Suicide

Suicide

To say, “suicide is not the answer,” implies that there is only one question, “to live or not to live?”

Why do we jump to the answer without knowing exactly what the question is?

Albert Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

If there really were only one question, it would not be whether or not to live, but what is means to live. If what is meant by living is breathing, and if what life means is suffering, sickness, and old age, then what would be the point?

In his book Confessions, Leo Tolstoy, the great nineteenth century Russian writer said, “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” He confesses, “I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.” “My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death--complete annihilation.”

Meaninglessness is something we must all grapple with when through the tragic or mundane, what we thought was meaningful is revealed to be unimportant or vain. Confrontation with the question of meaningless comes to the rich and the poor, the famous and unpretentious, it comes to everyone.

If life is meaningless, if it is a mere contorting of molecules under the strain of chaos, and nothing existed but chaos, chaos we were essentially just spectator of, then the only logical thing to do would be to not spectate, it would be to commit suicide. We seem to be stuck between two worlds, or criteria of decision, logic and meaning; therefore, if meaning doesn’t exist, then logic is the only way to go. Though suicide would be the logical answer to meaninglessness, it would be illogical to assume life were meaningless until we had searched it all for meaning.

I believe that likely every person will have to grapple with whether life is meaningless in at least one battle where they won’t feel it is a battle they can win. This might come after a very fulfilled and stable life after a child dies, or after tragedy that seems to taint the future, or just after we get everything we ever wanted and realize it’s not enough. At some point, or maybe at many points in our life, we will find ourselves with no palpable evidence of meaning in life, and with no idea of where to look for it.

If that time has come, or when it comes, where should we look for meaning?

If we made it our goal in life to be the evidence in someone else’s life of the existence of meaning in life, would that be something meaningful?

It certainly wouldn’t be logical try and make someone else happy when we are the ones who want to be happy. To operate on the assumption of the existence of meaning without seeing evidence of it first doesn't make sense, but it does make life more than cold heartless chaos.

You might think, “but why should we have to invent meaning in life, shouldn’t there already be intrinsic meaning in life?”

What if meaning, is something infinitely complex? And what if we would never be able to comprehend it without first assuming its real, and then trying to conceptualize it?

Tolstoy said, “For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”

It is very possible to develop a greater sense of what is vain or meaningless than what is meaningful. It is very difficult to entertain something that is both in some aspects meaningful and in some aspects meaningless, especially when we don't understand how to distinguish them appropriately. Meaning is not the absolute absence of meaninglessness, meaning is infinite, and our ability to comprehend the infinite nature of meaning increases as we try to find and do what is meaningful.

Just as hot bread is best, meaning is something better in the moment, because it cools, stales, then molds and crumbles. We have to be content making bread every day, not mountains and mountains of it, but just enough for the day. If we compare each day to the most meaningful day we remember, we will likely always be disappointed, and when we realize that what made it feel so meaningful were things like being proud of ourselves or having others be proud of us, all meaning will seem like nothing more than a dream.

As a child, we do not search for meaning, everywhere we look is new and exciting, and meaningful. This is either because everywhere there is potential to add meaning to everything, or because meaning is already in everything… or we are just naïve and confusing the novelty of life for meaning. Either way, we are soon told by people in our life where we should search for meaning. We are told what things we are doing that are meaningless to them, and what things we could do that would be meaningful. It soon become a scramble to find ways to make ourselves meaningful to others rather than find meaning in life. Instead of creating meaning in the world, we find ourselves on a quest to prove there is meaning in us. Worse than coming to the conclusion that the world is meaningless, is coming to the conclusion that the world and others are meaningful, but not us… that life and others would be more meaningful with out us.

Every day we are learning and growing. Subsequently, our ability to find and do what is meaningful increases. Meaning is not a straightforward concept, there are no simple instructions or formulas, but we can look back and see that even in the considering the worst we have done, we now know better what we don’t want to repeat in the future. Who we are cannot and is not a sum of our past actions, rather we are the awareness, imagination, and will-power that all those experiences has made more aware, more imaginative and with a more resilient. All things that happen to us, or that we do positive or negative, show us more that there is to be aware of, and show us better how different ways things can combine, increasing our ability to imagine future ways to combine things, and we have a will-power with experiences to prove we can trust ourselves to do hard things, and regretful experiences to motivate us not to give up again.

