The good stuff I cited was just an example -- what makes a person's life feel, subjectively to them, good or bad is as variable as each person is, right? Some people enjoy solitude, and are desperate to escape family entanglements and friends, and strongly don't want children, etc. For them, The World feels good when it closely matches those desires. For another person, family is key -- they feel miserable without a spouse and children and all the chaos that goes with it, and a community they can be a part of, and all that. For them, The World feels good when it closely matches those desires. What I'm trying to get at is that The Good World is just a schema each person has in his or her head -- and they hold that schema up against the world they're actually living in, to see how they're doing, and how they should feel about things. That schema is individual to each person, and is influenced by, and compared to, the circumstances of their lives -- the external things that happen to and around them. And, for some people, the world seems homogeneously bad, because what they want and what they expect in no way match what they have and where they are. Some people react to that fact by saying, "Well, you don't have to be stuck there. You can change things!" And the point of my first post is -- hey, man, the fact that a person can even have the hope that change is possible is an accident of circumstance. The ability to change things, to not be stuck where you are? That's a rare privilege, when looked at on the scale of the world. So, if you cannot change the circumstances that you find yourself in, the only other alternative is to change the schema. To change how you define a "Good World" to match what actually exists. Because the world doesn't care. It's neither good nor bad. It just is. Well, this right here is why I'm not a first responder for emergency situations. My response would probably be something like, "I dunno, man, jump if you want. The only reason I haven't done it already is a vague curiosity about where all this is going. Also, there's a fear of the pain. Jumping would hurt. I've thought about poison, but it's so... uncertain." And so on. You've just described The World as one homogenously-good thing for some people, haven't you?
If you were to see this guy in the ledge, would you convince him to stay, knowing how terrible he perceives life to be? why? how?
That's a very considerate, deep way of talking about what makes our lives what they are. Thank you for sharing. Do you think like your response to a suicidal person on the ledge would be wrong? inconsiderate? uncareful? meaningful, or, meaningless? something else?
I don't know -- all I can really say is that I've made a personal commitment to honesty, so I'm sort of bound by that commitment to say what I actually think. So, who knows how inconsiderate, meaningless, or harmful that statement would be to a person on a ledge... but it would be honest. I just know that if it were me on the ledge, and someone tried to talk me down with some bullshit about how "where there's life, there's hope", I'd rather jump than continue the conversation with that person.