Memetic Index
I watched about the first hour of it. The caller at minute 36 kind of had a point, I thought. I'm conflicted as to whether to even send this email. The whole thing has become rather draining.
In AA we say "Suicide on the installment plan" so the term "slow suicide" is nothing original, nor perhaps particularly insightful (since it's just a pithy description for a thing, a well-known thing in some circles, and I'm not sure it illuminates what is is for those NOT in those circles, since addicts and depressives immediately understand WHY you would "commit suicide on the installment plan" and why that term is especially apt as opposed to any other, and how a normie thinks that the right treatment is to just "talk to the non-mentally-ill would-be suicide" and "explain to them why his life is worth living (if he loses weight and gets a job and a girlfriend)"
That's what Dr. K was saying the whole first hour. Maybe I need to watch the second hour. Maybe I need to watch one where he talks about addiction.
Minute 36 kind of had a point, which Dr. K disagreed with, namely that if you commit suicide then you have to be mentally ill in some way. Dr. K. said that some percentage of suicides (30%?) had no indication of mental illness. I may be oversimplifying, but obviously that statement is problematic on many levels. If you define suicide as an expression of an illness, like you die of yourself rather than of a stroke or heart attack or cancer, then any suicide death is by definition due to mental illness. Men kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Many men kill themselves because they feel they've disappointed their families, companies, or countries, especially if the act of killing themselves absolves family, friends, et al, of the consequences that made the man kill himself. Despair takes many forms. Depression can be a pain that seems to have no reason. When I was most suicidal (probably) I had a 6-figure job in the greatest country, the greatest city, in the world, with a great apartment, a great wife and a great kid, working for a prestigious company, and I was wondering why I wanted to kill myself, why I couldn't be happy with all that stuff. Men are taught that their lives are worthless, or worth only what they can produce, and when that goes away, and one can't get it back, the idea that you can just tell somebody durng an office visit, "C'mon, buck up, Buckeroo, you're not worthless. If you just get in shape, get a job, and get a girlfriend, then you'll have value again, and boy howdy I bet you can do it."
It's pretty easy to see how "excessive" video gaming is a (relatively harmless) symptom of that kind of despair, and not at all the cause of it. A gamer is probably at no level thinking "I'm hastening my own death by just a little bit by playing another level, but without the finality of a hose in the tailpipe or a bullet to the brain."
A man can look at his life and weigh it against an insurance policy, the inconvenience that will be lifted from his family, the shame that will be avoided by his friends, company and family, and so on, if he ceases to exist. It may be true that a woman will always be daddy's little girl, or somebody's, no matter what she does, but that's definitely not true for men. Men are expendable, and once you stop being able to stay one step ahead of that, it's not nice, and it's unclear where you go from there.
A typical male thing when the "alpha male" (actually a dumb term) gets set up and gets all the women, or all the women are taken by the other male birds and there aren't enough left, is to form a "bachelor flock/tribe/group/pride/pod/
"The measure of the soul of a society is how it treats its women and children"
-- Gandhi
"No people is truly beaten until the faces of its women are on the ground."
-- Apache saying (or some nearby tribe)
"The wealth and power of a society stems from how effectively it uses its men."
-- some dude
I guess I came away with something resembling a crushing sense of despair and a sort of unfocused inchoate feeling of rage. I was going to post a reply (or three) but there didn't seem to be anything to grab onto, like minute 36's comment about suicide = mental illness, and then the kaleidoscopic flurry of partial responses to this just made it impossible to say anything without writing page after page, basically just writing a whole show. I can't write any more about this now...
I guess it worries me and makes me feel sad. I deal with people who suffer from addictions almost every day, I nearly died of this myself (and may yet someday--it's a daily struggle), and I have at least one very close friend who died of suicide, closely related to addiction. This Dr. K guy is trying to get views on YouTube, is trying to get people to come and be clients and pay him, which is fine--people have to make a living, and it doesn't automatically make them a liar--but he says a lot of things some of which I consider to be just plain false, from my own studies and adventures in therapy and also from my own real-world lived experience, but also a bunch of stuff which kind of sounds sensible, maybe peppered with a few things, like statistics (and of course 92% of people will believe anything that cites a statistic) and it just gets all mushy, which defies deconstruction. My overall impression is what I more or less said before, that it feels like a demeaning and coöption of genuine life-threatening suffering ultimately in the service of garnering attention and money.
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