What terrible experiences to live with. You are more important than PG, then whoever claimed association with PG, and than all the others. They don't matter much at all compared with you and your life. To heck with them. Forget they exist - they will fade away - and do what you love. You have a chance to do it, and nobody can stop you.
My hearing is blown out, has been for a long time, and the damage has finally caught up to me. I stopped music despite a few attempts to restart it with my hearing disability; I can't use power tools; and, my concentration to use computers has gone away. I am homeless with no career, and live in a constant state of suicidality with no ability to finish suicide.
Yes, I am seeking medical treatment and disability compensation, but this process takes time. I'd prefer death, except I lack the ability to complete suicide.
No, I am not important at all except to me. Entities and people I am calling out are more important to society than I am. As such, they can get away with shenanigans such as targeting US citizens to destroy them. This can and does happen. There is no accountability by big tech corporations or related thugs. If I died, few would notice or care.
The bottom line is that the rule of law is different when you're a VIP or VIC, versus a commoner like me -- regardless of the extent of my grievances. Humanity is littered with low class wealthy powerful sociopaths - and we depend on such amoral folks to move society forward, even if a few folks wind up as cannon fodder.
My desire to die is both due to my hearing disability, and also cemented by learned helplessness developed over a lifetime of dealing with unaccountable sociopathic apes. Dying peacefully in my sleep this holiday would be, by far, the greatest gift. Please, God, kill me before 2022.
What happened to your hearing? Does sound hurt - is that why it affects your concentration? It's painful to hear about how hard it is.
I've know from others that accessing government services can be insanely bureaucratic and time-consuming.
> I am homeless with no career
I'm glad you can at least hang out on HN.
> I am not important at all except to me
I hope you have empathy for yourself for all the pain, emotional and otherwise. If you love yourself the other entities have little power over you. It's only if you look to them that they can affect you.
I'm glad you are getting some help! Maybe give yourself some love for the holiday, at least - to hell with everyone else.
There's a lot of very interesting information here that only prompts further curiosity.
Music sounds important to you. How impactful is the hearing damage you speak of?
Why can't you use power tools? Are they unbearably loud to use due to the hearing damage? How long can you tolerate in-ear earplugs for (possibly with high-rated passive earmuffs over the top) - or does this exacerbate other symptoms?
The concentration issue is particularly interesting. How would you say this relates to your hearing damage? Do you experience anxiety or brain fog when near/using certain devices? (I do; it can be cripplingly annoying, and in some cases dangerous.)
Regarding your points about suicidal ideation, on the one hand it sounds to me like you're expressing passive interest in the idea similarly to how someone might uninvestedly say of something "oh that might be interesting to try one day [after I count to infinity twice]", while on the other hand it sounds like you're really pushing to try and make this happen - on its own. At least that's how I'm reading your comment - I've often wanted things to self-activate because I haven't had the activation energy to fully resolve intent to motivated execution. I've recently realized this is just another expression of depression, and may (incidentally trying to get to the bottom of this) correlate with executive function impairment.
For what it's worth, there is absolutely nothing and nobody stopping you from jumping off a bridge, or heading to a train station, or tripping over your shoelace right as a truck is going past, or finding out just what a knife will do depending on where you use it, or any number of other methods. (Those are some of the ideas I've noodled over myself for the past few years.) Nobody is holding a gun to your head and requiring you to pick a specific method, "the right method." Structurally speaking, there is no fundamentally correct way to live or die. You get to pick and choose what's correct.
If you're struggling and on the fence with the how, perhaps the insight you seek lies not in considering one outcome vs the other (where the only common element is perhaps "I want closure"), but in deeply considering (as a major project) the focal point associated with the mental mechanical dynamics of the fight itself. Why is that argument happening, both in terms of causative input and neurological steady states? Despite the obvious components of learned anxiety in your statement that you lack the ability to suicide, it also sounds to me like you're trying to reach toward understanding the fight (in spite of the impediment of depression), which is a really good thing, and IMHO represents forward progress that if anything should be pro-rated to correct for the dismissive influence of depression.
