Speaker For The Diodes - September 23rd, 2011

05:24 am - QotD

"We can be made happy by others, in the same way that we can be made happy by frost on the windows, hot cocoa, warm socks, and puppies. It is a more complex happiness, but it still comes from within us, and not from them. They are not responsible for our happiness any more than the frost, the cocoa, the socks, and the puppies. We do have responsibility to each other not to hurt each other maliciously, to do what is best for each other within our abilities and while keeping ourselves well, to respect each other, and to act in a way that is good for us and for the world. That applies to how we act in relationships as well as to things like not pouring paint thinner down the drains and using a push mower on our lawns instead of the gas one. But we are not responsible for each others' happiness, not when happiness requires mental health and clear vision and a wealth of past events falling into place for each of us to experience it.

"Someone mentioned the helplessness of it, in a conversation with me elsewhere. Yes. We're helpless. We're very helpless. There's suffering we can't even imagine going on right this instant that we can't stop. The most horrific news stories you hear are probably still happening somewhere else, to someone else, and you can't stop it. In fact, you have more power to stop some suffering (starvation, lack of medication, abrogation of human rights) than you have power to love someone out of depression and other mental illness. The only thing you can change is yourself, even that we have less power over than we like to believe or we'd all be the perfect weight and the perfect height and not in any pain at all."

-- machineplay, "Love is not enough", 2008-02-13, discussing this XKCD cartoon