So, what if we don’t care that no matter what we do and no matter what happens to us, we are learning and growing, either the hard way by approaching it passively, or the easier way by approaching it actively?

Let’s suppose you do come to the conclusion that there is no meaning in life, and that you ought to just be logical, why ought you be logical? If there were really only one world, or one criterion of decision, logic, then why do we have the choice between doing what is logical and what is not? All of the solutions suicide seem to offer, if true, would be meaningful.

It is true that meaninglessness is easier to see, but if one thing or action can be more meaningless than another, then the logical thing to do would be trying to find what is less meaningless and why. If there are only two things in life, and if we define the borders of one, the other one would by default be defined.

Life seems almost meaningless when what seemed meaningful is exposed for the vanity actually present. Just as we didn’t notice the vanity in what seemed meaningful until we found it, we won’t see what is meaningful in what seems vain until we find it. Logic is predictable, once you can count to 11, the pattern can be guessed, we know what to look forward to, but meaning is not predictable, we can’t guess what meaningful thing we will find until we find it.

Tolstoy said, “I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

A stone doesn’t seem to expect anything more from life than the purely logical, because it is part of the purely logical world. A stone could be put in a wedding ring, or in the stone wall around a house, but it likely wouldn’t perceive the meaning of the promise of compassion in better and worse times that stone represents in the wedding ring, or the cozy feeling of home it produces in the wall around the home. Just the fact that we can perceive when something is meaningless, or becomes meaningless, is evidence that we are not part of a purely logical world. Wanting to remove ourselves or others from a cold meaningless world shows that being in a cold meaninglessness is not natural for us, and that is why it is not a completely illogical assumption that death might offer us something more.

I have found that most people don’t typically talk about the time when they felt life was so meaningless than death seemed the next best place to search for meaning. I have found that less likely someone will say anything when they currently are contemplating whether death might contain the meaning that seems lacking in life. And it is because no one talks about it, that we feel so alone when we do. Operating under the assumption that almost everyone has at some point or is at least entertaining the idea, I have found that I can bring it up in a subtle and non-judgmental way, and people open up about it.

“What do you do when life seems really meaningless?” should be a lot more common of a question than it is. If no one brings it up, it will seem taboo and embarrassing to talk about, and when we do want to talk about it, we will end up asking someone who because of their profession can’t judge, and can’t gossip about it to our friends… a doctor. Is that doctor going to say that during his twelfth sixteen hour surgery shift in medical school, even while doing a life-saving exploratory laparotomy on someone who had been shoot, that even then, the same question you are asking them they thought as well? No, likely  not. The doctor will likely do their job and see if your struggle with the possibility of the meaninglessness of life is having a clinically significant impact or your life, or whether medication would have a statistically significant positive difference in your life.

I am not against medication, but if we aren’t talking to people we trust, and if we don’t know that they are going through the same thing as us, then considering if a chemical was what solved the problem of meaningless, will seem even more meaningless. Why be born into a world missing an essential chemical in our brains? Was life always meaningless until the advent of psychotropic medications?

If you are considering that the only possible place left to look for meaning in life is death, then of course talking to your doctor is a great idea. Before you are completely out of places to look for meaning, talk to people around you. Ask, “What was the most meaningful part of your life, and why?” and then ask, “What was the least meaningful part of your life, and why?”

Superficial or false conversations can bring a pretty intense sense of meaninglessness, and facilitating meaningful conversation, but creating a supportive environment of non-judgment and opening up the conversation to more meaningful topics, can do wonders.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the more meaningless life seems, we shouldn’t be scared, we should actually be curiously excited. If you had a compass that only had one dial and it pointed south, would that make it any more difficult to navigate than the typical compass that points north? No… as long as we know its pointing south and not north. Similarly, when we find what is least meaningful in life, moving away from it will be a meaningful step. Therefore, the better we know meaninglessness, the better we can find meaning. If we can’t see something meaningful to do in a given situation, then we can just look for the least meaningless thing possible, and doing it.