Suicide is Selfish?

I have seen in a number of places over the past week or two the claim that suicide is selfish, sometimes referred to as the ultimate selfish act. This is not a big public debate, but rather one of those random coincidences of several people saying a similar thing over a short while. This is something that really pisses me off, and I will explain why.

The reasoning for suicide being a selfish act is that it is something done for oneself, and it results in other people suffering. When someone commits suicide (a rather repugnant term for it as it suggests a crime) the person who kills them self does it to solve their own problem, but the result for other people is negative. Those who care about the person are saddened by their death. In these terms suicide is selfish, but then under those circumstances almost everything we do is selfish.

If you have money, if you don't give your money to someone else then by this definition of selfish, you are selfish. Someone else would be happy by getting money, you didn't give it to them, therefore you are selfish. Eating that pizza, having a house, driving a car, all selfish acts. By this definition of something being selfish, that you do something for yourself rather than others, almost everything that anyone does is selfish. In order to not be considered a selfish person under these circumstances one would need to be a saint of the highest order.

I don't think this is what people mean when they make the statement that suicide is selfish. I think what they mean is that suicide is particularly selfish something that rises above the basic definition. The meaning is that suicide is egregiously selfish, that the harm to others is very large, and the benefit gained is relatively small. This, I believe, comes from the school of thought that thinks suicide is "The easy way out." This school of thought is that those who commit suicide generally don't have insurmountable problems, their situation really isn't intolerable, or even extremely unpleasant, and that suicide is an easy thing to do. These are appallingly wrong.

When someone is depressed enough to commit suicide their situation is horrendous. Suicidal people don't just decide to do it in one day. It usually takes months or years of thinking about it, of worrying on the problem, of living in literal misery. I have experienced major depression, and I'll take someone breaking my leg with a baseball bat to the experience every single time. To be depressed means that nothing provides pleasure. Food has little or no taste, you have no sense of humor, nothing is funny, nothing is beautiful, nobody really cares for you. You feel entirely isolated, alone, incompetent, ugly, useless. If you have not experienced it then all I can say is that it is worse than you imagine. Whatever you are imagining of what it is like, it is worse than that. It isn't the situation that you are in. It isn't finances, or the loss of a loved one, or unemployment, or any other life situation. It is that and the complete inability to be happy, and the certainty that you will never experience happiness ever again in your life.

As for suicide being the easy way out, this is nonsense. The human body comes equipped with a desperation to remain alive. The basic instincts are entirely built around the survival and reproduction of individuals. That shot of adrenaline, the panting, desperate fear that happens when you just avoid a car accident, or when you slip near a large fall is built into a person. Someone who wants to kill themself is not free from these instincts. The thought of dying is terrifying. Someone who points a gun at their own head feels the same fear that someone who is getting a gun pointed at their head feels. Someone about to jump off a bridge feels the exact same fear of heights that someone who has slipped and is hanging on for dear life feels. Could you break your own leg deliberately? How hard would that be for you to do? Standing there with a baseball bat, feeling the adrenaline pumping, imagining the pain, the sound of it, worrying about whether you'll do it right or whether you'll have to try twice.

Being depressed to the point of suicide is an appalling situation. It's as bad as chemotherapy, but without the hope that you might recover. One of the most egregious things about depression is the hopelessness. The hopelessness is so prevalent, so enormous, that a leading reason why very depressed people don't commit suicide is the belief that they'll screw it up, that they are so useless that they couldn't even do that right. Most suicides happen as people are getting better, because at that point they have the motivation and self-belief to do it.

Committing suicide is an act of extreme willpower, an act of enormous physical courage, in my eyes the same as a war hero risking gunfire to rescue a fallen comrade. The goals are different, he outcome different, but the act of will required is the same. It is not easy to commit suicide, is diabolically hard. It is the willful denial of all the dreams and hopes you ever had for your life. It is an act of physical courage. It is hard, really hard. In fact, it is so hard that the only reason I am alive is that it was too hard for me to do it. I know for an absolute fact that I am too much of a coward, too mentally weak to do it. I remember standing in a grocery store simply weeping in misery because I didn't have the strength to kill myself. I know for a fact that suicide is not the easy way out.

What the thought that suicide is selfish really comes down to is that those who hold the position think that themselves, or the relatives and friends around the person who kills themselves, are more important than the person who commits suicide. Their misery as a result of the suicide is more important than the misery of the person who was depressed. That their happiness is worth the other person suffering by living. It is a position that holds the person who commits suicide in contempt. It assumes that they know the position of the person who is depressed better than that person. It assumes that they can evaluate the situation better, that they have thought more about the consequences, that they love the person more than they are loved. This is all bullshit. Nobody knows more about the situation than the person who is depressed.

When people undergo chemotherapy, or get very sick, or lose someone they love, they are often very sad or miserable. Anyone with any empathy feels pain because of what they are going through. But we don't deride these people as selfish because their situation hurts us. We are sympathetic towards them, we wish their pain to end. We don't call someone crying in public because they are frightened of dying from the cancer they just contracted selfish, even though their misery and fear hurts us. Depression is a disease that nobody asks for either.

