Existential Musings

[Fragment]

As I check off more and more items on my bucket list and the things I feel I "need" to do get fewer, I reflect on the things that I already accomplished in my job, before things went to hell. Things I can be proud of- or at least could've at the time.

From that, the following thought just struck me.

If you feel like you’ve had the best day in your life and everything is going well- that’s the time to kill yourself.

Usually we wait until we’re depressed and things have gone to shit before getting suicidal. But how dumb is that?

Better to go out feeling great, before the inevitable fall happens.

I wish I would’ve killed myself on that night, when I felt like I had everything I ever dreamed of and the world was perfect.

Thinking it could continue like that was just delusional folly. I didn’t imagine I’d crash out this much, but the crash was still inevitable.

Nothing gold can stay. Yet, just like with the stock market we hold on past the peak and lose our chance to cash out on a high.

[Jim Burton]

So you managed to do everything you wanted to. Given suicide can be interpreted as a confession, isn't being seen to preserve or at least value your own life an investment in your priorities, even if it is painful?

Hypothetically, the best strategy would be to manufacture some kind of situation where you are martyred, with zero risk that you might be declared insane, imprisoned for life, or forced into suicide.

[Fragment]

If I'm going to die at the end of it, anyway, I don't want to have to serve a mind-numbing 2 year sentence in a Japanese prison where the "highlight" of achievement might be getting a welding license. If I'm lucky. Otherwise I'll be assembling pens. Or cardboard boxes.

But not yet.

[PorcelainLark]

Come on man, you know suicidality is contagious. For the rest of us trying to keep going, it makes it so much harder.

[HumanBeing]

As I check off more and more items on my bucket list and the things I feel I "need" to do get fewer, I reflect on the things that I already accomplished in my job, before things went to hell. Things I can be proud of- or at least could've at the time.

From that, the following thought just struck me.

If you feel like you’ve had the best day in your life and everything is going well- that’s the time to kill yourself.

Usually we wait until we’re depressed and things have gone to shit before getting suicidal. But how dumb is that?

Better to go out feeling great, before the inevitable fall happens.

I wish I would’ve killed myself on that night, when I felt like I had everything I ever dreamed of and the world was perfect.

Thinking it could continue like that was just delusional folly. I didn’t imagine I’d crash out this much, but the crash was still inevitable.

Nothing gold can stay. Yet, just like with the stock market we hold on past the peak and lose our chance to cash out on a high.

I hope this post is just a vent of yours, I know trying to be an activist can be very stressful but that's no excuse to just give up, You said it yourself in another post "Wouldn’t you rather go down fighting? , Suicide is their victory."

If you need someone to talk to we can talk via PM, I think you still have many good things to do for yourself and for our community.

[Fragment]

Come on man, you know suicidality is contagious. For the rest of us trying to keep going, it makes it so much harder.

My mum is coming to visit for my kid’s birthday. My next court date will be after that, so I get to see her before prison.

That’s over a month away. But it’s another check off the bucket list.

It’s quite a while away so my mood might change again. Or I might find some new project or something new to put on my bucket list.

I’m glad I’ve done all my interviews, though. Whatever happens, whether prison or whatever else, I hope the community keeps them alive. The variety of ground they cover, from the personal to the academic, makes them a series that I think provides something that we don’t have enough of. I also hope my voice doesn’t remain the only one.

[aeterna91]

I totally disagree with your reasoning. "If you feel like you’ve had the best day in your life and everything is going well- that’s the time to kill yourself." A very bad idea, I think. Because you can't be sure that in the future there won't be days more or less equally good; at best, maybe even better! But, if not, at least almost as good, definitely good enough to live through.

I think there are only truly extreme cases in which that reasoning makes sense. Perhaps if you're completely paralyzed or have a very painful, incurable illness... well, in cases like that, perhaps many people can be almost 100% certain that their future won't have days half as good as those they've already experienced and that everything will get worse.

I don't think you can be that certain, although your current mood may make you believe you are. But moods change, and a person's goals, objectives, and the things that bring them happiness can change throughout their life. It's possible that in 10 years, things that don't appeal to you now will bring you a happiness you can't yet imagine.

I haven't experienced the suffering you're experiencing now, so I don't want to lecture you on how to feel. All I can say is that it doesn't seem to me you have any guarantee that you won't be happy 10 years from now, so your reasoning for why you should have committed suicide seems flawed to me.

[Fragment]

I guess from an epistemological point of view, you can never know when the best time for a suicide is because you can never know what the future will hold.

However my point was more that "you're better to die at a high point when life is likely to get worse, than to die at a low point when life is likely to get better". Yet due to how our human psychology works, we generally only consider death when we are at the low point. Dying at the high point seems to be mathematically a better strategy.

I've seen something similar regarding choosing a house to buy, something that is not quite, but almost as high stakes. You'll never known which house is the "perfect" house that best satisfies your needs regarding size, location and cost. But logically you can find ways to decide that "now is the time to buy".

I overshot my mark in terms of having a "happy life". It's possible my life from here will have a moment where I'm happier than I was mid-2023, but probabilistically speaking, that's unlikely. So if I killed myself tomorrow, by waiting when my life was at its peak, I chose to subject myself to 18 months of suffering that was unnecessary. It probably also means that dying before prison is probably better than dying immediately after prison, unless I see prison as a net positive on my life.

It is possible that in the long term my life will somehow manage to improve. But if I reach 80 and my life has stayed shit all the way through, I'm really going to wish I'd cashed out earlier.

[PorcelainLark]

Would you advise the same thing to others who were saying the same thing as you? Like if I said I was sure my life is as good as it's going to get, and it's downhill from here, would you say I should die?

I was so severely suicidal I spent nearly an entire year where I couldn't be left on my own; it was there every hour of every day. Even now, I don't feel safe.

If you do die, it will completely tarnish your image in my eyes. I won't be able to empathize with you or think about anything you've done, for my own psychological well-being. Knowing that other people keep going despite everything keeps me sane.

If you continue down this route, I will have to stop coming to Mu and the b4um. I can't watch you do this, it's too triggering to me.

[Fragment]

This was meant philosophically as much as anything.