You're also correct that vanishingly few people will know of your death if you do disappear forever. The Internet doesn't auto-chronicle us humans automatically 24/7 using AI (...yet, yikes), so we still get a significant role to play in how we represent ourselves to the rest of the world. The constant engagement required to sustain this can definitely be a terminal drain (I only frequent HN, myself, and don't comment much), but IMHO how much effort I make engaging, defending, etc has no bearing on the fact that some people choose to strategically do the "right" thing in the right place at the right time and achieve disproportionate influence and power over others as a result (with "right" quoted because it means whatever will move these people forward in the moment). I agree that it definitely stinks for circumstantial cheatcodes to land in the laps of undeserving people who then keep the benefits to themselves (and then some), but that whole sphere is a zero-sum game that calls for moral bankruptcy as table stakes, and you'll never succeed at trying to fight against it. If you have friends or people you empathize with that are impacted by such people, you'll never win by trying to take the big guys on because they will always fight dirtier than you choose/want to (and the law seems to have a curious permeability to this sort of dirty fighting).
One of the things I've been thinking about recently (it's pretty basic, but something something developmental delay, so it is what it is) is the extent of the split between the world of ideas in our heads and the world of what we retrospectively realize we've accomplished in practice. The world in our heads achieves justified cohesion by modeling the "right" ways to do things (spanning everything from morality and belief systems to aesthetic preferences in design or programming to knee-jerk editor wars which typically fuel off of experience level (and not wanting to look stupid)), while the world of what we actually accomplish is what contributes toward the emergent cohesion of society. There is a very real and very cognitively-dissonant split between these two worlds, in which feral sociopaths that would have significantly contributed to "the state of the art" in WWII-era concentration and torture science, are indeed part of the ostensible "furthering" of society. Such is the architecturally broken foundation of humanity; I am currently absolutely convinced there is no solution to this save for declaring that the boundaries of my moral compass are hard-limited by the boundaries denoted by Dunbar's Number, and deciding to keep good friends.
I can't really provide a more targeted response without additional context. It would be very interesting to hear more about your story, I think!
How impactful? Suffered T & H for a long long time. I don't enjoy listening to music anymore, much less performing.
T: four tonal ranges in one ear, two in other; non-aggravated significant flare-up's in both. Stress is a factor. Some tonal ranges have morphed over time from pulsatile to resonant; none are purely sinusodial; they cover lows to mids to highs.
H: I become angry from loud sounds and sometimes quiet ones. Any exposure increases sensitivity. Stress is a factor.
Earplugs w/muffs: any exposure to vibration/noise aggravates both T and H. With no hearing protection on e.g. a miter saw, I'd risk an ER visit. Even one unprotected cut introduces significantly amplified T for days.
Programming: Any brain activity increases T & H, incl'g coding, social activities, or anything involving interacting with technology and society, for that matter. Programming specifically causes my brain to always be "on", which is particularly bad for T.
Life outcome: Was told no treatment existed, so I tried to deal with it and move on with life. Didn't work. That was decades ago.
Suicide: peaceful method available, not the problem. Persistent fear of death exists.
Mental theories about serotonin imbalances, DSM nonsense, etc: I have found humanity to be distasteful since childhood. Conscious decision. Please kill me now.
Limited social networks: in the space / satellite / cam age, this is impossible. I am not moving underground.
T: I'm curious if you ever listened to exceptionally loud sounds at or near the problem frequencies either once-off or over an extended period of time. I also wonder if/how well the technique where you put your hands over your ears and flick your fingers works (I'm quietly hoping you haven't heard of it and it's useful :D). (I hold my index/2nd finger slightly away from my head, but mostly the same as https://trudenta.com/this-simple-trick-may-help-with-tinnitu...)
H: It sounds you're describing a death spiral feedback loop where the H increases the T which aggravates the H which...? I can kinda understand your overall worldview now. Also, how do you mean that you become angry? Sensory-overload driven perpetual aggravation ("bar-fight mode")? A feeling of core breakdown leading to an event-horizon "everything goes white" or "bomb goes off in movie and nobody can hear anything" level of fundamental disassociation? (Those are the two reference points I have the most familiarity with, to a small extent.)