The opinion that suicide is selfish makes me very angry. It is deeply ignorant, a hold over from times when mental illness was contemptible. The belief shows contempt and a complete lack of sympathy for someone in a horrendous situation. But most of all, it is a deeply selfish position, a position that puts one's own sadness at the death of a loved one over and above the release from misery of the loved one. My feelings are more importnat than your feelings.


Who does this opinion effect? What is it for? It doesn't effect someone who has committed suicide, they are dead. The expression of this statement is for two groups of people, those thinking about suicide, and those who will be around someone in that situation. The results are that it adds to the guilt that a person thinking about suicide will feel, it adds to the loss of self-esteem, it confirms that the person is useless and awful. For those around someone with intense depression it relieves responsibility for helping them out, it relieves the guilt (I couldn't stop them from being selfish), it allows us to love the person a little less which helps the pain.

The statement, in my opinion, reaches the level of being evil. It hurts those in the most need of help, and if it helps anyone, it does so only by denigrating others and supporting the worst in people.

Update with Point?

The house has been sold! Whoopee for something being over, if not for no longer having that nice house in Portland with all the fond memories that went with it. Part of the house selling process was that today a piece of paper came with the amount of money we received as a result on it. While looking at it I had two reactions, first I checked to make sure the number was within the expected range, the second was to think, "It's just numbers."

Now, I know that it isn't actually just numbers, these numbers stand for a value. But that value is so arbitrary, so seemingly removed from fairness, or logic that it has no set value. At the same time it is a fraction of the value of a regular house in London, and the amount that ten average Bangladeshis earn for their entire lifetimes. What it means to me is that I get to live in my own house which has plumbing, electricity, heating and cooling and furniture, eat unbelievably amazing food, dress like a king, and still save money so that I become even richer.

What do I do with these riches, and my life in general? Not much. I take care of the house but not in a way that anyone would think justifies my existence. We live like college students. I have produced an excellent dog. I try to improve at music, but not enough to be great, because that's really hard. I have started a novel, and am writing it extremely slowly but hope to speed up at some point. I think about things a great deal. I wallow in decadence. From time-to-time I go abroad and see different places, which is a wondrous thing. But I don't do a lot.

But not doing a lot is fine. This is good enough for me, and my wife says that she is the happiest she has been. That's the key, good enough is exactly that, good enough. There are people who say that good enough isn't good enough. Those people are idiots. Life is about getting to a place that is good enough, and then noticing where you are.

Lingua.

Hot sun and humidity. Unlimited access to alcohol. A pet demon. A wandering mind. Music and swearing in the background, the sound of spreadsheets.
Blue eyes in wrinkles, laughter or squinting?
A physicist philosopher suggests there's a 20% chance we are in some sort of computer simulation. Would that make computer simulations reality?
There is nothing so magical as sunlight sparkling on water. Or perhaps giggling. I think any religion based on the holy giggle would get my attention. On the other hand, The Holy Giggle sounds deeply terrifying. Punctuationmatters. But spellin's for losers.
Do any of you ever feel the need to run amok with two sharp, somewhat persian looking knives? No, me either.
Did you know that The Beatles were the second best album selling band between the years 2000 and the present? I find that hopeful and encouraging, still after all these days all you need is love, rent, and nourishment.

Birdsong.

One of the things I've been meaning to mention about Houston is that all day long songbirds serenade you. I don't mean that in the morning there is a chorus of small birds screaming at each other. What I mean is that all day long, (and two nights ago, all night as well) virtuoso songbirds run through an entire repertoire of melodies individually or in concert. Sometimes, usually in the early morning or evening cicadas accompany these multi-varied pieces with a solid, rhythmic drone.
If it wasn't for the omnipresent mosquitos that have evolved the ability to disregard mosquito repellent I would spend most of my days in a deckchair, with golden sunlight filtered through green leaves, serenaded by these birds.

Determinism.

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.

From, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

I am a determinist, at least at the present I hold to the morally difficult, emotionally depressing, bummer of a philosophy of determinism. I think that every meaningful action in the macro-world (anything bigger than a couple of molecules) is determined, it must happen based on prior circumstances. This means that there is no choice about anything that you or anyone else has ever done in their lives throughout all of recorded history. Any action we take must be taken based on the environment. I think there are no random actions beyond the actions of the very, very tiny (and even then I'm not certain). Why do I think this?

I think this for two reasons. The Laws of Physics are universal and effect the very large and the very small and everything in between. These Laws are predictable, in that they occur in the same way every time. If x happens, y must result every time. When the electrical charge and chemical concentration in a synapse reach a certain point the synapse must fire. All thoughts, ideas and actions are electro-chemical events in the brain, and electro-chemical events happen because of the pre-existing conditions. At no point in this change is there an "I" that alters the event separate from the event. If, in a hypothetical world, we understood exactly how the brain works, and we had every single piece of informaton about the conditions of a brain, we could predict with absolute certainty what a person would decide in every situation. There is no actual free will.

