is self pity always a bad thing?

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Well, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you like ridiculing my posts for no particular reason. You got caught up in the side details without seeing the common principle involved - you missed the forest for the trees.

My post featured an analogy - a situation involving self-pity that featured someone spiraling down into misery and despair over an easily-resolved situation (at least, it was in the beginning). Analogies are flawed by their nature - they do not describe the actual events that they are analogous to, yet significant parallels can be drawn. In this case, I was illustrating the principle that self-pity is a trap, in that a person may become progressively more fixated on their misery and lose sight of easily-obtained goals, such as when smokers stop trying to quit because it is "too hard" for them to deal with the withdrawal symptoms and the lack of their orally-fixated crutch.

I was not ridiculing your post I was disagreeing with what was said, and how you where comparing more serious issues with your cousin who could not find a date and chose to behave like a selfish couch potato with an inferiority complex. So maybe I did not get the point you were making, no reason to try and accuse me of ridiculing your post.

I don't think that was a good comparison is all.......and I feel like if someone feels bad about their situation or for themself within reason they should not deny those feelings, they should not use it as an excuse to waste their life and complain 24/7....but its not usually good to supress feelings.

It's way to easy to make ignorant judgements here. I mean, there are people who completely destroy themselves over issues that seem even more trivial than not having a date (at least on the surface). There are people who starve themselves half to death because they think they're fat if they can't be as small as a runway model. If you can't possibly understand them you might want to grab them and shake them and scream at them for foolishly throwing their life away.

Well yeah I suppose...I probably took that post wrong, I thought it was implying people here who express things that could be seen as self pity are just making a big deal of nothing and making totally irrational life style changes and throwing their lives away over nothing. I was not trying to ridicule anyone however.

OP, I think you're dead aim on all of this but I'd add - what you're really talking about is peeling the layers apart and separating other people's mythology about you and people in similarly frustrating situations (eg. your ex) from your knowledge of self as well as understanding the mythology that the so-called healthy have.

Its 99% social darwinism and natural selection behavior though IMO. We're still apes, we still have centuries if not millenia of feeding sick babies to the wolves, throwing infirmed adults off of rocks, and later sterilizations and camps - in our DNA, and quite regrettably there is absolutely no point to life in a physical sense aside from procreation and the procreation game is inherently a game that keeps us coming back to the natural selection and eugenics issue.

I don't know what our society will ever do about that, I get the impression that gene-receptor drugs and perhaps drugs that correct genes will at best utterly confuse our natural selection impulses as well as, obviously, close the gap between the highest functioning in the world and those sitting around the Camp Cheerful singing Three Blind Mice on carpet squares in their 30's or 40's. We may just as likely at that point have a world of people so beautiful that those who would be mega-10's right now would be considered too ugly to live, so they'd need to up another dose and, if anyone had physical rejection issues with the meds, odds are they'd be euthanized.

The circular problem though is - we're scum. Its not that we want to be, we're built on animal frames though and there's nothing better that we can be. If we do ever solve that problem though, for humanity, we'll obviously need a new mission statement and we'll need to be crystal clear and unified on why we exist at that point, if not we're back to square one.


My advice though - I agree, dwell on your problems to the point that you feel like it helps you sort them out, but after that - stop, a do be sure to distract yourself if it's truly a hopeless situation. In certain ways it'll come back up but if you've been able to compensate in other areas of life you'll perhaps do better at getting yourself around it or being compassionate with yourself over what you feel you haven't achieved or been given. As for other posters though - I don't know how often I'd phrase posts in a 'woe is me' way, it invites that kind of garbage, but regardless I wouldn't worry too much about people's valuations of your posts in that sense or their opinions if the responses are too far off point in that direction.