KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_269
R: “I am afraid that, if I attempt to commit suicide, the thought police who monitor my thoughts at all times will detain me, incarcerate me at a mental hospital, and force me to pay a huge hospital fee for my stay at the mental hospital.”
S: “Why would you attempt to end your own life instead of extend your lifespan for as long as you can?”
R: “I would want to commit suicide in order to escape being in more agony than I can stand and agony whose source I cannot seem to eradicate.”
S: “What is the most probable source of such agony?”
R: “I think the source of my most profound agony would be some kind of crippling accident or some kind of imprisonment (and both of those conditions are functionally the same to me because both seem to prevent me from doing the things which make my life feel worthwhile). In a severely disabled state it might be impossible for me to commit suicide. I would only seriously want to end my life if I thought that there would be no end to my imprisonment or disabilty (if those things were what I deem to be severely depriving me of autonomy and creative/intellectual freedom).”
S: “Are you suicidal now?”
R: “No. I am not suicidal now and I have never in the past been suicidal. I have thought about death a lot and the topic of suicide because I feel that I am trapped in the midst of an ongoing war waged by people who seem to seriously want me to suffer as a result of being prevented from doing the things which make my life feel worthwhile. In other words, I am fighting night and day to maintain my motivation to keep living rather than to commit suicide (and I am trying to avoid commiting homicide, genocide, vandalism, slander, and theft). What helps me to keep surviving rather than to give into fatalistic and pessimistic thoughts is to pretend that my reality is not as hellish as I describe and that, instead, I am simply delusional and just imagining my situation is worse than it actually is. (In truth I believe my paranoia is justified and that it is protecting me from devolving into madness, but in order to avoid getting persecuted, I feel obliged to pretend that I simply suffer from some kind of mild mental illness which makes me more anxious and obsessed with ‘difficult’ subject matter than most people seem to be).”
S: “If you cannot do the things which make your life feel worthwhile, are you willing to keep on living with minimal complaint anyway in order to avoid upsetting people?”
R: “That seems to be what I have no choice but to do because it seems that suicide is actually illegal where I live.”
S: “Do you think that suicide should be illegal?”
R: “No. I think any person at any time and for any reason should be allowed to end its own life by any means except for cases in which other people’s safety is endandered. I believe that suicide should be done away from other people if possible. Suicide seems like an efficient ‘solution’ to the problem of there being too many humans in too little space and not being able to live in harmony nor in a manner which permits every person to have a decent enough standard of living. If society becomes a cesspool of starvation, violence, and illiteracy, I would probably opt to kill myself by jumping from a tall cliff than by allowing myself to get tortured by those hellish societal and/or environmental conditions.”
S: “You and I seem to have different approaches to how each of us would handle living in such an apocalyptic situation. Unlike you, I would do everything in my power to stay alive for as long as possible; even if I end up getting tortured by those hellish societal and/or environmental conditions because, regardless of how good or bad I think my present moment situation is and future experiences are likely to be, I believe that there always exists the chance for my trajectory to improve such that my future self would be grateful for having survived that long rather than having chosen suicide as an exit from what seemed like a terminally bad situation.”
R: “I do not seem to be as brave as you are. An essential component of what makes my life feel worthwhile to me is for me to experience what I think is an adequate degree of comfort at all times in which I am alive.”
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