If you have been personally touched by suicide, please don’t be offended, I do not entirely agree with the sentiment of this essay. The prompt here was “Write about suicide as an act of desperation.”. We had just listened to a lecture about how most student’s essays end up being the same for the same prompt; any unique or different essay will score better. Additionally, you can’t lead me that much in the prompt. Sure I agree that suicide is a bad thing, but we can’t treat that as a given.
~ Luke Shumaker
You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake of specialness. You are made of the same decaying, organic matter as everything else. Accept that you are going to die and let go. It is the only way to find freedom. The only way to live life to the fullest is to accept, and embrace, that life does not matter. Suicide can be an act of optimism.
You are going to die. Everyone you have ever loved or cared for is going to die. Everyone you have ever met is going to die. If you’re having trouble wrapping your mind around this, perhaps a religious interpretation may help; God’s ultimate plan for you: to die. Everything you create will fall apart and be forgotten. Nothing you will ever do will matter. Losing all hope; this is nihilism.
To commit suicide is therefore to accept our place in the universe, and embrace our fate. To embrace “God’s will” for us, to fulfill our divine mission, surely is a noble act, a positive act of optimism. We don’t have to do anything; we fulfill our mission by being born, living for a while, then dying.
When we accept this, accept our mortality, and the futility of life, a massive burden is lifted. When we accept that our mission in life is to die, we no longer must worry about fulfilling it; we will. We no longer have an obligation to be significant, to make a difference. We become free. Losing all hope, and finding freedom; this is existentialism.
Plato wrote that Socrates had taught of “reluctant leadership.” That the “enlightened” must return from their “enhanced world,” to lead those who had not attained enlightenment; they were obligated to, though they would not want to. He believed that philosophers should govern society. Perhaps you remember Plato’s allegory of the Cave? In it, the individual who found his way outside of the cave, and saw the true world had to return to the cave to watch over those who did not realize that there was a world beyond the cave. I can’t be the only one who found this horribly depressing. You attain enlightenment, and are rewarded by being forced to return and govern idiots who think you a fool for believing in a world beyond the cave. I don’t want to hack an awesome piece of software, then spend my days running its mailing list.
To find freedom, we must give up all that matters to us; for it does not matter. We must come to what are possibly the most painful realizations a person can have. We must give up the life we know, the life that matters. We must accept that we are going to die, and stop caring. Then we can enjoy what we have, the way we want to. The phrase “live and let live” is a good start, but how about “live and let be?” Why must the other person in the phrase live? The phrase embodies allowing others to make their own choices, regardless of what you think, so shouldn’t they get the choice to not live a life? In order for us to find our freedom, and them to find their freedom, we must accept that life does not matter. We don’t all have to kill ourselves, but accept that life does not matter.