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>> No. 6449 Anonymous
30th August 2016
Tuesday 8:21 pm
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Does anybody know some good philosophical literature (preferably classic) with themes of employment and productivity? I need to develop an understanding of these topics so I can try and get myself off benefits.
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>> No. 6450 Anonymous
30th August 2016
Tuesday 8:44 pm
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>>6449
No you don't. Knowing anything about philosophy of any sort has never made anyone more employable save for philosophy lecturers.
>> No. 6451 Anonymous
30th August 2016
Tuesday 9:39 pm
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You might enjoy "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matthew Crawford. He was a philosopher, but binned it off to become a motorbike mechanic. His book is about the philosophical implications of manual labour.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/0143117467
>> No. 6452 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 12:05 am
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>>6449
While we are recommending each other books, I would appreciate it if someone would recommend me anything that shines a positive light on suicide.
>> No. 6453 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 12:53 am
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>>6452

I recommend calling the Samaritans on 116 123. They're open 24 hours a day, every day. Calls are free from land lines and mobiles.
>> No. 6454 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 12:55 am
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>>6452
This will help.
>> No. 6455 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 1:35 am
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>>6452
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Never-Have-Been-Existence/dp/0199549265
>> No. 6456 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 1:50 am
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>>6455
http://bookfi.net/book/744942
>> No. 6457 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 1:53 am
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All of this material is related, in fact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
>> No. 6458 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 3:57 am
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>preferably classic

I'd hazard it doesn't exist or at least not in terms of the modern workplace. Aristotle probably wouldn't be happy looking at the modern office drones life but maybe you will find something in the Nicomachean/Eudemian ethics. Try to ignore his claim that good men have good dreams.

I wish I could be more helpful but philosophy helps you in life by developing logical ability. Taking an interest in reading philosophical works will improve your workplace ability and I know this from experience but its hard to explain exactly why this is.

>>6451
I was going to suggest Crawford myself. Pirsig would also be a highly recommended shout but I dunno if maybe all of this will turn OP into some hippie selling beads over ebay.
>> No. 6459 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 6:13 am
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Try some of the videos from this youtube channel as a starting place, the common topics they talk about would be relevant to you, and they a lot of videos introducing you to certain philosophers and authors.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lz-qrVUecE
>> No. 6460 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 6:54 pm
6460 OP
By philosophical I mean something that is considered, something that attempts to find principle or has a moral* message. Maybe I misunderstood the word. (*maybe this word too is misused).

Robinson Crusoe is the perfect example of the kind of ideas I'd like to explore, but I don't want to limit my mind to only one idea of productivity.

Thanks for the replies thus far.

>>6450
I'm not looking to be more employable, rather to understand my current situation and decide if I want to change that.
>> No. 6461 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 8:08 pm
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>>6453
People who really want to kill themselves would not call the Samaritans. People who want a shoulder to cry on call the Samaritans. The threat of suicide is just a bluff. Suicide, or freedom, is not something bad that should be stopped, and any suicidal person knows that.
>> No. 6462 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 8:16 pm
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>>6460

Forgive me if I'm putting a political spin on your ideas, OP, but when I think of the philosophy of employment and productivity I find it hard not to bring up people who have influenced me.

Wilhelm von Humboldt is excellent to read if you're interested in creativity and its relation to fulfilling work. Adam Smith, when closely read, is actually far more compassionate than he's given credit for in Wealth of Nations, and in fact a lot of newer 'free market' practices run totally counter to his beliefs. And yes, as you probably already know, Marx and Engels have plenty to say about employment.

On the more modern side, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly talks a lot about visualisation, productivity, and reaching a state of 'flow' in your work.
>> No. 6466 Anonymous
31st August 2016
Wednesday 8:45 pm
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>>6449
Why do you think philosophical literature might help?
>> No. 6468 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 2:04 am
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>>6461

If you're still alive, then you're ambivalent about suicide.

Suicide provides the freedom from suffering, but the freedom to do nothing, experience nothing, achieve nothing, enjoy nothing. There's no upside to being dead. Suicide is essentially a bet that the whole of the rest of your life will be an unremitting ordeal. Given the statistics on recovery rates from mental illness, that is an exceedingly poor bet.

Suicide may be a rational choice for someone suffering from an incurable and debilitating illness, but depression is far from incurable. The prognosis for depressed people who engage with treatment is remarkably good; unfortunately, 80% of people who experience a major depressive episode never seek treatment.

