About Committing Suicide, 5 Points

1. A relatively surefire method
Meaning it has to kill you, not leave you to suffer, damaged and sentient in some hospital room, unable to finish what you started without help. They say that you need to jump off something really high to be certain, that that’s the closest to surefire you will ever get.

2. A method that is psychologically appealing
Meaning that you can see yourself following through on. For example: lots of people can’t stand the sight of blood so the thought of cutting wrists turns their stomachs.

 

3. Absolute certainty
Seeing that there is usually no coming back from this, this is not for those who are dithering or tremulous on any level. If you have to think about it you probably are not ready. There can be no questions anywhere in your mind.

4. No one you care about leaving behind
This has to be selfish and completely private by definition. If at any point anybody else other than you crosses your mind you probably are not ready. You have to be fixated and obsessed and completely single-minded about it.

5. No opportunity for last-minute regret
In the first point in the list I pointed out the fact that with jumping off high places there is the issue of a long fall to the ground. You get to think and feel regret after you have gone past the point of no return. It is but a few moments, but there is time for conscious, pointless remorse which is not how you want to spend your last few moments. With hanging or sleeping pills or anything that takes time there is this issue. You want to opt for the kind that takes you consciousness immediately after you have made the final step.

The Nature of Success

Successful people, or people who think they are successful, all believe that life is a meritocracy because this makes them superior to all of the average people.

Average people want to believe in this principle when they are faced with those who are less-than average, but any such ranking system would indicate that they are inferior to the successful. They can’t admit that so they just don’t think about any of it.

Life is not a meritocracy. It’s not a crap shoot either. Nothing is guaranteed. Lazy people get successful, hard-working people fail and wind up smoking crack in a corner behind the dumpster. Kind people suffer and die and assholes prosper, good guys get shot and bad guys get away with it. Everybody likes to pat themselves on the back and forget the advantages they had and pretend that they got success because they are just too cool to fail.

Everybody alive is more successful than the dead people. That’s how “success” really works. You have no control of anything. People who have money, who have fulfilling and profitable careers, just have not meant the right drunk driver, rapist with AIDS, workplace shooter, or period of suicidal depression due to a malfunctioning brain. If you think any of that is because you are so awesome, remember that the cancer, or one of the aforementioned things is out there, waiting for you. You won’t always be cool.   

The value of the lost cause

You get the security of knowing that you will be banging your head against a dead horse for the rest of your life, looking for the solution, the elusive result that will make you feel validated and satisfied. You get to spend your days thinking up ways to solve the unsolvable, thus giving you something to think about, which you would not otherwise have. It's the ultimate red herring, the plot of your life seems to be going somewhere, even though it really isn't. Just keep on thinking those positive thoughts, keep on dreaming the dream. You won't ever find your way, you will die still fumbling in the dark, but at least you can tell yourself that what you are fumbling for might be there. You get a project with which to kill time. Life is short, so spend it on a fruitless, pointless, pleasure-less task so as to make it seem shorter.

It's way more important to be able to tell yourself that some absurdly fantastic notion is worth chasing than it is to actually accomplish anything. Once something gets done then what else is there to do? You are stuck with this finished task that no longer has a place for you, the fixer. The completed building no longer needs the builder. Sure, you are validated having gotten done, but with each passing day your role of fixer/builder diminishes in memory, and you become more and more obsolete. The good contractor must cause as many problems as he solves so as to ensure a lengthy period of work. Here’s to the lost cause!

5 Different Ways of Escaping Real Life

Everybody tries to escape life, remember the Cormac McCarthy quote. People have different ways of doing it, and to some extent the means of escape is a sign of personality assets and defects. What does your escape mechanism say about you?

Romance fiction
This is an escape for those frustrated, for whom real life relationships are never satisfactory because the person they are with does not make them happy. These are the women who go into relationships expecting that some guy is going to, or should, make everything in their lives perfect and protect them from ever feeling unhappy about anything ever again.

Insulting commercials
Why the fuck do you have an animated lizard advertising insurance? Are toddler’s insuring their pacifiers now? Nobody questions it, either so the whole world must think this kind of thing appropriate. The reason they do it is because a fantasy animated creature automatically shuts down the grown-up part of the brain and switches on the infantile picture-book entertainment part so that you watch and accept instead of thinking about, real-life adult matters like money and property. The idea is to make you into a kid again so they can take advantage.

Mexican Immigrants
Yes, those undocumented workers, so loathed and despised by the right wing in American politics, they serve as an escape for many Americans. They are here because of Americans who  think they are too good to pick lettuce, and clean their own homes. Everybody sees themselves as belonging to the upper middleclass, or are longing for it so badly that the idea of doing menial work is unpalatable to them.

Science Fiction, for the most part
The genre, like most genres of everything, is mostly shit, built on stories that have nothing to do with science, written for people who know nothing about science, and with no themes that apply to real life. It serves only as an escape for people who are too ignorant to know what bad writing is. Speculative fiction is written usually by people who know very little about the real world and who can relate only to their own daydreams. It’s the attempt to circumvent your ignorance of the world around by making up your own worlds.

Marriage, how you see it
Your fairy-tale happily ever after lie. Of course, nobody is going to admit to being naive to the point where they actually believe that everything will turn out perfectly now, but they do. Deep down they think that marriage will change their lives for the better, which it doesn’t because can’t, and when they find this out they switch their expectations to having kids. After 3 or 4 kids they still aren’t happy so then it’s onto the divorce and the second marriage and so on and so forth on in perpetuity.