The logical solution.
Let me start by saying I'm a very logical person. I tend to not be emotional, and when I am I'm still able to think logically and do what's best. Now, for the past month or so, I've been conducting and experiment of sorts, and it's time I post my results. Everytime something good happens to me, something bad will happen the same day unless the good thing is at the very end of the day, in that case the terrible thing will happen the next morning. Today I hang out with friends, I forget my toothbrush and tooth paste and a statue I liked is broken. Before that I was working on homework with a friend, having fun, and not more than 10 minutes after saying goodbye to them and feeling great I start feeling terrible and that night people in my dorm decide to be loud keeping me up late into the night. I go to my college's homecoming dance, for days afterwards I feel bad. I go to Friday Night Magic dressed in steampunk in honor of the newest card set that was released, my dorm floods. I try going to a counsler to help with my feelings of loneliness, and no matter how good I feel before or even in the waiting room I always feel worse when talking to the counsler. I can go on and on, showing example after example of when something good happened and then something bad happened right afterwards, but I feel like I've shown enough examples. The bottom line is, when something good happens to me, I know in less than 24 hours something bad will, and the converse isn't true. When bad things happen to me, that doesn't mean something good will. this means that any good thing that happens to me will be balanced out by a bad thing, but not everything bad thing will be balanced, so my life's net happiness will always have an average below 0. If my average net happiness will always be below 0, wouldn't it make sense to do something to stop that? And since I can't do something that makes me happy and know that will raise my net happiness, it would appear my best option would be suicide. Again, let me say I am logical, and so I will not be doing anything irrational in the next few days, I just wanted some other peoples point of view. If I can prove through numerous examples that I can never be happy without something ruining it, what reason do I have for not stopping the cycle?
I also should say, I don't like this solution. I don't like how logic appears to point towards suicide being the best option. And yet, I can't find a major flaw in my thinking.
@BDRD
If you're having thoughts of suicide please go to the local emergency room, call 911 or call the national suicide hotline.
1-800-273-TALK(8255).
ER and 9-1-1 services are generally for actual emergencies, not for thoughts. To talk to someone about thoughts, a helpline is appropriate. I have never seen any ER or 9-1-1-type emergency service anywhere in the world that deals with thoughts.
For example, in St. Louis, MO, the health department has a line staffed by clinicians 24x7 every day of the year on 314-469-6644 / 800-811-4760 It is appropriate for talking about thoughts of suicide. Other places worldwide have similar services. Many of these are listed at suicide.org
@LScheinLPC
The thing is it's not even logical to see it that way in the first place. It sounds very superstitious and while I understand where you're coming from (those sort of things seem to happen to me too), do you really believe that somehow there's something making sure that everything good that happens is outweighed by something bad? Perhaps you're more alert to noticing bad things after something good has happened because you are so used to it that you're basically expecting it at that point. Since, like you said, bad things happen even when there aren't good things...
I don't exactly know how to make things better but I thought I'd point that out.
I find this difficult to understand, logically. Even accepting your scoring system, there seems to be no reason to expect the overall total to be zero. And even if there were some reason to expect it to be zero, I would expect it to be zero over a lifetime, or perhaps over many generations of a family, certainly not over so short a time as the month or so of your experiment.
I have doubts, too, about whether your scoring system is strictly logical in the way it treats different types of event.
The thing that jumps out at me from your description is what a useless counselor you seem to have. It makes me wonder whether a better counselor might transform your life.
You have made a lot of very interesting points, though. If you'd ever like to chat about these kinds of thing, feel free to send me a message.
@BDRD
