Addicted To Suffering.

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Another reason to get as far away from her as possible.

And as soon as possible.

I think that we should just accept that some people are born with the inability to be optimistic, I know such a person with ASD who I love dearly. Most of us struggle with what life deals us, and those who can only envision doom and gloom can extinguish our hopes and optimism in a flash. We have to remember though that some people are slaves to their emotional default and cannot change however much we would like them to.

Teach, is it the inability to be born optimistic that we're born with or is it that optimism and positivity has become more like a cult in which one is not allowed to have a negative thought whatsoever cause our society says so? Sort of like the extremely religious puritan man who does everything and anything to get rid of all sinful thoughts because his society demands it.

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Pos ... 0312658850

Human beings have a full range of emotions we're meant to feel. Not optimism and happiness 24/7. We live in a brainwashed and deluded culture that encourages unhealthy thinking.

We don't need more optimistic thinking but more logical, critical and scientific based thinking.

I still feel that people should provide themselves with hope that they will "beat the odds."

I see nothing wrong with "false" optimism if one believes one can succeed, even if 80% do not succeed at the thing he/she is trying to succeed in.

I've "beaten the odds" plenty of times. There was no reason why, at age 19, I should have believed that I would be at my job for 39 years.

Congratulations, that's an amazing accomplishment.

It's true that optimism and happiness are treated like a cult in our society. However, I highly doubt that is what this tread is about.
There are people who pretend to be always happy in an almost cult like manner.
There are people who express a range of emotions.
And then there are people who are constantly depressed, constantly hopeless and can't believe that anything will ever get better. It seems like the later category is what this tread is about. Always assuming the worst and insisting that everything is hopeless is no more logical than blind optimism. It can become a self fulfilling prophecy, though, as people are less inclined to try hard, try again if they fail and move out of their comfort zone if they are already sure it won't pay off.
One extreme may be glorified by society. However, that doesn't mean that the other extreme can't be a real problem.

People who are exhausting for others due to being inconsolable are people who want attention for their suffering but the attention given to them doesn't seem to make a difference. They don't seem to be looking for solutions but for reasons why suggested solutions can't work.
You may in a literal sense be inconsolable if you don't want to be consoled but to discuss things instead, but that's not what's usually meant if someone complains about someone else being inconsolable.


No one has control over how they feel in the sense that they just choose an emotion they like and then they feel it. However, most people can influence how they feel to some extent.
They may directly try to dull an emotion that impacts them negatively or they may try to steer their thoughts into a more positive direction and see something from a different perspective or they may try to relax and calm their breath as not only the emotional state affects the body but the body also affects the emotional state.

This does not have to entail lying to oneself as emotions are not always based on reality. For example someone with an anxiety disorder may try to make their emotional state correspond better to the actual severity of the situation.


Often someone who focuses on everything that is wrong in their life does not have any idea how not to do so. They don't need to do it voluntarily for it to pose a problem.
Granted, in some people's life something is so severely wrong that it'd be impossible for almost anyone in that situation not to focus on it. In other cases there may be some positive things in their life and it wouldn't seem so gloomy if they were able to see them or they could improve their life if they didn't focus so much on the negative.
Unhappiness isn't always a defect. There are very real reasons for it. However, some people would be unhappy under any imaginable circumstances. Others can be happy under almost any circumstances. Everything in between exists too.


Most people have some control over their lives. Some have more than others. No one has absolute control over their life. You don't need to have absolute control to have some ability to influence your situation and therefore some responsibility for it.
Sometimes things may happen in your life you absolutely could not have predicted or prevented. However, in the vast majority of lives this is not the case for every single bad event or bad outcome that ever happened to the person.
If someone completely externalizes all the blame for everything bad happening in their life the consequence is that they assume complete powerlessness and have no incentive to try to improve their situation.
It is not a problem if someone acknowledges that they're sometimes just unlucky or that sometimes someone else harms them. However, it has a negative impact on a person's life if they assume complete powerlessness where this isn't actually the case.


Point 5. is a bit of a contradiction to point 4. and a person obviously doesn't have to fulfill all points to have a problem with addiction to suffering (or any more accurate term people have suggested instead throughout this thread).

If you actually had no means to influence the outcome of a situation or no means to have the knowledge to influence it in a predictable way, something can not be your fault. These are the cases where you'd actually be right if you acted according to 4.. A healthy mindset entails placing the blame where it actually lies and neither always externalizing nor always internalizing it.


I find it hard to interpret this one. I guess it could mean that a person blows small negative things out of proportion when overall most things are going well in their life. Subconsciously they try to find something negative and then they latch onto it or they even create a negative situation without being consciously aware that they do so.


It matters because people who take things personal that aren't tend to create conflict. They see malicious intent where there was none.
Something can affect you without being personal. As a blatant example, someone can take the last parking spot and you have to drive around for 15 minutes to find another one. This affects you. However, just like you that person was looking for a parking spot. Their decision to take it had nothing to do with you thus wasn't anything personal. They didn't steal it from you and they had the same right to take it you'd have had.


Guilt is an unpleasant, sometimes outright painful feeling. Inability to forgive oneself has a negative impact on one's well-being.


That's your prerogative. However the statement still stands if you don't take gratitude in a strict literal sense. Replace it by 'happy about' or 'anything you appreciate someone has done for you'.
You being miserable just for the sake of it doesn't ameliorate anyone's suffering. Even if the world is awful you don't make it a better place by being miserable. Why would it be morally wrong to feel something if this feeling has absolutely no negative impact on anyone?


