.
"People who consider themselves unselfish".
The article summary has the wrong link -- it's to a 1983 paper, Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1983;40(7):801-810.
The correct link is cited in the Motherboard piece: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0207-1
....but only after a lifetime of being shat upon by the rest of us.
-Styopa
If feeling bad about others situations is depression than we all should then ignore the suffering of others and not attempt to help or alleviate their situation. What a BS study.
Anecdotes are not evidence.
Though they are a good place to start.
I found over the years that people not obviously suffering from depression instruct other people to be "less concerned with yourself".
They seem to think that depressed people blame others for their situation.
Weirdly pretty much every depressed person I've spoken to blames themselves for everything.
Including things that clearly can't be their fault.
They more often blame themselves for their failures, and write off successes as chance.
While non-depressed people often blame others for their failures, get a bit angry, and then move on,
and are very happy to claim their successes as being of their own making.
Say a depressed person is trying to get a job, and they submit a resumé or CV, and get rejected.
They say "I didn't get the job because my CV wasn't good enough, no one will hire me, everything is awful"
The person with no experience of depression may hear that as "It's the employers' fault that I can't get a job, they are all being mean"
perhaps because that is how they would think, but they wouldn't get depressed about that, they'd get a bit mad, then move on, now they know that that is not a positive thing to think, so they advise against it, perhaps thinking that is how the depressive, is getting stuck... but the depressive is actually more likely stuck on the belief that they just aren't good enough.
In your example depressed people improve when they help other people, not because helping other people actually helps directly, but because it gives them something to actively engage in. Also they don't blame themselves so much. They finally have something they can blame on other people.
Say a depressed person sees that there is a homelessness problem in their town. They see it's a problem, but they don't blame themselves for it, they blame the establishment, or society for falling those poor people, they get active dealing with this problem which they know is not of their making.
And through this action they don't spend as much time in negative self talk, and all that new activity allows for neuron growth in the brain which is linked to reducing depression.
A similar result can be seen in depressed people who become more selfish.
Less concerned about others, and attributing less blame to themselves they can act more freely and get stuff done, and actively heal. Though people around them may see them suddenly being assholes.
Both selfish and selfless actions can lead to improvements for depressed people,
because both move you away from blaming yourself.
Both lead to action, and action is both a sign of, and a route to, healing.
People do good things for a reward. Period.
Some people do good things for extrinsic rewards and some people do good things for intrinsic rewards. The philosophical debate is whether the type of reward motivating the person should affect whether we judge them as 'good'.
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
Creimy acting in educational resource document, he actually confirmed himself on Slashdot that he was handled by Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education! He is really a king Dumpty!:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Exactly! We, at Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, couldn't agree more with you!
For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
-Nancy Guerrero
Unselfish people could lead happy lives... in a gated community whose members are all unselfish. Unselfish individualists are potentially happier, as they're less inclined to want (or expect) their generosity to change the behavior of others. There's plenty of prosocial selfish people around. I believe the term "leech" is often used to describe them.
What is slashdot now? Politics and psychiatrist stuff appear too often. I get some people in technology are depressed but why put articles about it on slashdot. Everyone in technology eats also but I wouldnâ(TM)t want to see articles on recipes here either, thatâ(TM)s just me.
See for yourself.
Direct quote: "Positive liberty is the possession of the capacity to act upon one's free will, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on one's actions."
You defined positive freedom as trying to increase other's freedom. That is not at all what it means. You completely misunderstood the use of the words "positive" and "negative" to mean something like "generous" and "selfish," which is not remotely how they are used in this context.
"Negative" means the absence of something...specifically...the absence of external constraints on one's freedom.
"positive" means the presence of something...specifically...the presence of capacities to act.
Neither is morally superior to the other, and neither automatically involves benefiting other people.
Semantics matter!
