What can I do to prevent my own intense suffering?

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Related: What can I do to prevent intense suffering?

• Take action if you suffer from depression, anxiety or chronic pain. Go to a good doctor. Search for drugs, tips, counseling, techniques. Try new things. Try again. Create a new story of your life that gives it meaning. Love someone (human, dog, cat…). Be wise by necessity. Remember that you are loved. Remember that we are together in this battle. Don’t take life so seriously. Enjoy small things. If you have very bad addictions or looping thoughts, try to focus on other things, with the mind, with the body or both. If you are desperate, try even other more healthy addictions (less harmful), as much healthy as possible. Remind yourself that you should avoid evaluating your decisions just ex-post. A good ex-ante decision is still a good decision, even if the ex-post result was terrible.
• Prevent your own specific future scenarios of intense suffering, anticipating suffering risks. Possible scenarios in your work, businesses, with your family, partner, friends, while traveling, making sports, driving… With details. Save or invest money for bad times (for legal support, for health, security…). Don’t do things that put you in risk of going to jail. Avoid conflicts. Avoid conflictive areas. Avoid walking the night if insecure. Spend in security rather that in sophisticated pleasures. Don’t do extreme sports [1]. Drive awake and carefully. Be kind with everyone. Remember that almost anyone can be violent against you. Avoid quick money. Don’t fall in love with the wrong person. Don’t cheat. Runaway from problems.
• Never, ever, try to commit suicide. Don’t do it. It’s extremely difficult to do it properly. In most of the cases it only brings more and more suffering for you. Most attempts go wrong and only make things worse.
• Make plans for having a painless death. Check the laws of your country. Plan about your own palliative care with therapeutic morphine. Save money to die in another country if necessary. Write a “living will” with instructions to avoid dysthanasia, therapeutic stubbornness or therapeutic cruelty. Example of “living will”.
• Do not do something that can land you in jail. Having a leg broken in three parts is very painful (I can relate), but it is very likely that you would prefer that to spending three days in one of the worst prisons in the world. Richard Branson spent one night in jail, and said: “Incentives come in all shapes and sizes, but avoiding prison was the most persuasive incentive I’ve ever had.” A very instructive testimony can be found in the note [2].

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Motivation

The question of Vlastimil Vohánka and Marc Terrettaz.

 

Notes

[1] Why extreme sports? I am thinking of deaths that are not quick (to die frozen, to die of hunger, thirst and cold lost in the mountain with a broken leg, or crushed in a grotto…), deaths that may seem fast but are distressing and terrible (suffocated under an avalanche or diving), as well as injuries and consequences of non-fatal but very serious accidents (practicing hang gliding, bungee jumping, climbing…) that can leave you disabled or institutionalized in health centers for life.

[2] This is a recent (2023) anonymous testimony about being in jail:

Most people will never question what a real jail is actually like; they vaguely assume it’s two bunk beds with iron bars. The reality is much more complicated.

You may be wondering how my personality fared. I consider myself radically different dramatically unlike the typical jailed person. Some of the most intimidating people found me hilarious and a decent. I was actually LIKED by the jail population because I didn’t start fights, and I was helpful, and they laughed at my jokes.

You may have come across social media personalities considered “aggressive.” That is considered EXCEPTIONALLY POLITE  in a prison setting. People like Lex Fridman and Sam Harris talking about how Nassim Taleb is too aggro to interview have never known this part of the human bell curve, and their Overton Window of what aggression looks like is limited by this.

In fact, if you don’t *physically* aggro people and are helpful and funny, no one will have a problem with you. Shutting the fuck up (when it’s important) is also valued a lot.

I should note that if you are bothered by the phrase “shutting the fuck up” you would be traumatized by this environment because you hear (and are woken up by) “GET THE FUCK UP” and “SIT THE FUCK DOWN” and various other instructions yelled at the top of someone’s lungs by people who are selected probably in part for their ability to yell really loud.

What I’ve realized is that while some jails may be great, others such as the jail I went to are designed around what are borderline human rights abuses by the type of officer who essentially moves the crowd of just-arrested people along and yells out what they must do. These were riot-geared unbelievably aggro people with hair-trigger aggression and batons, taser guns, actual guns, voice amplifiers, pepper spray, heavy bullet proof vests, etc.

Another power dynamic in prison is that everyone’s breath smells like shit because you rarely get to brush your teeth and you’re deprived of shaving tools, so the clean-shaven police look is a way to remind you that you don’t have access to this.

I was intentionally sleep deprived for 48 hours in an enormous waiting room with Walmart lighting. I remember a specific officer there handcuffing someone for lying down to sleep and refusing to get up as the officer yelled “SIT THE FUCK UP” repeatedly, then sending him to a single cell room where you are kept in behind-the-back handcuffs and unable to pee or forced to pee and shit on yourself.