Earplugs: Without wishing to ask triggering questions, I'm very curious why this input risks you ending up in ER (and (generally) why) - panic attacks, "please just knock me out" levels of T, unbearable mental stress, or...? (Maybe a combination?)
Programming: It being problematic for your brain to always be "on" is fascinating. For me, I find that my own hypersensitivity impacts my ability to access that place that reasons about complex problems and makes creative leaps, which strongly overlaps with fundamental calmness and tranquility. When I'm overloaded, it's like the pathway I use to access that place of internal calm is involuntarily monopolized by "immediate problem! must be alert" that doesn't go away and gets REALLY old very quickly. Similar to when someone's trying to settle down and go to sleep but can't because of persistent disturbance that never stops. My ability to use a given device is based on whether I can compartmentalize the bit of my brain that seems to need to remain "on" and hyper-vigilant until I slooooowly acclimatize and integrate the idea that the input isn't the end of the world, and finally relax. I'm curious if any of this resonates for you.
Muffs: Oooh. I get the impression you still have to avoid strong resonance even with earplugs and muffs in. Yeow. What level is "too much" with everything you can get your hands on?
Suicide: I was completely out of the ballpark with the direction I went in there, welp. I'm curious as to the root of your fear of death, although that's getting into personal questions that don't require answers. FWIW, my own worldview is that accepting one's expiration date is a form of obedience toward the consequences of the fallen mess we're in, and strict naïveté of the exact specifics about the when and how isolates our inevitable physical death from influence and conditioning by our fundamentally broken desires and intentions. TL;DR, I've drunk the "we probably do live forever" koolaid and think that messing with the implementation details touches things that are not meant to be touched for safety's sake, and that's where my own fear comes from.
Medical diagnoses: I personally wouldn't classify the root of unrest you're describing as being fundamentally based on a serotonin imbalance or DSM implication. It definitely sounds like something else. I've personally been trying to get to the bottom of my own sensitivity issue with VeRy PrEdIcTaBlE results for over a decade, and I can relate to your disenfranchisement about society (and particularly the medical (and educational) establishments).
Social networking: I would describe my own social interaction overall as generally "sustainably perfunctory", with HN being the primary focus I actually pay attention to :). As for the surveillance aspects of society, that's a firehose problem the world has made for itself that I'm slowly learning thankfully requires less attention and emotional investment than all the privacy sheep insist is necessary.
Target sounds - sounds risky. I'd rather do in a clinical setting.
There are new experimental drugs and techniques in the pipeline. Many vets suffer from this; many have it far worse than I do currently. There's a real need for new treatments.
My hunch is that we'll want to develop risk profiles for T and H based on genetics. My ears are sensitive and I shouldn't have exposed myself to loud sound at all as a kid. Probably should be part of military admission screening.
I've had this for a long time. It was so unbearable at first that I was sure suicide was inevitable. (Still seems that way). But, the remediation for me is low stress, low exposure to sound, get enough sleep, avoid activities that exasperate T and H. It's not as bad as it was when I got it long ago but has never gone away. Damage is done, though - to my life, career, relationships.
Anger: I never experience true quiet, so my baseline cortisol is elevated. I become easily angered. Yelling mostly. This raises my T and H. Any significant brain activity raises my T and H. I never finished uni nor accomplished much. My attention span was wrecked after I got this.
Tech: I detached a few years ago when I decided to drop out of life, prepare for suicide, and focus on shitposting 24/7 until death about the largely unattributed scumbag targeting incidents that I've accumulated over decades. Problem solving isn't on my radar any longer.
Muffs: Sure, I can wear muffs and plugs for short jobs. I'd be ok. But I'd prefer no exposure because it took decades for the T to subside, and only a few months of playing a musical instrument (with muffs and plugs) to make it worse again. That was about 3-4 yrs ago; T still worse than it was 5 years ago. Any exposure is risky.