To quote Ken Baldwin, who survived jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge:

"I instantly realised that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable - except for having just jumped."
>> No. 6469 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 4:21 am
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>>6461
>People who really want to kill themselves would not call the Samaritans. People who want a shoulder to cry on call the Samaritans.
People who want to kill themselves do call the Samaritans, but the vast majority of calls when I was on the phones were not of that nature. As a rough split, I'd say ~40% immediately hung up the phone as soon as I answered, 30% were prank calls (teenagers huddled around the handset and giggling, usually), 15% old biddies who just wanted to chat to someone (not that they don't need that, but it's a suicide line, so we'd give them ten minutes and then wrap it up), and 10% who had major issues in their life who may have needed counselling of some kind (but were not actually suicidal, as best I could tell); of the remainder, maybe only a couple of percent were genuinely, on-the-spot suicidals. They were the hard calls, but they called. I don't remember any "shoulder to cry on"-type calls. I'd presume that's because people who want that ring a friend, rather than a suicide line.

You could change most of "40% immediately hung up" for "fuckups wanting to hear a caring woman's voice to jerk off to" if you were a female phone operator (I'd imagine this percentage has become bigger since making the number toll-free. The individuals involved would probably get a bit of a shock if they could see the women they were tugging it to). Thinking about it, I had my share of male jerkers out of that bunch, so thanks for that, lads.

With all that said, most of the ones who sounded like they were really on the brink of suicide just wanted someone to listen, which is something I'm good at; repeating or reversing people's questions, getting them to talk about their troubles, has an unexpected result of making them resolve them out loud. I often got thanked for "sorting out [their] problems" when all I'd done was chat about them. Occasionally you'd get a cry for help, with an overdose of pills or whatever, and I'd get their address and get an ambulance over, but only ever with their consent. In all my time on the phones, I had a handful of actual "I'm standing on a bridge and I think I'm going to jump now", or similar, calls. I don't know how many actually did. There's one in particular that I suspect did go through with it. I'm not sure there's any combination of words that would've ended with a different result. I remember that call quite well.
>> No. 6470 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 6:19 am
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>>6469

Thanks for having done what you did. I'd buy you a pint in person.
>> No. 6471 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 9:26 am
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>>6470
You could say that he's a good Samaritan.
>> No. 6472 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 11:35 am
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>>6469
I called the Samaritans once, but that was because I'd been told that a friend of a friend was suicidal and the circumstances involved, and wanted to know what I should do about it. The woman didn't really seem prepared to answer my questions - her answer was basically 'get them to phone us' - but who else am I supposed to call?

>30% were prank calls
That's disgusting. I shudder to think what percentage of calls made to the emergency services are hoaxes/pranks.
>> No. 6473 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 12:10 pm
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>>6469
Having survived a suicide attempt and rung Samaritans a good few times in my life over the "major issues" type stuff, thank you so much for doing the work you've done. I can't imagine how hard it must be, and I'm angry that so many people call a toll free number to try and have a hand shandy but somehow not surprised.

The Samaritans calls I've made didn't prevent the suicide attempt, but the times I did ring them helped massively in dealing with some of the nastier shit from my childhood that I used to have far more anger about. And things are lots better now, though I never expected them to be. It's an amazing service, and all of us here in Britain are so lucky to have it.

That one call that may have gone through with it: I survived, and got better, and he/she/they might have as well. So, it's possible. I know you'll never get to know for certain, but maybe my continued existence can serve as evidence that you can get through an attempt on your own life and come out the other end far happier.

Having volunteered for them, would you say charitable donations to them are a good use of any money someone puts aside for philanthropic use? I'm poor as shit but I feel I should give something back.
>> No. 6474 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 3:57 pm
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>>6472
I've heard that prank calls in general are way way down over the past two decades, because the idea of phoning someone for any reason is alien to a lot of kids.
>> No. 6475 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 6:51 pm
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>>6469
"Shoulder to cry one" covers a lot of things. From the biddies who just want a chat but can't just come out and say that they are lonely and are dying for a human contact, to the drunkards who rattle on about their "problems," while you listen and repeat their shite to them.

A real suicidal person doesn't look at suicide as an issue. Freedom is a good thing, not something bad that you have to get talked out of.

>>6468
It is better to have the option of not feeling pain and enjoyment, rather than feeling pain and seeking out enjoyment for some 80 odd years.
>> No. 6476 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 7:05 pm
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>>6472
>I'd been told that a friend of a friend was suicidal and the circumstances involved, and wanted to know what I should do about it. The woman didn't really seem prepared to answer my questions - her answer was basically 'get them to phone us' - but who else am I supposed to call?
I don't know. I will say that with many callers it would become clear that "a friend" was being used as a pseudonym for the caller themselves. So if the woman you were talking to seemed to be avoiding the question, it may have been that she was trying to find out the nature of the question, because a lot of people (older blokes especially) have a hard time saying to a stranger that they have problems and that they're feeling like topping themselves. A lot of calls that started innocuously, on a surface level, about others, or about relatively trivial issues, went on to deeply personal and serious matters. This is a process that can take a long time. People want to know that they're actually being heard before they open up.