Another tactic is temperature abuse. Depending on how much the officers want to make you miserable you can be put in a room that’s deliberately cold, and/or a room that’s deliberately hot. They can also oscillate the temperature to intentionally stop your body’s ability to adapt to a single temperature range.

I’d say maybe 30-40% of people were there on drug charges, and the system would be significantly declogged if we decriminalized drug possession (and being under-the-influence but not doing anything) as a singular offense. One man was JUST there for being really really high on shrooms — this is absurd. Even if we changed the criminal offense to just “drug possession with (other bad thing)”, a huge amount of jail inefficiencies would be cleared up. There is an enormous amount of paperwork involved in simply processing people.

Maybe 5% of the people there were for lack of mental health facilities. Most of you would freak out if you met these people in real life, they are just absolutely crazy people. For example, a stick-thin elderly man with the flexibility of a yoga teacher who could sleep with his head BETWEEN HIS KNEES, while he talked RIDICULOUSLY AGGRESSIVELY to the police and tried to shit himself on purpose because he didn’t care.

Some of the people there were hilarious — a GIGANTIC man whose nickname was “Iron Man” I got along fine with. Another guy was so drunk that he was shitfaced for 48 hours. We joked that when he finally sobered up he’d have a genius IQ.

There’s also an odd split where the funniest people were (1) the police captain and (2) the person in there with the most serious sentence — Iron Man, mentioned above. I won’t mention their jokes because they’re “you had to be there” humor. The police captain was also the most reasonable officer there. What I took from this is that there’s an odd relationship with the extremes of power and humor, where people who have the most authority and least authority can crack the funniest jokes. I don’t know why this is, but it is.

An enormous amount — maybe 20-30% — were there on DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs) charges and violating probation. I’ve gathered from this that some kind of probations are easier to violate than others, and you can violate a DUI probation on accident relatively easily.

This leads me to believe we should budget a separate processing area for this sort of thing entirely.

DUIs, unlike drug possession, clearly should still be crimes. I should mention that when I was interviewed by a nurse and said I had “3-4 drinks of vodka” daily she asked me if I meant cups or bottles. I meant shots. When I visibly dropped my jaw and asked “people drink 3-4 cups of vodka daily?” the nurse had a facial expression of “oh god you have no idea” and her explicit response was “you’d be surprised.”

Even though DUIs are crimes, they clog jail and rounding up these people with the other inmates is an extremely bad idea. Decriminalizing mere drug possession and having some kind of separate processing area for just this DUI/probationary kind of crime would eliminate a huge amount of inefficiency.

Another 5-15% were the type you actually imagine going to jail. This person may be incomprehensible to you, depending on your background. If you have grown up upper middle class, you’d think they were the worst of the worst and they’re still not as aggressive as aggression can get.

The police would yell something that is clearly procedural — i.e. we were sex segregated for obvious reasons and told to not talk to the female side for obvious reasons. One husband-wife couple was arrested at the same time and a man violated this rule, so he was yelled at again to not do it and when he did it a third time he was handcuffed and started yelling FUCK YOU BITCH FUCK YOU PUSSY FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCKING BITCH ASS FUCK until they he was shoved into the sound-muffled single cells I mentioned earlier, then continued yelling at the top of his lungs for about ten minutes.

Another guy started banging against his door for three minutes continuously — just intensely loud pounding that would probably scare or disturb some of you. I don’t know if it was his body, head, or what but it was IMMENSELY loud banging, like someone dropped a 400lb barbell on the floor — you can barely hear your own brain. (This is why some people are justifiably handcuffed in these cells.)

The guards were completely unphased by this. I started making his banging into a drum beat, which a few inmates found hilarious – this situational sense of humor is the sort of thing that helps you in this environment. If you are incapable of taking jokes of archetypally male shit-talking you will have a lot of trouble.

Also, it is a risk to be visibly gay and people take this seriously. No one is going to be offended if you are gay, but if you have done anything homosexual they will tell you to shut up because they, themselves, are worried about being overheard talking about homosexual acts. Some people do not catch on to this dynamic. It is not necessarily homophobic so much as it is self-preservation.

There is a world of difference in what is considered “aggressive communication” in this environment and what is considered aggressive communication in Polite Society. Once more, if you have grown up upper middle class or better this will be incomprehensible to you. These are people who DEFAULT to communication that is basically just yelling, and it’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been in that setting what this is like.

In many occasions the officers were much worse than the inmates. I specifically remember this skinny guy who yelled at me because another officer told me to move to some line, and he wanted me moved to a different line, and it was the most ludicrous exchange —

“I SAID NOT TO MOVE”

“I was told by suchandsuch to—”

“I FUCKING SAID NOT TO MOVE”

“okay.”

