swatt (04/12/83)
It's interesting to read this newsgroup after an absence of a week or
so; you can try to get an overall "feel" for the newsgroup without
feeling impelled to answer any individual submission.
Suicide is an emotional hot-button for our society today (I suspect it
always is, but I've only lived in today's society and haven't read
anything on history of thoughts on suicide). "What is the meaning of
life?" is a question which we all spend our entire lives trying to
answer. It is impossible to ignore when confronted with it.
Now when someone commits suicide, they have asserted an answer to that
question: "there is none". The rest of us either have to agree with
the suicide, and kill ourselves as well, or we have to dispute the act,
which requires that we provide a different answer.
Well, what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is our
purpose and destiny?
"Well, er, ... I ummm, well I get by, sort of ..."
You see? The act of suicide forces each of us to try to come up with a
reason for living, which makes uncomfortable; we would rather ignore
the issue, and continue to "get by".
A person confiding an intent to suicide is even more unkind; you have
only the choices of doing nothing and allowing that person to die, or
trying based on your own life to prove that life IS worth living.
Well? can you justify your life?
Now back to net.suicide. This newsgroup is an excellent microcosm of
the larger dilemma: What do you do when someone wants to talk about
the meaning of life, and what makes it worthwhile? You can:
o Fill the newsgroup with black humor, or discussions about
"ways and means". Hide behind academic dilletantism.
o Treat the newsgroup as a vehicle for satire; make fun of
it. Deny the question.
o Start insulting people, and get them to insult you back.
"Ribbing", or "roasting" is a standard American way of
keeping your distance from others. They are supposed to
take it in "good spirit" and reply in kind. No one will
talk about what they really feel.
o Shift to a meta-discussion about the nature of submissions
to net.suicide, and why the newsgroup was founded. Bury
the real questions in procedural disputes.
o Unsubscribe. You can even be high-minded about it, telling
yourself the submissions are of such "low quality".
Well, I know these questions will not go away. If you don't try to
answer them, your life won't have any kind of foundation to support you
when circumstances get tough. And unless you're extremely lucky,
sooner or later circumstances will get tough.
I think it's very much too bad this newsgroup has been so dominated by
people who will not address the questions suicide purports to answer.
Perhaps the electronic medium is just too impersonal to allow people to
express (expose?) themselves this way. Or perhaps it's just that so
many people have lost faith in themselves because the world they live
in seems so complex and unreasonable.
I know I have a strong inhibition against sharing experiences from my
life, feeling it's "none of their business". However, having thrown
down the gauntlet, I feel obligated to be the first one to pick it up.
I have experienced both times of severe (it seemed later) depression
and total joy. I can't remember much about the last period of
depression I had, as nothing in particular marked the beginning, and
nothing in particular marked the end, but I can remember the last time
I abandoned myself to joy.
I was in a record store in Los Angeles with a few hours to browse
around before meeting a friend. I went off to the section on 14th
century music expecting to find maybe one or two slections and found
instead dozens. Everywhere I went to look for particularaly favored
music I found large stocks of stuff I had not heard before. The
thought struck me: I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but
listening to good music. I can remember being distressed once upon
a time when I first realized I would never read all the books that were
written; it was at that age when you first begin to realize how finite
you are in the universe.
On this occasion however, I was seized with joy at the thought. It
meant that I NEVER needed to listen to bad or mediocre music; there was
enough good stuff around to full every remaining moment of my life.
And the same was true of books, and every other form of human
endeavor. All of a sudden, my own finiteness was WONDERFUL. The
process of experiencing new things was more important than the
accomplishment of having experienced them.
I wish I could convey moments like that to people who doubt life is
worth living, but such moments only have meaning to those who have
lived them. It's that aspect of depression and suicide that is so hard
for the rest of us to accept; that you can't transfer your own
convictions to those who lack them.
I have talked to several severely depressed and suicidal people, and I
confess I simply fail to understand them. I often get the impression
they live in a logical world in which inferences "obvious" to the rest
of us are wild speculations in which they can have no faith. It feels
like we just talk past each other; as if we're talking different
languages that are superficially alike.
Well, I'll leave you with a thought I once had:
If medicine, or psychiatry could somehow restore faith in life
to those who lacked it, then that same technology could take
it away from those who had it.
When I thought that, the relative impotence of science ceased to be
a worry, and became pure relief.
- Alan S. Watttim (04/13/83)
The only possible motive for suicide is not, as was suggested, that one feels that life is purposeless. That is abstract. It is possible to feel that only your own life at this and all future points is purposeless; in fact, I suggest this is a more common cause. This feeling would not neccessarily be marked by depression: one could feel that one had lived for a purpose which had been fulfilled, and be content with death afterwards. This may well be what happened with Koestler: anyone got more data? Tim Maroney decvax!duke!unc!tim PS. We have only recently started getting net.suicide. What in God's name did Bimmler say to start all that? Please reply by mail in a relatively objective fashion, thanks...