Societal issues: Zero Trust, applied to technocratic incumbents means breaking up big tech, banning data hoarding and data brokering, banning cameras everywhere, policing satellites - a futile pipe dream, indeed. The risks of power asymmetry via tech will only rise. I am not optimistic at all about the future of democracy. Asymmetric power hoarding opportunities will probably increase significantly over the next 50 years - a scary prospect.
Sorry to hear the finger flick doesn't work :(. TIL about dewaxing (why anybody would even think that would help...).
Sound targeting is IMO something only worth doing in an especially-exotic clinical setting in particular - like fMRI while anesthetized, or watching skin resistance or brainwave baseline or reading cortisol level directly out of the bloodstream or something.
(I was actually trying to ask about how this all started, although sound testing is the far more practical disambiguation of what I (unclearly) said!)
I wonder what you can realistically do to try and "sensitize the bar" (in the sense of raising or lowering it), as it were, so more people can be classified in the "actually untenable level of baseline stress" group - so you can then be classified under the "significant life impact" FDA exemption thing.
> My hunch is that we'll want to develop risk profiles for T and H based on genetics. My ears are sensitive and I shouldn't have exposed myself to loud sound at all as a kid. Probably should be part of military admission screening.
Shakes head I think I can see what you mean about "society is broken", this sort of thing definitely should be part of core competency in terms of standardized testing, who knows how much wreckage quietly exists out there that's directly been caused by the way things are done now.
In any case, given your vet status, I wonder if you could wheedle your way into the side doors of some military medical audio labs and be a (heavily conditional) lab rat of some sort? Or go through the VA? (<existentially-scary voice> "embrace the bureaucrazy!")
((NB, That was a mistype above, which I immediately decided to keep. :D))
Maybe you could get an hour here or there in an anechoic chamber - which might actually be unpalatable given the stop-start non-continuous nature of the situation, but could work.
Or... what if... there's work out there, that generally requires absolute quiet? Like, beyond-library-quiet levels of quiet? Where everyone's in anechoic chambers for the majority of the day...?
I wonder if there's a way for you to constantly (eg, twice a week (>:D)) go "hi, I'm still here" in the general direction of Fundamentally Broken, Inc™ in a way that optimizes for minimum attention span use?
> Anger: I never experience true quiet, so my baseline cortisol is elevated. I become easily angered. Yelling mostly. This raises my T and H. Any significant brain activity raises my T and H. I never finished uni nor accomplished much. My attention span was wrecked after I got this.
I have a 0.2% version of the same thing, I think (particularly with the yelling - I liken it to an abused dog howling desperately in pained terror, except it manifests as anger and seething... totally gets construed correctly every time, welp!!!). I'm kind of impressed you're still here considering that you're describing an infinite feedback loop of doom.
I get the impression this was caused by some sort of event that occurred when young... and then exacerbated by hearing loud sounds in the military...?
I can completely understand something like this wrecking attention span. Whenever I'm around a device (presumably resonating at some ultra-low/high frequency(s)) that I don't like (can't hear anything, but I still respond to Something™ like crazy - still figuring the details out), it's like my involuntary fight-flight response monopolizes the pathway(s) in my brain used for a) inner tranquility, sense of "I'm okay" and mental space and b) problem-solving and higher-order thinking. Completely blocks it, and if I try to shift the gears manually it just makes my brain flip out.
(I wonder if you can monitor cortisol continuously, like blood glucose level? Hmmm....)
> Tech: I detached a few years ago when I decided to drop out of life, prepare for suicide, and focus on shitposting 24/7 until death about the largely unattributed scumbag targeting incidents that I've accumulated over decades. Problem solving isn't on my radar any longer.
Idea. Stupid, unfair idea that will make you angry (if it's even possible at all - it probably is):
Replace suicide as Plan Z with having your auditory nerves severed instead.
You've probably already thought of this and debated it up and down a few hundred times. I won't argue with any of that, nor the fact that music is obviously important.