This same guy was the most authoritarian person I’ve ever seen. One guy was trying to get up from a chair with handcuffs, and he didn’t have the leverage to in a standard way, so instead of just helping him up the exchange with the officer went like:

“GET THE FUCK UP”

“I can’t”

“GET THE FUCK UP NOW”

“I can’t!” (he gestures to his handcuffs)

The officer yelled at him to put his elbows on the chair and use them as leverage, but this was absurd and unnecessary physical abuse because he was clearly strong enough to help him up.

The worst people were sent to a cell called cell 10, where the inmates are handcuffed in such a way where they must hold each other’s dicks to pee and shit. The rooms are often underventilated on purpose so you’re constantly sweating and tormented by your own stench.

Even the basic means by which they all used a bathroom was abominable – I never thought I would say that anything could smell worse than a portapotty, but it made a portapotty smell luxurious by comparison.

I could have gotten out of jail within a day with mere access to a phone call, but I was deprived of this; the phone system was needlessly complicated and there were limited instructions and time to use it. 

I had read so many stories from people like Malcolm X or Bertrand Russell or a Georgetown law professor who were able to extensively educate themselves while in jail that I didn’t realize how contingent this was on the kind of jail they went to.

I would repeatedly be shuffled around rooms of 5-17 men, woken up by someone yelling, then shuffled to another room of 5-17 men. I would sleep on the floor. I was constantly sleeping and waiting and — this is the worst part — dehydrated beyond imagination.

Your meals before you got to a real jail (which I never did, although I’m not sure if that’s better) consisted of a single bologna sandwich with a cookie, and the only condiment as mustard, and a pitiful container of apple juice. You get the impression that this was designed specifically to malnutrate the inmates and weaken them, although this could just as well be because that’s all they’ll give you. The stereotype of inmates as buff is probably only true sometimes; in this environment it’s occasionally impossible to work out, and you’re basically constantly at caloric deficit.

The dehydration was worsened because they made all aspects of rehydration as disgusting as possible, especially just the act of drinking water.

In one room specifically I remember the water fountain let out a pitiful amount of water and didn’t drain properly, so you had to put your lips near what was a disgustingly shallow puddle of water.

The experience is like being in the smelliest Walmart you’ve ever imagined, and for a great period while you’re being shuffled around you’re only allowed to sleep sitting down; I specifically remember the utter misery of having my legs handcuffed, forced to sleep on a metal chair that resembles a park bench but far more cramped, and I had to sleep while sitting up — if I laid down I’d get yelled awake and told to sit up. I can’t reiterate how much people smell like shit when they are selectively allowed to shower and brush their teeth.

An inmate told me that other prisons were luxurious in comparison and he could talk to his wife all day with a tablet, so I’ve realized also that this differs from place to place.

But for many people, jail is truly hell. Much of it resembles the kinds of jails you’d imagine a prisoner of war to reside in, and makes you sympathize with people sent to medieval jails and how absolutely horrible – in smell, in sensory deprivation, in being forced to be utterly useless – the jails must’ve been when people were chained upright.

On one hand, I am now acutely aware of how luxurious a lifestyle even the worst gym or school or shopping store is compared to it. I can sleep 8 hours for the rest of my life. I’m appreciative of having a bed. I’m grateful to have diet soda.

If you are trying to model the educational attainment of an inmate, imagine the person who *possibly* graduates high school and aspires to go to college – ANY college – as a distant possibility. If you have a PhD or MA/MS or some other kind of advanced degree you are essentially considered a genius.

Most of this population just has legitimate impulse control issues, and the institution appears to exist to antagonize them and makes their issues worse. I completely understand the “prison/jail should be meant to rehabilitate” position now.

Finally, there’s the strip search. This bothered me a lot less than it bothered I’d imagine 99+% of the incarcerated, but you are stripped naked and told to turn around and spread your buttcheeks. I understood that this was procedural, but it was still bizarre. Considering how many people have a broad definitions of sex crimes, this would probably traumatize some of you.

The primary feeling of jail, other than dehydration and immobility and human stench, is waiting — constantly waiting, and being forced to wait and be useless. Most of the time, when I wasn’t sleeping, I was trying to sleep, usually on the floor, to accelerate the time until I was released. The rest of the time I was memorizing these events in my head so that I could write them down later.

However, this is invisible to most of you and the general population. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it were possible for regular people to go inside these places and see what I saw, because if you could it would be newsworthy and the prison system would quickly get its shit sorted out by politicians. Because of various restrictions that prevent normal people from seeing these things, this will happen slowly — and I’m sure the prison system will try to ensure it happens as slowly as possible.

If I can give one takeaway here it is this: please take prison reform seriously.