Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2017-05-01T13:10:38Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com May 1. http://ranprieur.com/#033acc81b3ac28990e5e386a82586fc872dc7dc6 2017-05-01T13:10:38Z May 1. A reader correctly pointed out that my mental struggles are situational, not chronic. I was a happy little kid, and I'm confident that I'll regain my full capacity for pleasure, and adequate motivation, when I get some stuff sorted out. So don't worry if I go deeper into the subject of depression by writing about suicide.

Super-smart blogger Sarah Perry, who lately has been posting on Ribbonfarm, wrote a pro-suicide book called Every Cradle is a Grave. It's mostly philosophical arguments that don't work for me -- and yet I agree that suicide should be fully legal and fully socially accepted.

My argument is practical. If suicide is normalized, it will become a very powerful form of social protest. Right now I can think of only two contexts where suicide is an effective protest: when a teenager is being bullied, and when a Buddhist monk sets himself on fire. But when tens of thousands of Americans with shitty lives overdose on opioids, everyone blames the drugs. It's not acceptable for us to say, "Despite having all these doodads of progress, my life is psychologically so hopeless that my best option is to gamble with death."

Imagine if suicide were part of the toolkit for making a better world, like a more drastic form of going on strike. Citizens could tell the government, workers could tell employers, kids could tell parents and schools: meet our demands or we'll check out. Now, maybe meeting the demands would just move the pain somewhere else. But we would all quickly stop arguing about stupid symbolic measures of quality of life, and start looking hard at subjective happiness.

Yes, I'm being glib about death. I have a strong feeling that death is better than a bad life, and I think this world has gone all the way to the other extreme, making death so forbidden, and making life so painful for so many people, that it's almost like a big torture prison. Only in this bizarre local anomaly could we entertain the philosophy that nonexistence is generally better than existence.

My favorite argument against suicide is that certain moments are worth staying for. From a reddit thread last year:

A sunny spring day, and the rain clouds were moving in. I went past a daycare where a little girl was dancing around, away from all the kids, by herself. You just never know, I thought to myself. What if I had killed myself, all that long time ago.

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