Are you apathetic in regards to your life situation?

xcagedsilhouttex wrote:Tad bit hard to work when you think people are trying to poison your coffee or when your employer asks what you have done during the day and you can't remember.

This was one of the variables that brought me over the edge. I had to sell myself. I come to work every day accomplishing what my manager wants and then they want me to tell it back to them in a positive spin? What kind of twisted $#%^ is that? Shouldn't they already know if they want me to come back and if not, let me know.

For me, it was being spied on and people talking about me. My wife was poisoning my coffee. LOL.

My neighbors who don't even know me and have seemingly no reason to do it, were spitting in my coffee when I wasn't looking.

xcagedsilhouttex wrote:
Only if you have the capacity to hold down a steady job which I am sure many on this site are not able to do.

I would work right now if it weren't for the psychotic episodes that keep popping up and dissociative episodes where I don't remember chunks of what I did.

Tad bit hard to work when you think people are trying to poison your coffee or when your employer asks what you have done during the day and you can't remember.

Except psychotic episodes aren't a schizoid trait. Sorry if that's what you're dealing with but I was responding to a post on a forum for people with SPD talking about apathy not psychosis.

Psychotic episodes in response to stress aren't unheard of in people diagnosed as schizoid, though probably not as commonly as in schizotypal or paranoid PDs. There's a reason they're all cluster A, though.

I'm giving apathy one more shot.

Yes, I am.

Have lived with my mother off and on (as an adult) for 20 years. Age: 45. Occasional occupation: Library Clerk Education: B.A in Philosophy and Comparative European Literary Theory.

issue(s): a nascent heroin addiction that lasted from 1997-2007 and 2012-2016, schizotypal (or schizoid - both d'xed)

I spend all day on Wiki looking up stuff like black holes, free will, history of the Republican Party, etc. and also watch old TV shows like Sanford and Son and The Fugitive on YT.

Just applied for SSI the other day.

Yes, I am apathetic.

I've long ago absolved myself to death. "I" am some particular combination of meat that will exist for a finite time under that definition. Whether 3 days or 3 hundred years, it doesn't really matter.

That said, having reached that conclusion, I often look at "peers" and react with derision. They havn't gotten to this point yet, if they even ever will. When a quasi-friend of ten years is obsessed with his newborn kid and some sort of immortality he is chasing because of it, or another peer is chasing wealth and status, I do judge them negatively. To inflict this world on something innocent or to chase temporary vainglory, you deny yourself what you could be. Stoic philosophy would say to be indifferent, but instead I'm arrogant towards it.

It sounds like you've not only "absolved", but also "resolved" yourself regarding death.

Is it really productive to judge others simply because they have taken a different route through this strange mystery called life? Perhaps some of those people who have children, for example, do so because they love to be around them, to care for them, to teach them, etc. I can imagine some people might claim that you have not "gotten to" the point that they are at.

It's a question of relativity and perspectivism, of values. I think you might be mis-reading the Stoics. From what I remember, Stoicism is concerned with ataraxia (and that way it has the same general goal as skepticism), or peace of mind. But a very special peace of mind, one which has become harmonized with the inherent Order and Logic of the Universe. They believed in a rational universe, which was a view largely contrary to their rivals, the Epicureans. It's not merely a matter of being "indifferent" for its own sake, or even arrogant, as if the chaos of the world calls for it, as if only YOU are rising above all of that in some grandiose act of "absolution".

Marcus Aurelius, if I remember, was a Stoic, and stated that it is not the world itself that causes grief, pain, suffering, struggling, despair, etc.....it is one's "reaction" to these events, and it doesn't always call for indifference. Emotions are acknowledged as events, it's how we cope with those emotions, once they present themselves to us, that is the key.

It sounds like you are jaded and cynical about the "world", as if somehow the universe has been working against you. That isn't only unhealthy, but it's also misguided. I might be also despairing, but I'm not going to blame "the world" which has somehow "inflicted" these hardships on me. Everything I have ever done, most of it sabotage and self-destruction, I have done to myself.

Also, why stop at being a "combination of meat"? Why not say that you are a collection of molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, pure energy, etc? lol

Ashlar wrote:I've long ago absolved myself to death. "I" am some particular combination of meat that will exist for a finite time under that definition. Whether 3 days or 3 hundred years, it doesn't really matter.

That said, having reached that conclusion, I often look at "peers" and react with derision. They havn't gotten to this point yet, if they even ever will. When a quasi-friend of ten years is obsessed with his newborn kid and some sort of immortality he is chasing because of it, or another peer is chasing wealth and status, I do judge them negatively. To inflict this world on something innocent or to chase temporary vainglory, you deny yourself what you could be. Stoic philosophy would say to be indifferent, but instead I'm arrogant towards it.

CityMouse wrote:"Necessity is the mother of invention." Interesting share.

Frank Zappa is also a Mother.....of Invention.