Diaspora Co-founder Dies At 22

phaedrus5001 writes "Tech Crunch is reporting that one of the co-founders of Diaspora, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has passed away. He was only 22. At the moment, the cause of his death is unknown."

Re:So...

[beaverdownunder]

This ^^ deserves the Aspie poor-taste comment of the year award...

Congratulations!

Re:What is Diaspora?

[epine]

Google is my friend, too, yet I would have been ever so grateful for the tiniest social grace of sparing me yet another Google result set.

I'm pretty sure Lewis Thomas in Lives of a Cell (or possibly Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher) comments about the sad decline of the elder statesmen: he hasn't forgotten anything so much as piled it so deep in the attic he can't find it without a substantial jog.

For about five minutes a year ago I knew what Diaspora was. Then it went directly to the Lewis Thomas attic of things I can only possibly remember once reminded.

Hard to understand, I guess, when you're twenty two.

Re:Sad

[eulernet]

It may be related to this message: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/721055 [joindiaspora.com]
where he announces that he just started an intimate relation, less than 2 weeks ago.

The relation has probably been broken, as his heart :-(

Re:Causes?

[Attila Dimedici]

Whether a behavior is rational or not has no bearing on whether it is a selfish behavior or not. Once again, you fail to actually make an argument for suicide not being selfish, you merely state that the person is motivated by irrational thought processes. I agree that depression is a terrible condition that causes people to behave irrationally. In many cases, people suffering from depression behave in outrageously selfish behaviors that are well short of suicide.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that many people's depression gets worse because people around them tell them it is ok to behave selfishly because they have a mental disorder. It is not ok to behave selfishly, even if the individual is unable to rationally understand that they are doind so. There is a feedback loop related to people's moods and behaviors. If you act depressed, you are likely to be depressed. Once you are depressed, you are more likely to act depressed. This creates an ever deepening cycle. On the other hand, if you act happy, you are likely to be happy. This creates the reverse effect. Unfortunately, some people have depression that does not respond to this approach. Those people may be suffering from influences beyond their control (chemical inbalances in the body are one possible explanation).
I will repeat. Just because someone is unable to rationally understand that their behavior is selfish, does not mean that their behavior is not selfish.

I'm not really anyone to you

[circletimessquare]

And I make no pretense to know what it is like to want to commit suicide.

But I've always wanted to say to someone who was considering taking their life: why not just take your "life" instead?

And what I mean by that is, your situation in life. It obviously is not working, so abandon it. Take a plane to a far flung location on the globe, without any money or means of support, change your name, dissolve all ties to your previous existence, preemptively sabotage any way anyone could trace you, and live off trash or stolen mangoes from a tree, until something better comes along.

And become another person. Someone who might be happy someday.

Effectively "kill" yourself: all the identities you have with your current existence, the sum of all your relationships that aren't working, the job that fills you with nothing but misery, all of the reality around you that cages you about how you think about yourself. "Kill" all of the signifiers about who you currently are and how you think about your place in life.

And maybe the challenge and novelty of that will put you in a new frame of mind. And then you can be happy someday.

Of course, I know, the fear is you carry the seed of your depression around inside you, and even in a new life, the despondency will return. But I think, for many people, it is a combination of nature and nurture, and you, who you are, had your life gone another path, you might not be so depressed. We all are depressed at times, we all carry the seed of depression, and major depression too, were the situations in our life and how we come to think about ourselves had evolved a different way. So write a new story. Yes, you carry a seed of it inside you. We all do, and we aren't committing suicide because our seed never grew. So cut down the tree your seed has grown into, and move to new soil where the seed can't grow.

So restart the story. A lot of people talk about reinventing themselves, in ways they consider major, but are really minor. Consider the most radical reinvention possible, instead of suicide.