A Meditation on Suicide: Why Live When There is No Reason To?
Again and again, we are led to ask the same big question: “what is stopping us from ending our life?”
To be or not to be that is the question — William Shakespeare
The 1998 short story, The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace is the single most accurate and bone-chilling account of the life of a clinically depressed person.
David wrote the story as if he knew every murky detail of walking down a path with no hope of ever finding light at the end of the tunnel.
His words would yield even more power when you realize that he took his own life at the age of 46 after hanging himself from the rafters in his home. But sadly, he is not the first one to have succumbed to the squares of his dismal thoughts that he poured over his writing.
Virginia Woolf’s letters to her husband before she took her own life by the river Ouse in 1941 are just as paralyzing, considering that she wrote this in her last letter:
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time…
Chester Bennington, the well-known singer who gave the world, In The End whose chilling lyrics, “I tried so hard but got so far but in the end, it does not even matter” spoke volumes about the deep existential emptiness and meaninglessness that plagued our times. Too bad that he too could not hold any longer and lost his life to his own hands in 2017.
And who can forget Sylvia Path? Her book, The Bell Jar was speckled with her own what’s-the-point-of-all-this type quibbles which she tried to resolve throughout her writing life.
And her tragic fate is no mystery. We know that all these people were battling severe mental illnesses. The likes of depression and bi-polar and anxiety disorder which are the single most cited cause of most suicides as of last year. The thing is we understand how these mental illnesses work.
We understand them in terms of the science vocab — in terms of chemicals and serotonin and gut bacteria. And we also understand them in terms of societal and systemic causes, the grueling dread and unspeakable violence of our world, in terms of capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, disenfranchisement, inequality, and injustice. As Mark Fisher, who also struggled with depression all his life and in the end committed suicide famously wrote: “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”
But there is something else that is missing from our understanding.
For Thomas Ligotti who wrote the infamous essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, the question is not why people commit suicides. But where do suicidal tendencies come from? In other words, why do psychotic disorders like depression, anxiety, neurosis, and paranoia originate in humans that sometimes lead them to self-destruct themselves?
According to Thomas Ligotti, the answer is this:
Our very conscious experience is the greatest source of our tragedy.
The very fact that we are “alive” and “know that we are alive” is the source of our deepest suffering.
At some point in our evolutionary history, we must have looked at the starry night sky and the ground beneath our feet and saw ourselves as a distinct point of view in relation to the universe. We must have become “aware” of ourselves — in other words, we gained “consciousness.”
Even though our consciousness was a gift that allowed us to construct language, religion, art, culture, society, and civilization but soon this ‘being aware of being aware’ turned its heel over us.
Thomas Ligotti quotes Peter Zapffe, the author of the classic essay, The Last Messiah, which views consciousness as a blunder, a biological paradox, a double-edged sword, that even though was an advantageous outgrowth of evolution but which soon turned us into “a race of contradictory beings — uncanny things that have got nothing to do with the rest of creation.”
Thomas Ligotti explains it as follows:
For the rest of earth’s organism, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things — survival, reproduction, death — and nothing else. We know we are alive and we know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering — slowly or gradually — as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms…Consciousness has forced us into a paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are — hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
Being too aware of everything seems as if more was put on our plates than we could possibly chew.
Things have trade-offs. We are smart-thinking conscious sapiens. But at what cost?
The truth is that we bear the cost of our heightened awareness — the cost of understanding death, and mortality, and suffering and sheer silence and coldness of the universe. We don’t just remain in the present, we have a gift to think in the past and in the future. And that has a cost — which often breaks out in the form of overthinking, neurosis, depression, anxiety, and other psychotic disorders…
Peter Zapffe asks a profound question: “Why has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living — because cognition gives them more than they can carry?”
According to him, the answer is simple. Most people can learn to limit the content of their consciousness. They can install artificial blind spots to keep their sanity. They can learn to fill the void inside them.
There are mainly two ways to fill the empty void inside us, external and internal. One way is to fill yourself with some kind of attachment, which is often the attachment to the cause of God and religion. But it can include an attachment to other things as well, kids, family, achievement, fame, money, work, success, pursuit of art or philosophy, social or political cause, making “impact.” The other is to fill yourself by freeing from any kind of attachment, this includes Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen philosophy. Side note, there is a third way as well, escapism — never-ending indulgence in pleasures of life and obsessive avoidance of pain.
No matter which way one adopts, its point is to prevent ourselves from falling into the dregs of our dismal and deranging existential thoughts.
And it’s not a perfect fix.
The tape that holds our sense of meaning, purpose and self together often falls off once in a while. God can be questioned, family can turn sour, kids can leave us, passion projects can fail, fame can go away, wealth can end, politcal or social causes can change. Also we are not house plants who can just shush our thoughts indefinitely and gain “inner peace” forever. And it does not need to be said but escapism can turn toxic many a times.
Literally, everything that binds us to the thread of life can be scissored away.
And that leaves us back to square one.
Why live when there is no reason to?
Thomas Ligotti attempts to solve the very puzzle that he created. His answer is a little strange…
He writes, “*No different from other species on this planet, humanity will flourish while it can, even though there is no praiseworthy incentive ***to do so.”
“Life goes on” that’s what he says. Even if there is no reason or purpose or meaning to it.
It’s like a raindrop falling off of window. It just falls. Yes, the raindrop can become conscious and begin asking why it is falling off, what its purpose, what its meaning, what’s the point of all. But it falls nevertheless…sometimes even by choice.
In the timeless and classic words of ancient philosopher Seneca, who attempted to take his own life and who grappled with the big question of “why live” every moment of his existence:
On many an occasion I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, [but then] I commanded myself to live…There are times when even to live is an act of bravery — Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Sometimes the very act of living is a radical statement, a big F-U to our predicament, a great accomplishment in its self…
It’s O.K to have no reason, or purpose, or meaning.
To live for the very sake of living is also a thing.
It’s O.K to be like a raindrop that can’t help but go on…
