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fao, read my other comment here. I really didn't mean to make it sound like anything is anyone's fault, or that it's their "problem" and they just aren't facing it.

If I didn't get help from some people, I would never have recovered. I didn't make my life better in a vaccum. I hope any issues you have in your life get better, and that at the very least I can offer some small amount of encouragement.

If things are not well with you, or anyone, sometimes that is just life, and life can be hard. But if you go and look for someone who has it worse than you, and somehow is still happy, we have to ask why and how, otherwise we may miss an opportunity to gain it for ourselves and those around us.

My mother treated my father very poorly, and she consistently blamed him for her unhappiness. But I found that if I make the people around me happy, even when I am not, sometimes it comes back around to me.

Do you take care of other people happily or out of duty alone? Just taking care of others may seem like a selfless act, but it can also be because of emotional abuse coming home to roost. I also took care of my mother, and she taught me as a child that being abused was normal, and that I should take care of her more than anyone else. So that is not what I meant simply by "worry about others more than yourself". I meant that sadness for your own problems makes you more sad, but sadness for other peoples problems causes you to act to help them. This was a barometer I used to determine which kind of sadness was affecting me, and which I should reject, and which I could do something about.



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