I'll instead make this point: suicide does not consider the long term by definition. It's always a reaction to a set of immediate-term potentials exceeding immediate-term tolerances. In a scenario where you discover "your price" (your maximum tolerance) and then take steps to respond to that, supposing some ideal set of circumstances in which whatever strategy you deploy is completely thwarted, it may be easier to revisit that place again and again, both because you've taken the step, but also theoretically because if you're taking the step it's because the potential to tolerance ratio has started trending beyond your maximum limit, and may continue to do so.
That absolute-immediate-term snap point hasn't been reached, yet, by virtue of the fact that you're still here. I'm guessing whatever technique you've thought of is not only peaceful but also reasonably contingent and redundant enough that it would be highly unlikely to be thwarted in practice. Which is why I'm making the argument that you swap `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` for `rm -rfv /dev/snd/`.
I read an article a while back... I think it was written by a military pilot or similar role; talking about how one of the purposes of training is not just to get "how to do X" into rote/procedural memory but also to encode "in scenario X I will make decision Y" to the procedural memory in the mind, by consciously committing to the decision during training. All the what-ifs get thought through, all the questions get asked, and if there are any questions or uncertainties left in the field it's a chaotic situation and hopefully you brought your wits, or you didn't pay attention in training.
So here, I'm basically saying, if you reach the point where you're like "that's enough", for "that's enough" values of "that's enough", if you were to commit (now) to this alternative, you'll have no identity left, but you'll still have your life.
The question is whether that scenario is worth living to you. You ultimately have no control over your life (see also, my points about suicide in my last comment), but you have absolute control over your identity (as much as society seems to be absolutely obsessed with convincing us otherwise??).
This is mostly a classical debate crossed with a thought experiment. I am very interested to hear your responses/counterarguments.
> Muffs: Sure, I can wear muffs and plugs for short jobs. I'd be ok. But I'd prefer no exposure because it took decades for the T to subside, and only a few months of playing a musical instrument (with muffs and plugs) to make it worse again. That was about 3-4 yrs ago; T still worse than it was 5 years ago. Any exposure is risky.
I see. :(
Wow.
Yeah this doesn't have any great solutions. Not really much point beating about the bush and dodging saying that.
It's an oddball suggestion (feel free to yeet it), but I'm curious if you've ever tried fish oil for any reason. Bear with me :) - the sole reason I mention it is that, I actually had a Really Bad™ reaction to some tech a few years ago, which exacerbated my own sensitivity to the point where I basically had a sustained baseline tolerance of zero (go near computer = Bar Fight Mode, I'd constantly pick fights due to internally sustained aggravation), and I was equally sensitive a year later to how sensitive I was a week afterward. Completely coincidentally I happened to trial a different brand of fish oil for my autism (Nordic Naturals), and while I observed I felt fractionally sharper after switching and regarded the trial a success, it wasn't until I tried a random gadget and... didn't fall apart... and... continued to not fall apart... that I realized that it was actually A Big Deal. I'm unfortunately still selectively sensitive to certain things (which I'm trying to work on), but the fish oil seemed to make some things click into place that apparently just needed a bit of a shove, and gave me some baseline viability. Which is the caveat emptor: I'm very bullish about alternative therapy (although it's what I use the most), moreso than drug-based therapy, because the alternative approach is more about gently nudging individual components this way or that (within the natural extent of their bounds) and seeing if there's any improvement rather than deploying green-field turnkey "engine go brrrrr" solutions that basically file any side effects under "deal with later". So the question is whether your circumstances and context would benefit from the same thing - and it's a good question.
> Societal issues: Zero Trust, applied to technocratic incumbents means breaking up big tech, banning data hoarding and data brokering, banning cameras everywhere, policing satellites - a futile pipe dream, indeed. The risks of power asymmetry via tech will only rise. I am not optimistic at all about the future of democracy. Asymmetric power hoarding opportunities will probably increase significantly over the next 50 years - a scary prospect.