A response to this position is often the solace in particle physics, in that the position and speed of very tiny particles can only be known statistically as probablilities. The location of an unimaginably small particle is a random event. This suggests to those wanting free will in the world (almost everybody, including myself) that this doubt is the area where free will comes into play. Somehow our will decides for the particle where it is. The experimental data that demonstrates that observation does actually make a decision for a particle on its location seems to back this up. When a conscious entity views a tiny, tiny particle it changes from having been a random distribution of possibilities to having a location. However, the macro-world, the world in which we live is made up of billions of these tiny particles. And all of these particles have statistical probabilities to them. With things that have very large numbers of actions with fixed probablities we can extremely accurately predict what will happen. If you roll a fair die a billion times you can very accurately predict what the outcome will be overall. One sixth of the time, to a very high degree of certainty, a six will be rolled. Any action in the macro-world is like rolling a fair die a billion times, we know what the result will be.

A further nail in the coffin of free will is that these mathematical equations in physics work just as well in either direction of time. In physics there is no reason to believe any more that causes produce results than results produce causes. If we believe that the past is fixed, that there was a history and nothing can be done to change it, in terms of physics the same can be said about the future. The future is as fixed as the past because it folows identical rules. Everything that happens in the Universe must happen.

What does this mean? In terms of our daily lives it means almost nothing because we never will have adequate data to accurately predict all actions of people. As such, an excellent approximation is the concept of free will. With limited information good estimations are made through application of the concept of free will. So that although we know that people have no choice in their actions, including ourselves, the best way to act is as if they have free will. Acting as if people have free will produces an environment in which people will behave in ways we wish, approximately.

However, it does put a complete end to the silly nonsense that any Creator would create the Universe, and give people free will, not knowing that everything in the Universe was decided by the very act of creation. A Creator that made the Universe decided every action that we will take. Complete proof that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and any other judgement-based religion is at the core completely false.

Birthday Musings.

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 39, 3x13, and it was a beautiful day. Pools of golden sunlight, green growing gently, water running laughingly. It lead me to think what heaven might be, and my answer is a single golden day relived over and over, with the past and future muddy distances. A day of love and light, laughter and music, slow and meandering. A day without anything extraordinary but the perfection of ordinary things. Fresh baked bread, a breeze over water, smiles and jokes.

39. Thirty nine. No real meaning, just a number. Older than Alexander the Great or Jesus, younger than Lao-Tsu or Julius Caesar. I have thought more often recently as a result of my increasing age of my memory of my father at the same age that I am presently, because I can for the first time remember him at an age I am. Not to judge or compare, but simply to think about it, to know him better.

While driving in my SUV, stroking my wild red beard, with a black wolf in the back, mexican accordion music playing, on an infinitely wide and sunny Texan boulevard, I wondered, "How did I get here?" It's a ridiculous place to have got to from the painfully shy english boy I was. There's nothing wrong with ridiculous.

I am reading a book recommended to me by my darling wife. A book of India, with stories within stories, attitudes and philosophies changing depending on the situation of the story. I find myself while reading some books, and usually the better ones, becoming immersed in the mood and language of the book. I take the pace of the story, the flavour of the places, the character of the hero with me into the rest of my world. It changes the way I speak, what I notice, the decisions I make. How about you?

Decide to be Happy?

I hate affirmations. I hate the cheesy, Stepford wife desperation to be cheerful nature of them. I hate that the point is to trick you into feeling differently about things. But most of all what I hate about affirmations is that they might work. I don't know what it is about me but I hate being tricked into something, and how horrible that I would do it to myself?

In a similar vein I have always disliked those who say that you can choose to be happy. For one thing I think people who say things like that don't know what depression is actually like. But the main thing about it is that I think there's something to the concept of choosing to be happy, in that your happiness depends on how you approach things and how you look at life. It really does matter whether you consciously look for things to be happy about, or whether you are on the hunt for confirmation for your misery.

Yesterday I decided to stop doing things that were frustrating and annoying, tried to find things that I could feel good about, and then made sure to notice that I was feeling good about them. In this effort I then noticed a bunch of what might seem happy accidents that cheered me up too. From being up and about I ran across a number of people, just people in the post office and stores, who smiled and were helpful. I came across nice people who smiled at them, and I smiled back, and two people's days were a little better. After a couple of hours I was deliberately smiling because it made me feel better. By the end of the day I was in a very pleasant mood which remains today.

Smiling is an interesting thing. Most people think that you smile because you are happy, but it's more complicated than that. Smiling and feeling happy are inextricably linked, when we are happy we smile, and smiling makes us happy. It's like pulling on a string, you pull on one end and the far end has to move with it. It sounds ridiculous, but just try smiling for thirty seconds, if you don't feel better I'll be shocked. Frowning has the reverse effect, as does slumping your shoulders and letting your mouth be slack.

It annoys me to no end, but I think that it really does help a person who feels down to buck themselves up, look on the bright side and slap a smile on their face. But if you try telling me to do that when I'm grumpy I will bite your head off all the way to your knees.