Please Stop

Why are so many people I know so self-destructive? I often joke around about how the world is one big insane asylum, and we're all both staff and patients, but really it's not funny at all. What's with all the shooting of ourselves in the feet and intentional crushing of our own dreams and spirits?

Do we believe that we're doomed to failure anyway, so the best course of action is to cause the failure ourselves, thereby gaining at least some sense of self-determination? Is it just a symptom of contemporary culture, which encourages us to indulge our unhealthiest desires and then has nothing useful to say about how to deal with the problem of addiction? Is it just human nature (assuming that phrase even means anything) to want to be "bad" in order to make ourselves feel good? Are the Christians in some horrible sense right about original sin, with the twist that in our post-theistic world where moral values are no longer handed down to us from on high, we actually feel the need to act against our own self-created ideas of right and wrong? Do most of us go around so full of self-loathing all the time that we need to constantly punish ourselves, and then hide our motives by pretending that the punishment is actually a reward? Are we that sick, as a species?

And what am I supposed to do when I see the people I love acting in these terrible ways? I'm talking to you now — what can I do to set you straight? I've never developed any kind of good strategy for this, and sometimes it really makes me pull my hair out (speaking of self-destructive behaviour!) in frustration. Addressing it directly, either by bringing it up in a forgiving way or taking a more chastising, "tough love," approach, always just seems to feed the shame that fuels your addictive self-hatred. On the other hand, if I just act like it's your own cross to bear and doesn't bother me, you take that to mean that you needn't worry about it and keep doing it. Yes, taking the reins of one's own life can be hard. But I feel like watching helplessly as others refuse to take those reins can be even harder. Should I try to remove you from my life because it's all just too painful to bear? That's hardly a less painful act than playing passive spectator to your tragedy, and I'm sure no more helpful to you. What can I do to make you love yourself as much as I love you? Sometimes I wish I didn't love you so much.