There's no problem if you sometimes see yourself as a victim of circumstances. That is not what the whole 'addicted to suffering' thing is about. There is a problem if you frequently see yourself as a victim of circumstances even if that is not the case in a given instance.
Everyone is a victim of circumstances at some point in their life. Most of those circumstances are things you can recover from. If someone insists that their life is destroyed due to some incidence in the past that wasn't even particularly severe they have a problem, precisely because everyone is a victim of circumstances sometimes and wallowing in ones victimhood forever guarantees unhappiness.

There are a few who have no intention of doing anything differently, but will submit a post for 'help' as if they will. I wish they could bring themselves to say, " don't invest a lot of emotion or time in your responses, because although I have made a thread for suggestions, I will list reasons why nothing you suggest will work. " Then we know, 'okay, for some reason this individual is stuck right now. " This individual may not stay stuck, or they may. But, it would be a courtesy if we knew ahead of time.

I would not consider myself a happy go lucky "ON" individual, at ALL. But I lean toward believing that most made made problems have a solution. I don't know what that could be categorized as, maybe stubborness? But, it works for me.

Cube we have had this discussion before
Not a cult, a wonderful instinct that brings us through holocausts and hurricanes and unimaginable loss, and keeps us moving forward with hope for a better future. I always say that pessimism may be a middle class luxury, because those of us who need to work hard to sustain ourselves with absolutely no assistance, have no other option but to imagine that it can get better, or how would I manage to start the day? Optimism is the fuel that propels us through adversity. I do however believe that some people inherently lack optimism and it can't be artificially simulated.
Btw many people on WP are both logical and optimistic. Try Bach or Ella Fitzgerald instead of Leonard Cohen.

Can you disprove the list of reasones?

Here’s how I see it
Me: I can’t fly
Person:sure you can just do it
Me:no I don’t have wings I can’t fly
Person:that’s just an excuse to jump off a cliff and fly.

Sorry I have to live in reality where due to my condition and position in life I’m super limited. No amount if just do it can make a human fly. Humans can’t fly we aren’t birds, we aren’t Superman.

Maybe the people offering help could accept that and that the person wanting help has already tried a lot of things before getting desperate enough to ask for help.

Me:I can’t get in my house
Person:have you tried opening the door
Me:oh no like I’d total it thought if that simple thing , the doors locked I can’t open it.

Two sides to everything and I tend to side with the sad person cause I’ve been treated as their treated. I don’t think successful people have any advice to offer they didn’t live our life they got lucky, luck is all there is to it.

Holocaust would benefited more from negative thinking. Not positive “no way any human would do thst you’re just mistaken.” Genocides still happen today too. People still say the same thing positive thinking.

Maybe if the allies had though negatively less people would been murdered, instead they thought positive and that mean thinking the Nazis couldn’t do such things, despite being told they were.

You may be an exception, Sly, but this is usually how I see it in others:

He: I can't fly.
Me: You can just do it if you try.
He: Yeah, but I don’t have wings.
Me: Can you build some?
He: Yeah, but I don't have money.
Me: Can you earn some?
He: Yeah, but I don't have a job.
Me: Can you look for a job?
He: Yeah, but no one will hire me.
Me: Can you learn some skills?
He: Yeah, but it takes too long.
Me: Can you borrow some wings?
He: Yeah, but I might crash.
Me: Can you fly low?
He: Yeah, but the low spots are far away.
Me: Can you relocate?
He: Yeah, but I would have to fly there.
Me: Have you tried flying?
He: Yeah, but I can't fly.

(Several iterations later...)

Me: You don't really need to fly, do you?
He: You don't want me to fly, so get out of here!

I think rational thinking comes a lot into this. It's very much "Worse case scenario if I do x and y". There is great fear behind it that is irrational, not laziness.

I think depression and a loss of hope has a great part to play in it too.

Maybe because most of my life I have experienced great loneliness that, I feel like if I could prevent it in someone else that would be a good thing. Sometimes I've managed on my time on WP, other times not. I think I've managed to save a few relationships, which makes me proud.

Sly, we can't change history and yes, terrible mistakes were made. My country, Israel, was fought for and established by Holocaust survivors and refugees who endured unimaginable suffering and persecution. Seven decades later, under conditions of a perpetual threat of destruction to this day, we are ground- breakers in medicine, technology, cyber, agriculture, science, aviation and many other fields. We have no resources of fresh water so we learned to desalinate sea water. We are bombed constantly by our enemies so we developed the Iron Dome anti -missile system.We have judo Olympic champions and we have won the Eurovision Song Contest several times.We don't bomb German embassies or complain about what we lost, we live every day as a gift.It is necessary to count our blessings and fight for a better future. It's a state of mind. People can love us or hate us in Israel but no-one can accuse us of not being optimistic or living in blame or a pessimistic state of mind.
So, no- one should ever think that hope is fiction, problems are not insurmountable, though much of optimism is founded on faith.

I am by no means a "success," Sly.

So, from your viewpoint, I can offer you advice

I have learned not to assume the worst.....nor envision the best.

Just because 80% of people can't do something doesn't mean I can't be one of the 20% (even though I have all the characteristics of the 80%).

You've read a lot of history---and you're a smart guy in general. You have overcome a lot, and have kept a job for a long time.

So why not seek to think the "glass is half full" sometimes----instead of it always being "half empty."