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Comment by hypertele-Xii | Hacker News Reader

> They give you the skills necessary to interact with your life today.

I'm fully interacting with my life today. My life today is not a problem. I'm the master of survival skills for my particular environment - I would've died already otherwise.

The problem is the circumstances that failed to cultivate and extract my potential. The problem was leaving me to fend for myself. The problem was godlessness, immorality, violence, and stupidity.

No therapist can fix that. Ergo, therapy is a waste of time.

> If you are struggling to handle problems yet believe you already know and are doing everything then I would suggest you find some humility.

Can you explain this? Knowing and doing everything is a struggle almost by definition. This struggle I welcome with glee because it's a struggle I choose to endure for the betterment of my quality of life, and through health and productivity, hopefully a benefit to all one day.

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I've read what you've written. I won't give you a long argument about why therapy can help someone in you situation because you won't buy it.

But I will say that as someone who spends all day with people that have have his kind of intelligence, therapy is for you. Recontexualizing your life, past and present, as well as your future path is pretty much bread and butter CBT.

Too many smart people have the disease of "I know better, therapy can't help" which is why for example elite institutions have the highest suicide rates. You're falling into that trap, but it's a catch 22, once you're in it, you won't be able to logically argue your way out. Just take the leap and go to therapy.

My suicide rate is and will forever remain zero, so your continual bringing that up as a reason in favor of therapy is having the opposite effect.

If you truly believed that therapy is for me, you'd be glad to give me the long argument. You already know I won't buy it because you know it isn't.

you must be a pleasure to have at parties.

Sure. Back when I partied, people were phoning me up, I took cabs from one party to the next. Every weekend, sometimes multiple parties on the same day. People came to hug me, some even literally said I was an "integral part of their party experience". Something about being easy to be themselves in my presence.

Your attempted ad hominem falls flatter on its face than a pancake mask at a hydraulic press factory. I've not only partied a lot in my youth and was very liked, I was deep in the scene, friends with the crews that organized the parties, the DJs, camera and audio techs, backstage, etc.

Yes I'm well aware of the grandiosity you attribute yourself which covers the hurt and vulnerable child within screaming to not be abandoned, abused, neglected, shamed or isolated. But nobody here will do that to you. This place is a safe place. People only wish you well here given all the comments urging you too bring the critical thinking that this forum is well known for to your own problems. It could be that you don't know everything. It could be that therapy could help you. You simply should try it while heartedly before you dismiss it so eagerly.

> Yes I'm well aware of the grandiosity you attribute yourself

Where is this coming from? I know it's not coming from me because my explicit narrative is precisely that my life lacks these "grandiose" things as you put them, for the obvious reasons I laid out.

Since it's not coming from me, sounds like projection coming from you.

For the record I read your statements in the same way they do. I might not use "grandiose" but I see what they mean.

Simply from reading your own statements, I can see that you're wrong. I'm probably not as smart as you, yet I can see that you're wrong, but you cannot, why is that?

I'm happy for your alleged ability to see wrongness, but bring into question the validity of merely exclaiming so without any explanation. You didn't just read and see wrongness, you wrote about it without any content whatsoever. Your comment is entirely void of substance.

So how am I wrong, or are you satisfied merely virtue-signaling?

It's great to be smart, but thinking you are smart can become a big problem.

If smartness is so great, how is awareness of it a problem? Your statement appears contradictory, could you elaborate?

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