got a sdr?death is sacred
blow my brains out and preserve myself in amber as opposed to becoming more insane and being remembered as some sort of tragedy
think about all my friends that chose to exit their bodies and its like damn, pretty good move all things considered
if youre trying to seriously / relatively calmly approach the question 'should i kill myself' i think it ends up becoming a sort of economic analysis eg 'how much pain do i get from remaining alive' vs 'how many nice things might happen' and decide what the value is to you
despite what people tend to think, killing yourself isnt exactly easy for a number of reasons so the outlook has to be particularly dire to push you into commitment (unless you are in some total fugue state where you are able to confront these sorts of massive commitments without the reservations a human brain will naturally project onto you)
despite what people tend to think, killing yourself isnt exactly easy for a number of reasons so the outlook has to be particularly dire to push you into commitment (unless you are in some total fugue state where you are able to confront these sorts of massive commitments without the reservations a human brain will naturally project onto you)
the problem is that except in certain obvious cases that guarantee eg a lifetime of chronic pain (or otherwise that you are extremely materially well-off) making these sort of 'economics of phenomenology' forecasts of your own life arent exactly rational, and additional if they could be there is in itself something depressing and alienating about that, so there's a sort of no-win situation here
i get delusions and when i start seriously contemplating my own death one of the recurring ones is that the afterlife somehow looks like "the third policeman" or some rory hayes comic or something which genuinely freaks me out
anyway folks im not like about to kill myself im just thinking about it again and how cool death is
i worked at google in the nyc office at port authority for a while and i fucking hated it so bad i would go up to the 14th floor and hang out on the balcony after work and stare out into soho or whatever and think about flinging myself off it. according to lostallhope and the original book by geo stone that everyone cites, 14 stories is definitely plenty to smash all life out of my body unless some freak accident happens. there was only this like waist-high stone thing because google wouldnt compromise aesthetics or anything and i guess this wasn't a very popular thing to do. i wondered if the fact that i did this would show up on my like quarterly report or something but i guess google didnt really care about that.
i thought it might be funny to fling myself off of that and traumatize a ton of nerds especially because there was a ton of internal drama at google at this time. but at some other point while i was there people came in on a monday morning to discover that some guy had just like fully died while at his desk, like not violently not a suicide just like face down on the keyboard dead. we got like an email about this but nothing else happened. even in high school if some kid in a different class died in a car accident then everyone could go talk to a counselor about death if they wanted to or just go home early and process it or something but it really freaked me out that it was just like... Oops. Sorry, there was a dead body. We removed it. All obstacles overcome. Construction begins Monday.
i questioned the wisdom of turning my final act on the planet into a troll, especially a troll on a place that had already dehumanized itself and faced to bloodshed to the extent that it seemed to barely acknowledge death except if it was a body that was occupying a desk and thus preventing it from being used to produce Value, so i guess i never did this.
i thought it might be funny to fling myself off of that and traumatize a ton of nerds especially because there was a ton of internal drama at google at this time. but at some other point while i was there people came in on a monday morning to discover that some guy had just like fully died while at his desk, like not violently not a suicide just like face down on the keyboard dead. we got like an email about this but nothing else happened. even in high school if some kid in a different class died in a car accident then everyone could go talk to a counselor about death if they wanted to or just go home early and process it or something but it really freaked me out that it was just like... Oops. Sorry, there was a dead body. We removed it. All obstacles overcome. Construction begins Monday.
i questioned the wisdom of turning my final act on the planet into a troll, especially a troll on a place that had already dehumanized itself and faced to bloodshed to the extent that it seemed to barely acknowledge death except if it was a body that was occupying a desk and thus preventing it from being used to produce Value, so i guess i never did this.
