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When you’re presented with unacceptable conditions, backed up by force, often the choice is to fight those conditions, or become something to which those conditions are acceptable.

System 2 can be as corrupt as system 1.

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A suicide isn’t the tragedy, it’s the tip of an iceberg of tragedy. When you say the suicide is the tragedy all you’re doing is formally withdrawing your allegiance and sympathy from the person that killed themselves: It doesn’t matter that they were suffering, it doesn’t matter that they wanted to die, it doesn’t matter the position they were put in, or the conditioning and traps and bullshit that society used to disrupt their mind, what matters is they didn’t go along to get along, didn’t capitulate, didn’t die slowly and quietly: breached the peace.

I don’t often hear the feeling that they made a mistake. It’s how dare they, they didn’t have the right, or that they were just an idiot who refused to see how easy life is. And to be honest I get the impression most of the people saying it was a tragic mistake are posturing as wise, while the others are being more honest (having at least deluded themselves into these views, via just-worldism, before regurgitating them faithfully.)

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Revealed preferences are such a sick thing to refer to in suicidal people. There’s no such thing as revealed preferences. If a woman orgasms during a rape it doesn’t mean she wanted to get raped. A lot of people can’t help adapting to make horrific circumstances easier to bear. In fact, it’s a popular life lesson, uttered with grins rather than horror: “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Not to mention the sunk cost fallacy, and the temptation to have a way to say you knew it all along.

The idea that suicidal or depressed people “know” that things will magically get better in the future, but just irrationally don’t integrate this knowledge into their thinking is equally sick.

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Conditioning can be broken on an impulse. When your mind is tied in knots most directions are rabbit holes to nothing, but if your neurons and the wind align they can overturn things out of nowhere. But it can be just a chance at a path, a fleeting tunnel. Inspiration, insight, spite, “entitlement”, whatever it is, a flash of it might be followed somewhere better.

One of those insights is: if it doesn’t work out I can kill myself anyway. One of those adjustments is increased risk tolerance. One of them is caring less what other people think.

Paternalistic “you don’t get to kill yourself and anyone who does was irrational” nonsense is a fairly neat piece of insiduous poison that almost seems designed to prevent that kind of loosening up.

When you’re trying to fix a broken mind, you don’t have to hold anything in reserve to be able to gracefully handle it if it doesn’t work*. Your life and death are yours. You are a sovereign person. A lord of your own tiny skull sized kingdom, even if it’s been conditioned and tricked and trapped its whole existence into a state of horrific disrepair. It’s yours. You’re yours.

*nor, of course, is the opposite an obligation.

That’s what the get help crowd don’t want you to think. They want you to give up your judgement, and let the men in white coats guide you into the rigid embrace of the hivemind, which solves all things.

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(Good luck to you if you choose guidance, a little bit of standardisation, and what might be cynically called placebo, as if to better yourself through an anchor of thought is misguided. I’m hypercritical of it because it’s something whose elevation to dogma is harmful to me and people like me. But if its right for you, it’s right for you, and you’d be a fool to see it the way I do. I don’t live in your mind, and I haven’t been accounting for it, or most minds, here.)

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But aiming higher and ending in the gutter doesn’t mean you were wrong. Sometimes it’s right to go all in on 70%, sometimes 55%, sometimes 50%, sometimes less. To decide I’ll be strong and good and smart and me, or whatever it is you don’t want to compromise.

Or I’ll die trying.

And die trying.

It’s usually correct to overshoot your commitments. They won’t go unharrased, unattacked. Most of the time you won’t have to die trying, won’t even come close. You can bide your time, come back from another angle, try again, and again, and again. Or come across a smooth, decent compromise. Or a lot of things. But if you decide in advance that total defeat from your own approach is an unnaceptable risk (maybe I should buy IBM?), and let people convince you your life is not yours, it won’t help you to keep your aim or your head high.

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The difference is that slaves can suffer against their will, while dead people are just dead.

Alternative solution: You can sell yourself into slavery, but even as a slave, you have the right to end your own life at any time.

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You don’t own other people. Get the fuck over it.

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Though I’d set it at 4 months (since to even get evaluated for the euthanasia law in Oregon, you need to have a terminal diagnosis with an expected life span less than six months).

Or maybe an option for at 9 months *with hospice care and pain medication* as well as *anti-psychotic medication if required*.

By 9 months you’d be over any potential clinical depression AND will have a 2nd opinion from nature on your terminal illness.

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He had been entertaining thoughts of death for a long time. Thanks to a combination of physical problems that we’d mostly gotten under control (but were still slowly deteriorating), physical problems that we were still trying to figure out, and drug-resistant major depression, I believe he was anticipating a life of constant pain with very little pleasure (at least, he said as much). He was also a PhD student working on his thesis, acutely aware of how badly his condition was affecting his research output, but determined to finish.

So I believe there was a strong rational component to his decision (though I also think the stress of writing up was a less-rational component). Given certain aspects of the circumstances, I am also pretty certain that he had been making plans for a while (including setting the dominoes up so that it would be impossible for me to be the one to find him — I was overseas at the time). However, I am also pretty certain that there was a strong impulsive component to the precise timing of his suicide.

Maybe this is just a long-winded way of saying “people who are under sufficient stress lack full decision-making capacity, here’s an example,” in which case it’s a crying shame that a horrifying teenage experience in a corrupt state psychiatric system led him to refuse any psychiatric intervention other than drugs thereafter. But we already knew that.

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