Thoughts on suicide

When you ask yourself, why should I keep living? Why not just die?

Remember, death will catch you eventually. It is a guaranteed outcome. So why rush it?

Maybe death is emptiness, or becoming a part of the biological cycle of life. Carbon and water, in the atmosphere, ground and new living things.

Turn the question around. Why not live?

Perhaps you don’t need a reason to live. Perhaps it’s just enough to postpone the emptiness of death for a bit longer.

With death as an alternative, the choices in life can suddenly feel insignificant. What does it matter if I spend my life watching tv, if the alternative is death? What does it matter if I don’t experience love in life, when I don’t believe I can experience it in death?

This insignificance can be liberating. Freeing me from the pressures of being alive.

If things get too much, there are less dramatic ways of running away than death. Quit your job, break up, leave your family. If you choose death, you would leave all those things anyways. So why not do it? Death is rarely the only way out.

So I hang in there, trying to stay curious about what life still has to offer. Because death will come eventually, that’s for sure.