ew@rats your projecting your mental perspective on life. there are many people who are happy regardless of circumstance and enjoy life, so it's not physical reality that is preventing you from being happy but simply your mindset
@ew a lot of people arent very smart
i mean, more seriously, i remember trying to ask around early when i started using fedi if anyone actually felt specifically that they were "thankful they were alive", because i had heard that as a common refrain from people who survived suicide but i never really felt it myself. i think there was exactly one person who said that they were happy they were alive because they were excited to see what the future held for culture and technology. most other people seemed to be ambivalent or just hadn't thought about it
i mean, more seriously, i remember trying to ask around early when i started using fedi if anyone actually felt specifically that they were "thankful they were alive", because i had heard that as a common refrain from people who survived suicide but i never really felt it myself. i think there was exactly one person who said that they were happy they were alive because they were excited to see what the future held for culture and technology. most other people seemed to be ambivalent or just hadn't thought about it
@rats I am, but I'm a nihilist. I would rather experience than not be able to experience at all, because the latter means nothing. plus life is so chaotic and beautiful
@ew i am also a nihilist but dont think you can really project that as a universal onto people who want to die. beauty is subjective. chaos is admittedly cool and the world is strange but if everything is constant agony it seems fine to catch the bus
@ew aside from these sorts of unconvincing rational arguments it tends to fall back to 'you shouldnt die because i like having you around' because someones purpose in life is to like provide entertainment to others, or something
@rats that's more negative projection, providing value to others isn't such a shallow thing you make it out to be. you probably judge others in the same manner you just aren't aware of it
@ew i'm even aware of it i just wouldn't try and shame someone into staying alive to entertain me
@rats I probably wouldn't either but that's because I'm more selfish. I don't keep people around who aren't posiive influences on my life, or at the very least aren't vampires who won't suck my happiness out to cure their depression
izzy@rats yeah i had an experience that fits the "some fugue state" description above and since then my answer to the question of whether i *should* kill myself is a definite yes, but i'm unlikely to actually do that for a while assuming the very recent improvement in my condition continues. most of my overriding intent to continue living is out of obligation to others and my work, overwrought economic utility arguments about whether i get more pleasure than pain out of living or whatever seem ill-founded since i had that experience, and i don't know if i could describe why in a compelling way but the core of it is that being utterly at peace and free of all of the intrinsic desire of being makes you realize that the pleasure is not a thing-in-itself so much as an absence of that desire. the state to be desired (contradictory, i suppose) is unbeing. none of this is really novel, it's just that internalizing it feels really different from reading it in some philosophical treatise in like an intellectualized and critical way, because none of this is axiomatic enough that you can't form an argument against any arbitrary position to cope with it.
i think ultimately my understanding that life is a poor decision, an inherently losing game by the only inherent metrics that can be constructed (like, on an ontological level, it's inherently *something*, which is worse than the peace of unbeing, because all phenomena are characterized by their relationship to desire no matter how pleasing they might seem in the moment)... that understanding actually makes me more likely to continue living in some perverse way, because it contributes to my like personal mythology of martyrdom? not really sure. i think part of the reason that i have difficulty articulating this is that the conclusions i've reached are not based on the perceptual framework under which i operate on a day-to-day basis, so they continue to hold true but like a lot of other things that are a consequence of perceptual shifts for me they're really hard to externalize.
but yeah. probably a good move in practice, and definitely something i hold as exquisite... sort of the only inherent good in a way? but at the same time on a day-to-day basis i am as much a confused being of intertwined desires as anyone else and want those i care about to continue living even if, given full volition and awareness, i would absolutely not choose to do so.
i think ultimately my understanding that life is a poor decision, an inherently losing game by the only inherent metrics that can be constructed (like, on an ontological level, it's inherently *something*, which is worse than the peace of unbeing, because all phenomena are characterized by their relationship to desire no matter how pleasing they might seem in the moment)... that understanding actually makes me more likely to continue living in some perverse way, because it contributes to my like personal mythology of martyrdom? not really sure. i think part of the reason that i have difficulty articulating this is that the conclusions i've reached are not based on the perceptual framework under which i operate on a day-to-day basis, so they continue to hold true but like a lot of other things that are a consequence of perceptual shifts for me they're really hard to externalize.
but yeah. probably a good move in practice, and definitely something i hold as exquisite... sort of the only inherent good in a way? but at the same time on a day-to-day basis i am as much a confused being of intertwined desires as anyone else and want those i care about to continue living even if, given full volition and awareness, i would absolutely not choose to do so.
