Tag: suicide
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering_risks[🡕] Continue reading
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
Why I don’t kill myself: an essay about beliefs
r/Pessimism, u/finitemode Continue reading
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
Against the idea that suicide is not worth it, like some important authors say instead
In reality, we don’t kill ourselves because the rationalized suicide is basically impossible for everyone… Read the full page
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pessimism/comments/u8t6dy/there_are_no_personal_victories_or_bittersweet/[🡕] Continue reading
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
As if through the mist Fading slow From this moment From this life
Of no fulfillment Of no discovery
Only the passing Only the flow…
Leaving from all That once had a meaning
To reach deep For the inner desolation
To awaken the emptiness That was always there Here, in the stillness A yearning For an ending
Shape of Despair – The Inner Desolation
These are the kind of people who live on the edge of life, so to speak, who are thrown into uncharted waters by their melancholy, and somehow manage to find the surface right before they are lost to the high tides. Anyone who has gone through debilitating bouts of depression knows what the feeling is like: you stand at the cliff of a mountain and gaze right into the abyss, whose gravitas is irresistible. During those times, it really helps to have something; anything at all to grab onto – your job, your spouse, a family member, a promise made to someone, even a pet. As the years pass, however, you start to lose those things, everything feels old, repetitive, and it is not the case for melancholics to be friendly or even easy to be around to keep relationships. This results in the loss of personal meaning, and the fundamental truth of life hits the hardest when personal meaning is non-existent, for there is no cosmic one. The abyss pulls you in; you wade into the cold, uncharted waters, lost in its deep oblivion. This, to me, is suicide par excellence, and only a very contemplative few get to carry it out.
Selim Güre – The Occult of the Unborn
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a “normie”), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if you’re anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that it’s mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of one’s personality – and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
– […] I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… or the happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
– What does that mean?
– You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Annihilation (2018)
Horace and Pete – How do you find love?
A sad girl after a bad online date, another girl, a guy, Leon, and an old man at the bar. Continue reading
The true, only problem, is not having the aptitude for suicide.
Someone on the internet, around 2016
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
– I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.
Rust in “True Detective”
– So, tell me. Why do you want to kill yourself so badly? Mummy and daddy, they didn’t love you enough?
– No, it had nothing to do with anything like that.
– It has everything to do with “anything like that”.
The Suicide Theory
But you’d only take a life That was already over to save another
Electric Youth – The Best Thing
All right, look, man, I’m cashing in. I’m done. I’m 40 shit years old, I got nothing, I got nobody. And I don’t want anything, I don’t want anybody; and that’s the worst part: when the want goes. That’s… that’s bad. I mean, like, suffering is one thing, or “not having” is one thing… But when you just don’t care anymore?
You know, I’ve gone soft in the last three pussies I’ve been in. You get to a point where you go “Maybe it’s time to just put a period at the end of my… whatever this was.”
Louie, S02E09 – Eddie (Doug Stanhope)
And I? Who will lower me into the molten iron?
You’d be surprised by how many people aspire to be completely normal. We’re a race apart. You have to fight to the teeth for not end up being one of them. Read the full page
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
I used to feel… I used to sense what were Inside of me To feel waves of difference Waves which brought me to live I enjoyed this life in me Breathing and feeling Burning and suffocating Didn’t curse the hour Which gave birth to me Didn’t curse another life When bearing death inside
Now all things I do bear Are all gone and free This, myself… Now fleeing around death Cursing the hour And another life… Which whom I used to care Now… Watching myself My own life Fading to afar… Listening these voices And trying to tell them That I will soon be gone
Shape of Despair – Curse Life
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Pirandello proposed, among the alternative solutions to the problems of existence, murder, suicide, or madness; nowadays, in an age of frantic synergies, we must combine the different possibilities, so we must become completely mad, kill the highest possible number of individuals, and then finally commit suicide.
Carl William Brown (Bruno Mensi)
Waking Life – Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq – Platform
Your fears of death covered up by the words “Suicide is weak”
Abyssic Hate
The so-called ’psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ’hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t!” and “Hang on!”, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person
Dear world… I have confusion around me in every direction from my brain. I’ve tried and tried to make it here in this fucking world… but I think it was a mistake that I was ever born. I do not feel guilty about taking my own life. I’ve tried your ways. I’ve had a job since I was thirteen years old. Making a living was never a real problem for me. The problem was all I see is misery and darkness. Die, die, die. I’ll put a gun to my fucking head right now.
Gummo
Peoples got to work for a livin’. I believe in a blue-collar race. I think suicide’s the only way out[🡕] – out of life. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but I didn’t. They say it’s my depression, but what the fuck, man? I don’t fuckin’ know anymore. Which way should I fuckin’ turn, man?
Gummo
Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.
Libero (Massimo Ceccherini) inside the casket, in The Cyclone
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
The Annunciation – András Jeles
We exist, and yet we do not exist. Read the full page
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
I know what you must be saying to yourselves. If that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh, no. Not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment. For I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you, when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself:
Is that all there is, is that all there is If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing Let’s break out the booze and have a ball If that’s all there is
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – Is That All There Is?
The Fire Within (Le feu follet / Fuoco fatuo) – Louis Malle
– You still have feelings of anxiety? Continue reading
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
Do normies suffer?
In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply don’t understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor’s woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat—these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don’t understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? If that is the case, their sufferings should be easy to bear: they are the common lot of human beings and perhaps the best one can hope for. I don’t know… If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose. What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Money? Hardly—it couldn’t only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but I’ve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances… No, I don’t even know that… The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.
No Longer Human / A Shameful Life – Osamu Dazai
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, Journey to the End of the Night
The World as Will and Representation
[…]But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives (ed. cause-effect chain). But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the Esse, not in the Operari[…]
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, as found in “generic_gnostic_01_shard” in the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” (2020)