I've seen a couple threads on here talking about kids learning programming, with stymied comments wondering just how some 19 year old or 15 year old or 8 year old can figure out where on earth to start with the profusion of opportunities and languages and environments and libraries and frameworks and distractions and conflict... given that this generation is supposed to be suffering from a silent epidemic of ADHD and autism, don't we presumably need less complexity than existed in the 80s, not more? How on earth is this coding thing supposed to work out?
It's fascinating that those comments seem to orbit around ideas of doing things like starting kids out learning QBasic or Turbo Pascal (as the comment authors did), as though that's an irreplaceably necessary first step to being able to grasp the complexity of everything else.
Perhaps this represents a scenario where someone hasn't fully internalized/normalized the fundamentals of programming, and they're still special-casing everything around an untenably-narrow bottleneck of oversimplification.
But I wonder if the same sorts of trip-ups and biases that can lead to (in this case) perceptual pathologies, can apply near-universally to perception of society as a whole.
There seems to be a noteworthy cognitive bias for certain inputs to slot into certain interpretative models. I'm not sure how much of this is nature/genetic and how much is nurture/indoctrination (see also, toddler's picture books with model towns where everything in the right spot), but there's always seems to be "here are the peasants" and "there's the ruling power over there" and "(the peasants are all dying of this that and the other)" "(the ruling power has no idea (because the peasants are too many abstraction levels below them))". I'm hesitant to interpret the Stanford Prison Experiment as accurately representative, but it is nonetheless interesting that people have such divided opinions about it - it's obviously touching a nerve somewhere, so we're obviously sensitive to this sort of stuff.
A little while back while discovering chaos/group/game theory etc I summarized my newfound understanding as the question "what's the difference between cause and effect and network effects?". Realizing the mathematical void of empathy in emergent events has actually been really liberating.
So, winding back to society and technology, I 100% agree with you that the amount of untapped, un-recognized societal potential (denoting unexpended energy) is higher than it has ever been, and that the entropy pool has both a wider range and more coiled-up immediate momentum than ever before. Cue rollercoaster ride much. Things are going to get pretty crazy in the short to medium term in some interesting and challenging new ways.
But I maintain an optimistic perspective that I'll personally ultimately be okay, by recognizing there is nothing I can individually do to improve the societal situation as a whole in certain areas. (It's like supermarket reusable bags, or "energy-saving" lightbulbs, or whatever - doesn't remotely steer the Titanic away from the iceberg even a fraction of a degree, but it gives everyone something shiny to do so we forget we're going to crash and stop squabbling (across the board - from confused posts on Facebook to equally confused motions at the UN). Achievement unlocked: Idiocracy)
And in recognizing there's materially nothing I can do, I just look at what's around me, and I (try to) survive. And I figure it out, in much the same way the latest generation of coders are figuring it out (with or without the help of the broken education system ;) hah!).
This reads like a bit more of a pat answer than I would like, I have an existentially sore throat atm and am not articulating at 100% efficiency. :/
I explain the above to basically say, I hold the view that whoever's in power effectively got there by chance, by being in the right place at the right time. TL;DR, emergent alignment. That's it. This view is youd-better-believe-it a bunch of self-indoctrination :D that (for me at least) really seems to help shatter the perspective that my circumstances are some sort of immovable situation I fundamentally can't change without going through route X Y and Z. I can; I just solve for making my moral compass happy and achieving whatever I need. It's basically the definition of hacking: taking a bunch of threads everyone kind of looks at in an ingrained way, and going "okay let's use this this way", and then making something new that doesn't have any definitions or reference points for people to latch on to and say "but that won't work!". They say rules are meant to be broken... but nobody forgets to add the context that it's not the correctness of the rules that is meant to be broken, but that the rules say things have to be done certain ways :D
(NB. I'm very happy to keep talking, here or elsewhere - if the thread locks my email's in my profile.)
Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful response and kind offer. Clarification: I am a civilian, not a vet.
Nothing has changed here. I am still as suicidal and cynical as ever. While I am very likely to chicken out and not complete suicide at this time, it truly is my only remaining goal in life -- not specifically to die by suicide, but rather to be dead as soon as possible.
Thank you again for your very well-thought out reply w/ insightful comments.
