Ask Lemmy

Don't take the bait of arguing with them through this batshit rhetorical frame that they are presenting. Stay focused on what it is that you want to say.

Ask whose values and why others should adhere to them?

Does a painting have value? It doesnt do diddly except look pretty and be valuable.

Does a pet have value? It actively drains resources.

Value is a purely human concept and means only what we decide it means.

Who defines "valueless"? In my opinion, anyone who says something like that has no value and so...

You don't need a therapist, she does. Sounds like she is suffering from EDD, aka Empathy Deficit Disorder. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-resilience/201004/are-you-suffering-from-empathy-deficit-disorder

What "value" does she purport to bring? Just out of curiosity.

Jesus fucking christ mom. I would ask her to evaluate her contributions to society and really dissect if she ever did anything meaningful in the past or present. Then usher her towards the nearest woodchopper and let her know its time to serve a real purpose.

Have you ever tried to coordinate 5 people to do something well? Do you know how hard that is? And you think thousands of well educated professionals, all over the world, are somehow working together to confabulate lies like "depression" just to justify laziness?

That would be my argument.

By the way your mom describes depression, it’s obvious she doesn’t understand what it actually is. She likely thinks depressed people simply sleep all day and feel sad. I would start by asking her to define the terms she’s using, have her define depression and value, then ask what she believes laziness means. The way she frames this suggests she’s repeating something she heard rather than expressing a considered worldview. It probably isn’t her own position; she’s just agreeing with it. Ask her what she actually believes, assuming she has a coherent position at all. Finally, close the discussion by asking whether she has actually read the Bible from front to back. That question usually ends the conversation.

Can't ban chemtrails but you can reduce contrails which play a weirdly large part in warming up the planet irrespective of fuel consumed.

Just putting the word out for an underrated climate thingy.

Eureka! That explains the hundreds of thousands of suicides!

"I hung myself to get out of work, to sleep, perchance to dream..."

What's her value?

"Value" is always relative. And it has nothing to do with depression or other mental health issues. As long as someone still has potential to be productive, then there's no exuse to say they don't deserve to live. Actually, if you objectively don't have potential to be productive, then you're such an outlier that you deserve to be cared for by others anyway. Everyone deserves to live.

So how is value relative to time and circumstance?

I have depression and ADHD.
People who see my work-in-progress stuff usually say "wow, you've worked really hard on this stuff for such a long time, this is amazing, I hope you have good luck finishing this stuff and world will see how great it is."
People who look at what I've finished usually say "you're a lazy b and you've contributed basically nothing to the society. What have you done last few years, anyway? Unbelievable."

By the way? This isn't exclusive to people with mental health things. Same thing happens to perfectly nominal people too. It doesn't matter how close you're to finishing some great work, someone's out there about to pull the rug from under you because they think you've not done enough. People get routinely absolutely screwed over by middle managers with completely arbitrary productivity metrics.

Your mom is clearly part of The Organization.

That's some Little Red Book shit.

She's using a logical fallacy, in this case, vested interest.

Here's how it works, logically speaking, from Dr. Bo Bennet:

Person 1 is claiming Y.

Person 1 has a vested interest in Y being true.

Therefore, Y is false.

Define "value".

Have you seen a therapist?

Try the classic (fully untrue, but who cares, it illustrates the point) quote about Einstein

Einstein failed his classes in high school, but by adulthood he was one of the smartest people in the world. People develop at different paces

Value is a loaded term here.

If, as I assume, she means "economic" value — in a twisted, Judeo-Christian, colonialist, capitalist, explotative system — then, sure, value is assigned to money and only the top 0.001% of earners "have value". Bully to the 99.999% of people on Earth who spend their lives delivering that value to the top. I hazard the guess your mom is one of those people.

Also, loaded into that term, if she has among her moral values those the western, chauvinistic, Biblical moral set, I might be inclined to question whether she lives up to her own values of charity, humility, and acceptance.

What everyone has is an "intrinsic" value; a unique set of experiences and gifts that has never existed before in the universe and never will again. We are here to delight in each other's presence and potential. This doesn't do much for the bottom line... until it does.

Collaboration on shared goals, building sustainable practices, and ensuring plenty for all are among humanity's highest intrinsic, economic, and moral functions. Previously, I said that the values system your mom probably considers correct is twisted; that's because in this system the highest functions are immense power, immediate profit, and absolute exploitation. These are ignored or invisible to most.

Your mom's blindness and/or ignorance is what makes her tragically wrong.

"Guess I'll kill myself"

What does value mean and how do we get value? It seems more like she's saying that she doesn't value some people, and that we should have the same values as her.

But she doesn't get to determine value, the whole community collectively assigns value. We've all hade times in our life where we were less and more productive to give up on someone during a low point isn't just laughably evil but also a bad investment.

It costs basically nothing to be nice to someone and that could turn around their depression (there's tons of anecdotal examples of this).

Are there any people or things that are valuable to your mother solely because they bring joy? Are friendships purely transactional, are you supposed to win friendships and extract more joy than the other party? Dunno just feels like she hasn't thought very deeply about this.

Depression is a luxury of human social bonds, modern safety, and excess. Without that, yes, you get too lazy or too low "value" and Darwin gets you. But that's pretty archaic thinking that doesn't really apply to modern society.

She's got the "One for all" part right but she fails to see the flip side of that coin, "All for one". As far as laziness, it reminds me of an old joke I heard..."My parents took me to a doctor because they thought I had mononucleosis. It turns out I was just lazy.".

She sounds like a hardcore fascist. I don't really have a rebuttal because I don't associate with fascists, if someone thinks that what is even the point in talking to them?