If you could push a button and simply cease to exist, would you press it?

not until i finish final fantasy vii, the wheel of time and another thousand toffee crisps

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Friday, October 12, 2012 5:28 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

good god, did you ever defeat Sephiroth???!?

destiny is calling me
open up my eager eyes

Long thread, didn’t read it all, maybe already been noted, but OP “does not exist in the ilx database.”

Kinda makes you thi— aw, never mind

lol

OP's still here occasionally, in a different guise, so there's life after death after all.

Really? Strange. iirc, the OP has left ILX at least four or five times, each time seemingly convinced they'd never return. This place has a weird effect on people.

they've been perma-banned now

had the decision made for them ig

i've very much grown fond of the "button" thought experiment

not in the form posed by white chocolate cheesecake, that's just anti-natalism adjacent. i experimented with antinatalism for a while, but mostly i just think cioran is fucking hilarious. that dude was seriously funny.

the version of the thought experiment that was most important to me was "if you could press a button and become a cis woman, would you?"

i'm framing it this way because i want to center the binary bias. i heard it as "a cis member of the opposite gender", which isn't a framing i'm into, i don't think of the idea of two genders _or_ "opposite" genders. i do come from a generation where i know a lot of women who genuinely wish they were cis. i don't know if a lot of zoomers think that... anyway, the only way to live with that, i think, is radical acceptance.

personally, i love not being cis. i can't think of any point since my egg cracked that i would have pressed that button. i've seen the framing help a lot of people, get past a lot of imposter syndrome. you ask a lot of questioning people that, and they'd push it without having to think about it, just instantaneously, it's not a question they have to think about. it helps with... a lot of the "questioning" is just imposter syndrome, people gatekeeping themselves. people don't need answers, they need permission. i guess that's a lot of the "button" framing... it's an acceptable way to ask these questions.

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re: the original question... "do i _want_ to exist?" is a... to me, it's a dodge, it takes something personal and makes it impersonal. to me the real question is "am i happy being alive". if the answer is "no", that's something a person can _do_ something about individually. i don't mean that someone can choose to be happy. if i'm unhappy, though, there are paths i can pursue.

having said that life often hurts for me. it hurts a lot. i do wonder a lot if life is worth it, do often wish that i could disappear. passive suicidal ideation, it's called. people can argue all they want about whether it's actually suicidal... i think the clinical consensus _is_ that it's a form of suicidality... certainly it's my bias, it's my feeling. as someone who has struggled with suicidality for most of her life. often that suicidality expresses itself passively.

the tension is that i have, for pretty much my entire life, wanted very much to _not_ kill myself. that's the dialectical tension there. if i just disappear i don't have to deal with the fact that i want to _not_ kill myself, i can tell myself i'm not. i'm not hurting the people around me and... if i'm hurting myself, it's instantaneous and painless. by removing myself from existence, i _would_ be hurting myself and the people around me... it's just that none of us would know it.

grossly unfair. grossly unfair and even cruel. to oneself. considering others... considering others, in a situation like this, is... when i'm in that situation it's easier to care about other than it is to care about myself. i can't ever hate other people the way i can hate myself. i can learn to love myself, though, and that... there's no dialectic there. the whole "love is stronger than hate" glurge... there's truth to it for me. when i feel both self-love and self-hatred, the self-love is so so much stronger as to make the self-hatred... just fundamentally meaningless.

it's one of those things where if i allow myself the choice, there's... it's so lopsided as to not seem like a choice at all. once i truly allowed myself to _ask_ the "should i transition" question, frame it genuinely, it was the same way... it didn't even seem like a _question_, even though it was, in fact, a genuine question.

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the point is the meme version of "the button" is one i really love a lot... it's a drawing by someone named jake clark.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/daily-struggle-two-buttons

it intersects really well with the "why not both?" meme, also really popular among... i mean i'm gonna be really honest a lot of the people i know have executive dysfunction and just hate making choices. is all.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both