t;dr how do you cope with death?

My dog has cancer in his liver and spleen, and learning this has strongly exacerbated some kind of predisposition towards being vulnerable to depression. He's an old dog so it probably wouldn't have changed his life expectancy THAT much, but it's still really sad. If you're not a pet person this might be counterintuitive, but to me it's losing a friend, and the things people say to me are mostly unhelpful. Which is why I'm posting it here specifically: the typical coping memes about doggy heaven or death as some profoundly important part of Nature are ruined for me. So I wanted to ask how people here deal with this sort of thing. Especially on the cognitive end of things, what types of frames and self talk you used. I do already know the basics, like exercise and diet and meditation, but I sure wouldn't mind a new insight on getting myself to actually do that stuff when I'm this down.

I've thought about cryopreserving him, but even if that were a good way to use the money I just don't think I can afford it. All I'll have is an increasingly vague and emotionally distant memory, I guess, and it sucks. I've been regretting not valuing him more during his peak health, as well, although maybe I'd always feel guilty for anything short of having been perfect.

I've been thinking a lot about chapter 12 of HPMOR, and trying play with and video and pamper him while I can. I don't want to say "fuck, it's too late" about anything else. It's the best thing I can think of right now.

This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And that was where it all started going wrong.'

And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice...

Wish granted. Now what?

Books (edited to include reasons)

Perfect Health Diet (dense, persuasive, hundreds of citations)

How to Fail at Almost Everything And Still Win Big (its very rational seeming for a self help book, his systems approach is interesting, the book includes some counter arguments to common memes (like questioning the direction of causality in the whole passion/success thing), he mentions other research and memes that will sound familiar to anyone who reads lukeprog self help posts, he assumes he and the readers are moist robots, it's self skeptical and cautious about naively assuming he knows why something seems to work)

Podcasts:

Zen Habits, Tim Ferriss Experiment, Conversations From the Pale Blue Dot

You might also find it worthwhile to search youtube for Ted Talks, lectures, interviews etc, and rip out their audio. If there is a popular book there is often a shorter free video of the author explaining and summarizing its basic gist.

For the future: [pollid:778]

Aw carp, how did I forget the media thread? I think that you are right, I'll do that in October's.

Meta discussion goes here. Things like discussion of the medium, whether short sentences could have much usefulness besides sounding witty, whether this thread should actually exist or if favorites lists are good enough, etc

Agreed, these would be more shareable than lw posts.

I thought you were being a little too fancy with the kinetic style text. The added difficulty in reading it compared to something more linear and clean/minimal was small but enough to make it harder to read it and still watch the illustrations at the same time. That might just be my taste, I am the one asking about attention disorders downthread after all, and I don't want to take away from the fact that it's cool you're actually taking time to do something when it's far more common to just fling ideas out there (which is fine too).

Thanks, clarifies things some, but I don't get why "messed up for [reason]" would be any worse for one's identity than "messed up".

Yeah the question of how we decide what we call legitimate is of interest to me as well. Apparently (according to a wikipedia page that says at the top it needs cleanup) there's some debate over whether SCT is a real disorder, and I'm not sure what the criteria would be among its critics.

I could try phrasing it in a couple of ways: "How justified are we in treating this group of symptoms as a cluster?". Do well accepted symptom clusters like depression point to larger causes, or at least narrow it down to a few possibilities?

Are diagnoses "we can tell from [symptoms] you have [cluster] which we define by presence of [symptoms]" type tautologies or can you get any information out of them that you didn't already put in?

"What is a cognitive tempo, what does it mean for one to be sluggish?" The more clearly you can reduce it to brain function, the more "legitimate" it might be?

Okay, suppose I decide everyone with the symptoms "has trouble coordinating colors, picking up distinct sounds over other sounds, remembering faces" has "Feidlimid's Processing Disorder", which I just made up. Is there a sense in which "FPD" or being an "indigo child" are less legitimate than "ADD?" More reason to think a "real diagnosis's" traits are related to each other?

This question is less rhetorical than it probably sounds, I can remember venting to a psychiatrist that "depression is a description not an explanation and we still don't know what's wrong with me do we?"

I learned the phrase "sluggish cognitive tempo" recently and thought that the wikipedia seemed to described me. So I'm turning to the lw crowd wisdom to ask how legitimate of a diagnosis sct really is, and what I should be doing to try and meliorate these types of symptoms.

Huh, I'm not sure actually, I had been thinking of consequentialism as being the general class of ethical theories based on caring about the state of the world, and that it's utilitarianism when you try to maximize some definition of utility (which could be human value-fulfillment if you tried to reason about it quantitatively). If my usages are unusual I more or less inherited them from the consequentialism faq I think