I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. People commit suicide because they’re depressed or in a desperate situation. A person of excessive honor might commit suicide out of shame. Assisted suicide is praised as an end to suffering and a respect that a person has a right to how they choose to conduct their life, even if it’s their final choice.
Suicide is a major taboo today for a host of reasons. The idea that life is “sacred” goes through many cultural or time period variations. Spirited, yet woefully ignorant, religious types make their contradictory pleas for purgatory bound eggs and sperm, only obscuring our capacity and conversation about what constitutes life. Invariably, though not forcefully, suicide gets regarded as selfish because of the effect it has on everyone around the person who chose to do so. In fact, the fear of it is that we’d be persuaded to do the same thing.
Depending on how broad your perspective, you’re always killing yourself and others. It’s rarely phrased that way. Your attitude towards taxes takes food out of others’ mouths. Your guilty consumptive pleasures ensure death in overworked and exploited countries. Your “inevitable” choices are heating up the planet. You’ve killed your capacity for empathy and reason in your anointment of fascism. This point stressed by either your actual vote or your silence.
What should never be lost in any despotic description of what it means to be alive is the idea of a choice. Whether you commit “social suicide” and never bother to engage with the outside world or “spiritual suicide” and forsake tenants of humanity that might hold us together, you are choosing to do so. If you don’t know why things happen, it feels like a scary force of nature that can take you over. Standing at the edge of a cliff isn’t scary unless you don’t trust yourself not to jump. Well, I have shitty balance, but you get it.
I like to describe the layers of my being in thinking about which of them I’m killing. Any trait that you’ve taken pride in or has served some utility is on the chopping block. Can I kill my pride? In an important sense, that’s been dead for a really long time. Can I kill my sense of responsibility? That basically needed to be reduced because it was simply driving me mad. Can I kill time? This one’s particularly complicated. If you run out of time, in a sense, all these problems solve themselves. If you spend your time wanting your time to end, what motivates a decision to keep going? For the individual, it’s anyone’s guess, but I speculate fear and probably a few genuine emotional ties. For society? Whatever myth is marketed the loudest.
Why keep persisting in a capitalist mindset? You’re a commodity. You are your labor. Profit is what matters and the base ethic is “adulting” and sacrificing for a world that barley includes you. If you’re not selling, you’re wrong. If you’re not tired and jaded, here’s the violins for whatever you think constitutes your plight. When you make dramatic professions and analogies to suicide, tone it down there creeper, the world’s not all bad, check out these pictures from my recent excursion. If you enjoy your job or normalize your circumstances, I’m every ounce of whatever off-putting judgement you can employ.
And yet, the prospect of achieving the kind of lifestyle that takes care and fosters and promotes ownership remains appealing. Where to put the idea that you can work because you like it or like people or have a mind that runs nonstop? These don’t have to be dreams or privilege. They take active resistance to what feels normal. I talk about some horrible news in the world or give people 10 articles to read, they either ignore them, throw me a like, or feel that much more depressed and hopeless. I post a status about a movie I watched or show I went to? Conversation and questions for days!
If I’m so wrong for wanting leisure or work that matters (like so many people my age on their pills and shifting job landscape) why the ever-loving hell can’t I get anyone on any page that can change things for us? A line in a song I recently heard said, “If you’re not getting good answers start asking better questions.” So I take it to you random sporadic audience. What are the better questions?
We don’t save together. We don’t live together. We don’t hold weekly brainstorming sessions. We don’t read the same things. We don’t have a leader. Do we even really care? Is that the operative question? Have we always been mostly acquaintances more than anything else? Are we actually okay with different levels of suicidal behavior, letting nature take its course in a way, so just go to work and shut the fuck up? What’s it gonna take?
I think I’ve been thinking so much about suicide because that’s what people's’ attitudes and sentiments reduce to for me. There’s not engagement, thought, respect, or conversation. There’s getting dismissed at every turn. There’s empty praise and inane sentiment. Just shut up Nick. Just shut the fuck up. We get it. (Even though you don’t) You’re so much smarter and better. (Even when that’s not what I’m saying). You can’t fix things either. (Even when I’m actively trying or proposed a dozen things we could start for free). No one wants to hear how miserable their lives are. (Actually, no one has the balls to believe or responsibility to realize how good their lives could be).
You should be sadder than you are by getting exploited. You should want a change. You should provoke conflict. You shouldn’t mock me for describing my choice to pursue as many hours as my body can take to keep forwarding my goals as a form of suicide. It is. I’m killing the person who would rather read and think and play his guitar so I can make an impersonal monolith with no care or responsibility to me survive in spite and damming tradition. And on the verge of this pursuit and decision, I’ll get to be asked for a spare $2 while getting gas in the morning as my life is nothing but a source of irony, because where’s your mockery for people who beg?
You’re closer to them than me. You’re begging for someone to save you, advocate for you, take the bullet, be it from a gun or the details you don’t want to learn. You beg for pills. You beg for recognition as you bury what’s worthy of being seen. You beg for my silence so you can forget what it looks and sounds like to want for something deeper or speak for something meaningful. I’m actively trying to choose the life I want to see instead of stave-off reasons for suicide. How creepy. How little deserving of sympathy.
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