If someone is so good at "serving the needs of others" that they burn out, then they're paradoxically, "not very good at serving the needs of others." Service is a long-term thing - anybody who ignores their OWN well-being and needs by ruining their body and their mental health (*cough* creimer *cough*) because they're obsessed with "serving others" is a fool. If you feel called to serve, that does not trump your need to care for yourself - especially if you wish to make a lifetime of service.
Of course, there's a balance - focusing on your own interests to the exclusion of others contradicts the very notion of service. But effective servants must spend some portion of their time caring for themselves and looking after their own needs, in order to amplify their efficacy as servants in the long term.
Covey's concept of "sharpening the saw" applies here - you must spend time in self-renewal and self-improvement if you want to remain effective. If you burn out, you have neglected something that is important to your ability to serve.
Those who are unselfish in order to get validation from others. Western psychology needs to dig a little bit into the Vedas.
Why is this on /.?
Of course they are more depressed. They feel empathy for others, which is mighty fucking depressing. Those who are self obsessed, like Trump, don't feel anything toward others. He doesn't love or care about his wife, children, etc. He just uses words to make it sound like he might care about them. He won't shed a tear if any of them happened to pass before he does, which is unlikely for his old, out of shape ass. Trump is a bit of an extreme on the narcissistic scale though.
He means that all the compassionate people from his church who try their best to integrate him into the community often end up bit in the ass and exhausted. But all the hardass haters stay in charge.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Yes, they care. Is that how right-wing sociopaths see caring now, as a "personality flaw" ? Somehow that doesn't suprise me at all.
You talk about over-empathize, but how do you define "over" ? For a sociopath, caring about anyone but himself is "over" empathizing. For altruists like Mother Theresa, not caring about every single human being on Earth is sociopathy.
Where do you draw the line ? How do you define what's an appropriate amount of caring ? How do you even define "appropriate" in this context ?
How do you link outrage to depression? If you aren't selfish, and you try and help others, and you find that you can't do much, you can easily get depressed. Most of the SJW outrage is NOT altruism but instead more self absorbtion, at least this is my observation.
It could happen either way! It really depend's on the way acquired is realised, used as a difference, impression's of sale's! Defining unselfish in a game of inheritance's in realising the expression is different than the intent's that could be used to hide difference's as sale's! The statement is a oxymoron to me because of what I realise! Take care every one! See you all on a different channel!
The prevailing responses are all trying to justify being a selfish, greedy person who's oblivious to inequality of opportunity. Most have likely never experienced mental illness, nor do they have a solid understanding of it. Excusing shitty human behavior with 'muh natural selection'.
I'm not sure if you guys have noticed, but we chose to adapt the environment to us. Natural selection and other forces of nature don't apply to us. If some humans lose out, it's because other humans *prevented* them from succeeding. Society gives *and* takes, on a daily basis. But as usual, survivorship bias leads the successful to believe those that aren't are simply lesser beings.
Or just more concerned with what other people think about them?
...which is why you'll never stop writing your tiresome ebooks. It serves only your needs. Speaking of which:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unemployable-cd-reimer/1126649884?type=eBook
When's that torn piece of stained toilet paper getting released?
At least it would have been if I hadn't unselfishly let someone else get it.
Now I'm all depressed because I don't get to bask in first post glory :(
Everything we do is selfish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DowJfUmlzeI
For altruists like Mother Theresa, not caring about every single human being on Earth is sociopathy.
Mother Theresa refused palliative care and even simple analgesics because, "the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross". She said, "I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church." She was kind of a monster in may ways and it's scary if that's who you aspire to emulate.
Anyway, this is the crux of his post and gives a good reference for "over-empathizing": "...but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy."
Your comment makes it seem to me like you care more about demonizing, ostracizing, and getting your way than about actual solutions and helping people.
