Re: I'm leaving for now
One thing I wanted to say, since the topic of mental illness and depression has been prevalent in this topic. May be a bit of a text wall, but hey ya know.
Were I not his friend, I'd feel strongly sympathetic for Sam upon seeing this post. I have witnessed over the years - not as a friend, but as a fellow forum member and gamer - Sam developing games, making some stupid mistake as a kid that caused his sources to be leaked, and trying to make sure they don't spread. He's however not perfect, having carried out a couple actions in particular a couple years back that would be considered annoying in the least, pretty fucked up in the worst.
Now as someone who knows him very well, I constantly see Sam from day to day trying to improve himself. Even when his depression was really bad though, he helped many people - with money, coding, security, and... believe it or not even life advice. Of all the times I've asked him to help, he's done so readily and without request for compensation. And believe me, he's helped me with a *lot* of stuff.
So I feel bad for him both as a witness, and a friend to his situation.
Some may recall the days when Danny, another former game developer, left the community. He posted similarly about being/feeling depressed. I did not have the same reaction, despite the fact that at one point, Danny helped me as much and in some ways more than Sam does at this point, him being my only friend at one time. I ridiculed him, and I did so quite persistently - because of his actions: blaming the community, faulty game development + superiority complex, unwillingness to change, selfish thinking, and a tendency to screw people over. Now I've compared 2 people who both were or are my friends, have helped me a lot, etc, to attempt to clear the air that my feelings and actions in these situations are not necessarily swayed by how a person has treated just *me*.
So now, let's go to a stranger to me in terms of friendship, Mason. I was never Mason's friend over the years - I didn't always dislike him, but we never talked enough to call one another friend. In my opinion a friend is someone you know and talk to, not someone you say hi to in passing, and that's all Mason was. However, reading Mason's posts here, and recently, and having followed him on Twitter and seen his posts there, I don't feel bad for him, similarly to how I don't feel bad for Danny any longer and haven't for 2 years. Here's why:
In my opinion, we cannot prove there is a God, simulation, ultimate judge, fate, what have you. We have no proof that someone is deciding moral wrong and right in our world aside from one another. Therefore, to me, you are in control of your actions and feelings - and other people are in control of how they respond to how you treat them. If you were insane and killed someone in someone else's family, now a days they wouldn't kill you because the legal justice system which attempts to maintain order will punish you for your crime. By living in our society, the person who's relative you killed has agreed to abide by the law and let it serve justice on their behalf rather than carrying out the action themselves, because unless they are a radical anarchist they believe that such a system maintains order and control, and is currently the most fair way we can do so. If they then agree to that and decide to enact revenge on you, or take their pain out on someone else, they've now committed a whole new, unrelated act of injustice - one that we just try to relate to "your" actions because had you not done it, they would not have reacted that way. However, they did react that way.
I know that Mason has not killed anyone, and that anything he did was not near as serious. I am however comparing cutie oranges to massive oranges, not oranges to apples. I do not know how bad Mason's depression is or even if he has depression, but I can only go on the fact that he does because he's said he does and that's all the viable proof I have. However, I am choosing not to feel in the least bit bad for him because like Danny, he has done bad things in the name of this "depression." He's back stabbed his friends, he's gone against their wishes, he's shat on the audio gaming community numerous times, and he's gone back on his word just as many. Some may say he has no obligation to uphold his word, but then other people have no obligation to feel sympathy and or respect for him. And that's just the beauty of individuality.
He, like Danny, chose to react in a negative way towards people who never wronged him, in the name of actions that other unrelated people and situations have done/caused. I can shout abuses at a hammer all night long and it's not going to jump off the desk and bash a hole in the wall in anger - because unlike a human, it can't.
I see him having mental breakdowns sometimes and most of the time, I scroll past it. If it's long and detailed and takes more than a second to scroll past, I may chuckle to myself, shake my head, and then scroll past. I do this because a lot of the time, it's (self-admitted), caused by his own actions and the repercussions he faces.
We only have a finite amount of time to live on this Earth. Some of us are privileged with decades more than others, but in the end we're gone. My thing is, I would much rather expend my sympathies and support on healthy investments; investments that I know will take them, and grow with them. I'm not naive to believe that I'm a panacea of any kind, but I'd like to know that my support and effort are going to a good cause, not a lost one. With people like Mason though? That feeling of empathy and support is nonexistent now, especially after his recent actions. While I don't think I'd be a good person for specifically targeting him with the intent to make his depression worse just for the sake of doing so, I don't find myself insensitive or a bad person for not caring what he's feeling, or turning a blind eye if I ever see someone else doing that to him. (Not helping them out, just not caring even though I know about it). I've seen him do it to others, and I have no viable evidence that suggests he'd never do it again in the future, so I refuse to exhaust the resources it would take to care even a little bit. I feel this exact same way about Danny, whom I bring up so often in this post because the situations are similar in both the actions and my feelings about them. Not to mention: especially in Mason's situation, I honestly don't know what came first - was it his depression, or was it his behavior? This thought process is why I don't feel bad for the homeless man that steals, the father who scams money into his family's desperate hands, taking away as he does from people who very likely never took a thing from him or them or probably anybody.
Never listen to someone who tells you it costs nothing to care, it costs nothing to lift someone up, it costs nothing to show someone they're important... because you're not infinite, so what makes someone think that your good feelings are infinite? It's optimistic bs, essentially. Never listen to someone who tells you you're privileged or naive or just stupid, or worse - insensitive, uncaring, evil, for not feeling bad for someone who's going through something. Your feelings are your own - and it's your choice or in some cases not to have them, but as long as you don't use them for nefarious purposes you're not a bad person for having or even expressing them. If you didn't cause someone to feel a certain way, in my opinion, it's not your job to care or try to make it right, though of course you can. And if a depressed person acts negatively in a way that personally affects you, they owe you. You don't owe them. Especially if all you were trying to do was help. And I honestly applaud people like Sam who even when I was done with Mason, made excuses for him and told me time and time again about how Mason had it hard and he felt so bad for him, while Mason was on a distant server distributing Redspot and Ultrapower on the premise that the evil Slam Tupy just doesn't care about anyone else's code.
Few. That was long as hell. I felt it was something I needed to get out though.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