Also, Samaritans aren't trained to be therapists, or a citizens advice service. They're trained to listen to and discuss people's problems, not offer solutions. The nature of the service offered - that of being passive listeners, not problem solvers - is something that came up in a lot of calls. If you said that the Samaritans don't really make that clear, well, you'd be right. The argument goes that it's better that way; would you call a suicide line if you didn't think they had the answer? I can't say whether it's the right approach. Within the remit of the Samaritans as an organisation, though, "get them to call us" is the textbook correct answer once you've eliminated the possible needs of the person calling.

Alternatively, you might just have got a shit one on the phone. It happens. The Samaritans also offer an SMS and email service, and you could go back through conversation threads and see a lot of hopelessly tonedeaf advice that some Samaritans had dished out, when they had no business doing so in the first place. I had serious misgivings about both of these services, frankly. The phone lines were generally helpful, as far as I could tell from the branch I worked at, but phonecalls tend to have a definite beginning, middle, and end, and socially we're all more or less familiar with this construct. SMS exchanges do not necessarily follow such a pattern, and it was obvious that a lot of them (if you took the time to read back through the conversation history, and consider how many messages and responses were occurring per day) were perpetuating a daily cycle of misery rather than helping the individuals involved work through their issues. In particular, there were a lot of teenage girls who were texting upwards of 30 times a day, getting a response from a different Samaritan each time, some of whom clearly did not take the time to read through the previous exchanges and were consequently (albeit inadvertently) asking the same questions over and over. Practically, this meant that these girls were being asked if they felt suicidal once every day or so. I don't think that's healthy, or productive. The email service, having no national restrictions, seemed mainly to attract Americans with strong opinions about gun laws, the Illuminati and so on, and whilst in each case you have to consider that such talk may initially be venting, to "sound out" the service before discussing more personal issues, as far as I could tell email exchanges never really went anywhere. Perhaps email is too impersonal, or we consider it too permanent, but whatever the case people did not seem to want to discuss their feelings and problems over it. Both services were rumoured to be due for an overhaul when I was volunteering, back around 2010 (the most pressing being the matching of the same Samaritans to individual service users over time - more systemically complex an issue than it might seem, due to the voluntary nature of the organisation's workforce, and the potential importance of immediacy of response). I hope that occurred, because as it stood I felt they were sometimes doing more harm than good.

>I'm angry that so many people call a toll free number to try and have a hand shandy but somehow not surprised.
It was a surprise to me. Or at least, the volume of it. There was no system in place to flag offenders. They'd only just got around to blacklisting a few dozen numbers that accounted for something staggering like a quarter of all the calls received, and that was seen as an absolute last resort. And with good reason - the guy who's yelling about coming over your whore face one day might well need to talk to someone about their (very real and deep-seated) problems the next.

>Having volunteered for them, would you say charitable donations to them are a good use of any money someone puts aside for philanthropic use? I'm poor as shit but I feel I should give something back.
Despite the reservations above, I think the service as a whole is of great public benefit. If you can't afford a donation they're always looking for volunteers. That doesn't mean being on the phones, my lot were always short on people to go around collecting change in a bucket at public events and that sort of thing.

(Sorry for the derail, OP.)
>> No. 6477 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 7:41 pm
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>>6475

Fuck you. What the fuck is wrong with you?
>> No. 6478 Anonymous
1st September 2016
Thursday 8:24 pm
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>>6475
>A real suicidal person doesn't look at suicide as an issue. Freedom is a good thing, not something bad that you have to get talked out of.
And suicidal people reach the conclusion that suicide is a good thing through contemplation, during which they have doubts and can be convinced that their issues can be overcome.

So far as I can see you're either positing that:

A) every suicidal person goes from 0 to 1 on the suicidal scale overnight, and justifies it to themselves on a wholly rational basis (which isn't supported by any literature I'm aware of: research that supports the idea of a sudden impulse in suicide emphasises the emotional aspects, and doesn't use so broad a brush as to say that that covers all cases of suicide)

or

B) You're making a really tedious semantic argument about how someone considering suicide and who may take their own life without intervention isn't "suicidal" because you've decided that we all must use your personal definition includes only people who are wholly convinced of the merits of suicide.

Neither of which is particularly well considered.
>> No. 6485 Anonymous
3rd September 2016
Saturday 2:12 am
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>>6478
Or, if I may interject to add, of any fucking use at all to man nor beast.

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