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Comment by w3mmpp | Hacker News Reader

For me, the problem is death is final, while our experience of life is always changing.

Reminds me of that documentary I watched about a police officer that was working on that bridge, not sure which, in CA I believe, who have seen a lot of people jump and die. The few that survived (and who were badly hurt result of the jump) explained that as soon as they threw themselves in the void they immediately regretted doing it, and later on, in the hospital, with broken bones everywhere they were happy to have survived it and were pretty much cured of their death wish.

Life is so full of unexpected turns.

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> For me, the problem is death is final, while our experience of life is always changing.

You have no way to know that “our experience of life is always changing.”

It doesn’t always get better. Sometimes it keeps getting worse! Sometimes it stays equally awful!

What’s true for you and the people you’ve heard talk about it isn’t necessarily true for everyone. Maybe the people who died on the bridge would’ve hated surviving?

> You have no way to know that “our experience of life is always changing.”

The experience we have is always changing, even if our material condition stay the same. That's what I mean here.

> Maybe the people who died on the bridge would’ve hated surviving?

Sure, at that moment, but what about 3 days later, or 3 months, who can tell?

So, my argument here is in life, nothing is permanent, while death is.

> my argument here is in life, nothing is permanent

Your argument is based only on your own experience and what you’ve chosen to hear from others.

Can you acknowledge the possibility that for some people the miserable experience of their life is permanent?

But can you acknowledge that these people are probably reinforcing the miserable experience by their own? And that's why it looks like it is permanent?

No, I can’t.

I can acknowledge it might be true for some of those people. But there are a whole fucking lot of people.

But when it comes to this, I’m not going to be so arrogant and self-centered as to say something that I believe applies to all of them.

The experience is always changing. If you cross the same bridge twice, at the second time the experience is not the same, as you are not doing it for the first time.

So if the experience is changing and you are equally suffering, you are not learning with life, that's a mistake that lots of people do. Suicide is not a solution.

Are you kidding me?

You’re willing to say that to someone who lives with an incurable and life-altering disease that I fucking hate? I cross the same bridge every day. When I get up. When I go to bed. When I’m asleep and every moment in between.

My suffering is because I’m not learning with life? That’s my mistake? And that it’s not a byproduct of something 100% out of my control?

No offense, but that’s pretty fucking arrogant of you.

So go ahead, give me your tips for learning with life and overcoming my mistake.

I'm the grand-parent comment so I feel a bit responsible for where it went so maybe I can clear what I meant here.

My view on the question of impermanence has been shaped by buddhism. I'm not a buddhist, I just discovered buddhism at an age and in circumstances where it talked to me and helped me a lot going through some very bad stuff.

In a nutshell, but the subject is extremelly vast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence

I hope it explains better than I did what I meant by "nothing is permanent", and maybe it'll be of interest to you like it has been for me. Feel free if you want more pointers.

Your bad stuff is not my bad stuff. Thanks for the pointers.

> Are you kidding me?

I'm not, I don't know you and I don't care about you. Desperation doesn't make your point right, the same way it doesn't make it right for a poor guy to rob another just because he is hungry. Life is tough to everybody, besides the 0.1% that are too lucky to born with everything they need and the 0.1% that have and will have nothing. I'll not modulate my opinion based on the 0.1% and wonder if you are part of this group. There is no arrogance on that. Life doesn't work for you? I feel sorry for you, nothing more.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN regardless of how provocative some other comment was. It only makes the thread even worse.

I've replied to the other user elsewhere, who has been breaking the site guidelines even more in this thread than you did, but two wrongs don't make a right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The bridge you're trying to remember is probably the Golden Gate bridge. There's a documentary about suicides and attempts from the that bridge called "The Bridge", which for me was riveting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRs-DlYmws4

I don't think so. If I remember correctly, this documentary was more focused on the police unit that was in charge of this bridge (could be the Golden Gate, can't remember even if it was in CA now that I'm thinking), and so one of their task was to intervene in case someone seemed they could want to jump.

That particular police officer they were interviewing was a pretty old guy, who spent many decades working on that bridge and so have seen it all.

It was a good 5 years ago, maybe even more, so my memory is a bit hazy.

A documentary focused on the people trying to stop suicide is going to be very anti-suicide.

You think they’re going to show people who survived a suicide attempt saying, “dang, really upset I didn’t die.”?

Bridge jumpers are self selected group of mostly physically healthy people suffering from the mostly temporary/treatable mental health issue of depression. I think almost nobody would argue that depression should qualify you for assisted suicide. Also, jumping off a bridge is probably the most terrifying method of suicide available. It's practically suicide-by-torture, yup, you're gonna regret that. It's a very, very different scenario than people who are in unrelenting agony and almost certain to die in X weeks/months, saying goodby to their families, going to sleep, and not waking up again. Do you think if you gave them a placebo, let them wake up again and asked "are you _really_ sure about this?" that many of them would change their minds? Probably never been done, but my guess is you'd get very few changed minds.

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