ben wrote:since none of us has sucessfully committed suicide it seems to make it hard to comment on it. it's like saying that pot should be illegal when you've never smoked pot.

Oh Christ, no one has ever tried to ethnic-cleanse me away, and I can have an opinion on it.

I do not play the saxophone, but I can discuss with you why Matana Roberts is such a great alto sax player.

Maybe some people on here have been suicidal from time to time. Most everyone has contemplated it at some point - even if just in the abstract.

I think death is one thing that everyone has in common. Of course we can talk about it.

suicide is perfectly valid.

i'm not saying i'd ever actively encourage anyone to do it, but this silly notion that life is always, unconditionally, worth living -- under any circumstances -- is such fucking bullshit.

we don't live in a world of possibilities -- we live in a world of limitations, and it's only getting worse. sometimes it becomes too much of a burden to simply behold how out of tune everything is, how empty daily life can be, how insincere and opportunistic people generally are toward one another, how our present society encourages stupidity and pettiness, how our bodies are constantly decaying, how the environment is going to shit, how awful things happen to wonderful people, how commerce has a stranglehold on art, how inherently biggoted everyone is, how governments thrive on deceiving and slighting the very people they claim to represent, how impossible it is to find someone you're compatible with both emotionally/intellectually and sexually, how everyone is essentially too absorbed in their own life to reach out when you need it and yet you can't get rid of them when you'd like to be left to your devices, how... well... okay... you get where i'm going here.

basically, if i didn't enjoy the simple things, like the color of autumn leaves or the random encounters with nice people, i'd have offed myself long ago. i'm not planning on killing myself at all. i'm too interested in seeing where all of this leads within the course of my existence. all i'm say is that i don't think it's unreasonable for someone to take everything into account and, at the end of the day, say "fuck it!" and be done with it. as jean renoir said, every man has his reasons.

have a nice day. i know i will.

giallobelly wrote: Life sucks but there's always something to open your eyes up to awesomeness, you just need to look. Look at a pug dog. Why not live the same world?

bumble wrote:This is silly.

Someone who is terminally ill making a lucid, informed decision could not be more different from someone with suicidal depression.

You can not lump those two events together in C/NC. Waffle factors don't even approach making up for the conflation.

Truth.

People are free to do what they will with their own body and life. Life is absurd anyway. We're just a bunch of atoms that fortunately or not ended up as a human instead of a table, so in the greater scheme of things suicide is rather meaningless, as is life. If you aren't genuinely enjoying your time alive I fail to see why it is anyone elses business at all? Of course there are family and loved ones to take into account, but at the end of day they'll all be dead one day as well so killing yourself really wont have mattered.

If you not enjoying it, why prolong it?

Gramsci wrote:If you not enjoying it, why prolong it?

b/c as you would agree, life is all we have. each of us, and collectively.

and unless you're in a state that has absolutely no hope of improving, unless you have no chance at a bearable future, you don't give yourself away like that. you can't throw away your life unless it is certain to be unbearable to the end anyway. it's a tremendous waste and a terrible mistake.

you don't get to find out what happens after you check out.


that idea alone has stopped me before (not from the act, but at least from entertaining it).

kerble wrote:that idea alone has stopped me before (not from the act, but at least from entertaining it).

Wait, you've tried it without even entertaining the notion first? What did you do, wake up one morning and find yourself on a window ledge? What had you been ingesting?

You are a complicated man, Faiz. No one understands you but your woman.

Gramsci wrote:If you not enjoying it, why prolong it?

Regarding suicidal depression: because everything changes. Bad times will change - maybe not into great times, but nothing lasts.

Unfortunately, this applies to good times, too.

tmidgett wrote:

Gramsci wrote:If you not enjoying it, why prolong it?

b/c as you would agree, life is all we have. each of us, and collectively.

and unless you're in a state that has absolutely no hope of improving, unless you have no chance at a bearable future, you don't give yourself away like that. you can't throw away your life unless it is certain to be unbearable to the end anyway. it's a tremendous waste and a terrible mistake.

Fair point, but one day you'll be dead anyway and it will have made not made a stick of difference whether you kill yourself now or live to 104, it's all the same. Whether you are happy or in a slump, you could kill yourself right now and it would make no difference, why should it? Does it make any difference to a horse when it dies? Thinking otherwise is standard human egoism.

Gramsci wrote:standard human egoism.

Sign me up.