/lit/ - Literature

>>13343040
No. I balance the pleasure in my life with discomfort and challenges, doing things I don't enjoy whose end result will benefit me.

It is impossible to live a life in pursuit of pleasure and also be endlessly, permanently satiated. You will find that even spirituality will not give you the satisfaction you desire. The reward mechanisms the outer world evokes in your body are the same ones that the spiritual world will evoke. You are racing towards emptiness and anhedonia.

Because of the Hedonistic Treadmill, you will develop a tolerance to any stimulus if you consistently expose yourself to it, pleasurable or painful. Eventually, you develop such a tolerance that the stimulus loses all appeal.

The only way to prevent this is to intersperse these hedonistic activities with hardship, which lowers tolerance to pleasure and can even reset it completely.

It is not that the rich are any less happy than we are; it is that they are no more so.

Is schizophrenia the most /lit/ mental illness?

Either that or BPD imo

What books will stop me from looking at everything through a very cynical, pessimistic lens?

My friends and girlfriend tell me that I'm very negative when I talk openly. It seems like every time I try and talk openly to someone, their eyes get wide, their faces shows concern, and they ask in a soft, worried voice if I'm alright.

I usually try to soften it with humor, which just ends up wit me saying something very dark and absurd. They kind of laugh, but I can tell they're still concerned about me. My friends go out of their way to ask if I'm alright, and my girlfriend always tries to get me to "open up". They're sort of concerned over how much I drink, too, and my girlfriend started dropping hints about "talking to someone".

I don't think I'm really that depressed. I think about killing myself sometimes, but that's more of a fantasy I play out in my head to put everything in perspective.

I hate being this person. People don't like to see someone they care about being miserable. I infect them when I'm around them. Sometimes I can fake a smile, and that puts them in a good mood.

I want to open up with people, be myself, but nobody really wants to be around who I really am.

To paraphrase Hesse in Steppenwolf, "You have to know what's worth caring about, and laugh at the rest". And I'm trying to sort out what matters and what doesn't, but that's two parts of the brain. I can rationalize things, but dull feeling in my chest doesn't go away.

have any books changed your perspective towards thinking about the world? have you read any book that left you with a hopeful, optimistic feeling?

Once. My dad always said nothing means more to girl than a hand-written letter.

I wrote my friend a letter, told her how much she meant to me. I put in in her textbook, and she found it the next day in class.

She kissed me the next time we hung out, pretty much as soon as she saw me. We ended up dating until August when i left for uni. I see her every time I go back, but neither one of us feel the way we did over the summer.

She was my friends little sister. I'd known her for about two years, had a crush for about a month before i wrote the letter. It could've turned out a lot worse had i been any uglier. She says she still has the letter though.