Anger releases dopamine in the brain, which is rewarding, particularly if dopamine levels are lower than normal to start with. This reward cycle becomes habit forming. Anger also releases stress hormones and over time stress hormones suppress the production of dopamine in the brain leading to levels that are lower than normal, predisposing people to getting caught in the addictive reward cycle of anger. Social media (youtube and facebook especially) are engineered to be maximally addictive and will show you whatever they can to keep you coming back as much as possible, and end up showing people things that make them angry because that's what works. Curbing social media use is generally regarded to be important in treating depression because the addiction promotes depression and depression promotes the addiction. It doesn't matter what type of content on social media causes the outrage/reward response, whether pro social justice or alt right anti-sjw messages, whatever gets the response out of the individual is what the platform will serve them.
But all the hardass haters stay in charge.
Just like Slashdot...
...which is why you'll never stop writing your tiresome ebooks. It serves only your needs.
That's the nature of writing. You should try it.
Speaking of which:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unemployable-cd-reimer/1126649884?type=eBook
When's that torn piece of stained toilet paper getting released?
November 1, 2017. If you bothered to read the page. For a literary critic, you're very stupid.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Yes, they care. Is that how right-wing sociopaths see caring now, as a "personality flaw" ? Somehow that doesn't suprise me at all.
I can't speak for "right-wing sociopaths", but the answer to your question is, YES -- an emotional sense of "caring" which is unfocused on proven measurable outcomes and instead is merely content to knee-jerk create programs and policies because We Can't Just Sit Here, We Must DO SOMETHING, is in fact a personality flaw. Somebody Think Of The Children! is in fact a personality flaw.
You talk about over-empathize, but how do you define "over" ?
I've defined that (though it wasn't explicitly stated as the definition) in my original comment, and you should also read the book I linked.
People who empathize in a way that is so emotional it therefore stimulates IN THEM a priority of assuaging their appropriated secondhand anger/sadness/victimization/injustice, are people who have over-empathized. But the map is not the territory. In other words, ANY empathy which doesn't translate into results exists because the empathizer is over-empathizing and is so caught up by that emotional flood of empathy that they don't stop to do what is truly necessary -- become a cold calculating machine, gather data, measure actual outcomes, ruthlessly guard against waste and fraud, and be prepared to have your beautiful program/policy canceled by human nature, unintended consequences, changes in society/technology.
For a sociopath, caring about anyone but himself is "over" empathizing. For altruists like Mother Theresa, not caring about every single human being on Earth is sociopathy.
Where do you draw the line ? How do you define what's an appropriate amount of caring ? How do you even define "appropriate" in this context ?
To take a stereotypical example, suppose we hear people in parts of Sudan are starving to death due to instability, improper/inefficient agriculture methods and recurring civil war. That truly is terrible. Starvation is a horrific way for a human being to live and die. To recognize that and mentally imagine ourselves in that person's position is a moral good. However, the over-empathizer gets so upset that the people over there don't have enough food, and because the prime motivator is that urgent, demanding, impassioned outrage that people don't have food, the solution is to have U.N. planes/trucks deliver hundreds of tons of food. Hooray! Gosh that feels good (that is, it helps dissipate the discomfort/anxiety of our empathy) to be able to say "Bono sang some songs and we sent 100 billion dollars of food to Sudan". Never mind the fact that the food shipments get hijacked by the warlords, or the people in some areas abandon their villages to come to where the food is being distributed which leaves even larger territories for the warlords to swoop in and take to strengthen their position, or that people begin to rely on the food shipments and there isn't as much incentive for local producers to at least attempt to get their products to market which further hastens the weakening of the very social/economic infrastructure which is necessary for a sustainable community, or even the bleak existential dilemma that assuming all the food gets to the people who need it most, all we've done with that 100 billion dollars is make ourselves feel really good and moral and beneficent by helping people in a war-torn hellhole stay alive another two weeks, and then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED our attention moves on to the next thing to stimulate our empathy, meanwhile three months later 80% of the people we fed are hacked to death or raped or conscripted into one of the armies in the civil war. But hey, we sure empathized with them!
If you live anywhere near a medium sized city, I guarantee you that book is available in a nearby library or used bookstore. Give it a try.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
At slashdot some dice employee decided to give you 2048 chances to stop spamming, stop making low-quality posts, and other things and now only after being mocked and teased have you finally at least gone 48 hours without trying to monetize your stupid fucking comments.
How fucked up is that that people have to hurt your feelings in order to get you to comply with social norms? "It's not in the TOS"... you're the reason my toaster came with a card instruction me not to put pets inside.
Remember that wherever you go people will ignore you or mock you to your face or behind your back when you violate social norms. Get it printed on a medical alert bracelet and read it before you speak.
It's not like we're assholes either this is a board filled with quirky autistic nerds and you still manage to set off people's instinct to enforce social compliance cause you're that weird.
You can't be serious. Everytime I get on Facebook I see post after post of "conservative" people who are constantly outraged. OMG Kathy Giffords! People want healthcare, god damn communists! NFL Player kneeled, RAGE RAGE RAGE!! I could go on with more examples, but I have to go.
The anger in my comment was a text book example of the mindset that's being created when a group of people who's only sin is to care, maybe too much, are continuously being ostricized by being called "SJWs" and "bleeding-heart liberals" and "snowflakes". Don't expect any sympathy from people you continuously insult and ridicule.
Thank you for your detailed and elaborated reply. Haven't read much of those on Slashdot of late.
The grossly inappropriate linking of individualism to selfishness betrays their political agenda. This is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to make people believe that if you aren't a socialist, then you must be a bad person. It's really a shame to see this kind of propaganda on /.
When you want a better world and see the inequality will only grow worse, that is depressing. And that is the hopeful side, the collapse of society is an other direction and may be more likely.
Here's another take on it.....
Perhaps if there wasn't such outrageous social inequality and we had ethical governments and financial institutions, perhaps these people wouldn't be depressed.
Perhaps it is people who have no problems with things like .... wiping out half the species on the planet in the last 50 years, climate change, social inequality... Perhaps it is these people who have a personality flaw! Not the people who can't help feeling depressed in a world run by Trump, bankers and arms manufacturers.
This is actually kind of interesting, because maybe they've actually discovered a scientific way of differentiating assholes from human beings.
I agree and I feel happy that the SJWs and other collectivist types are depressed. Hopefully they can depress themselves into oblivion and leave this place for people who think instead of feeling.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Supposed to make me feel bad now?? Gee I NEVER knew this! Thanks for the enlightenment. sarcasm
That's the nature of writing.
Really?
http://authorspromoter.com/why...
Great observation, on the surface I think you are right. Does explain the behaviours I see from some of my relatives who seem overly concerned about people they don't personally know.
You are trolling right and this is flying over my head? Please?
Here's another take on it.....
Perhaps if there wasn't such outrageous social inequality and we had ethical governments and financial institutions, perhaps these people wouldn't be depressed.
Perhaps it is people who have no problems with things like .... wiping out half the species on the planet in the last 50 years, climate change, social inequality... Perhaps it is these people who have a personality flaw! Not the people who can't help feeling depressed in a world run by Trump, bankers and arms manufacturers.
This is actually kind of interesting, because maybe they've actually discovered a scientific way of differentiating assholes from human beings.
Please re-read the very first sentence to my original comment and this time pay attention to how I've defined the set of people I'm referring to.
You are making an argument against something I'm not saying. I am talking about a specific subset; you are applying my subset observations to the top-level set above the subset I'm talking about, and then criticizing my subset comments for not being appropriate to the top-level set. My comments weren't intended to apply to the top-level set of "all people who care about injustice". I, myself, am in that top-level set.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
People who think they are not selfish are just stupider, in general.
I think the qualifying factors to this are success. Pleasing everyone is difficult and therefore statistically being selfless makes it more likely you are depressed. Similarly, being a perfectionist increases your chances of depression. If you go out and try and help others and see measurable gains in a positive way then it will help lift your depression and vice versa. On perfectionism: I wonder what would determine your perspective on success. When does someone consider 90% on a test a success or failure? Is it all external (expectations etc), what genetic factors exist? There is much room for complexity.