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

     To say, “suicide is not the answer,” implies that there is only one question, “to live or not to live?”
     I can think of a several questions that come up before the question of “to live or not to live,” even if no one talks about them out loud before the final question seems like the only one left:
Who is the happiest person you know, and how happy are they? What is the best relationship you know of and how much of the potential love they could have do they actually?
     Even without measuring, even if that were possible, likely whoever came to mind as being in first place didn’t score 100%... which is a pretty sobering realization. Even if we haven’t consciously done the math, even if we have tried to avoid doing the math, we still know it is not 100% and the “why” of that is pretty overwhelming to process.
     It’s difficult to give someone a happiness rating, but we could somewhat measure love in a relationship if we put the measurement of love as what percentage of things you would want to share with someone would you feel they would hear, appreciate and understand. If no one loves a hundred percent, why? Is love not actually worth it? Is it too hard? Does it even exist? What are the chances if the best relationship we see is maybe a 60% that we can get better than a D- in love?
     We are born in a world where there seems to be a mountain of evidence that love doesn’t exist and then for some reason we conclude that from that, that it is our fault, that we don’t feel loved because we are broken and that there is something that makes us unworthy of love… The question of what love is and how to do it easily can be eclipsed by the frantic struggle to do whatever we have to do be worthy of love… which really just becomes an effort to buy someone’s love… or attention, which we have been taught to think it a measurement of love… which if we stepped back for a moment and considered, we would realize that buying attention is definitely not love… but the complete lack of attention that comes with not playing the social commodity game doesn’t feel like love either…
It’s not an illogical conclusion to come to that love might just not actually exist. It’s not a meaningless conclusion that if the social commodity game goes deeper than social construct that life would not be worth living. It is not a weak mind that grapples with these questions and cannot seem to prevail.
     It’s quite a weird feeling to want to share something with someone and then realize that they probably don’t actually want to hear it. What makes it worse is when your heart convinces you to try anyway, and they make it clear they either don’t want to listen, they don’t appreciate it, and not only do they not understand, but they don’t want to. As a kid we start at an optimistic 100% trust in love and assume everyone wants to hear everything we have to say. By five years old for some people and later for others, we start to realize that we should probably only tell people what they want to hear. By fifteen or so we wonder if anyone wants to hear anything we have to say. What do we do with those unspoken impulses to share? Sadly they just seem to weigh on our optimism and make us not want to try and reach out. The options of lie and tell people what they want to hear, try and share and risk rejection, or just keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, is quite the lose-lose-lose situation.
We wonder why we don’t feel motivated sometimes or why things that used to make us happy don’t, and wonder why, when we know why but we don’t want to even think about it. What if love doesn’t exist? What if convenience is all there is, and this is just a meaningless zero-sum libido-driven game?
     Why would we want to even watch that, let alone live it?
     There are two existential questions which impose unbearable burdens. First, “Does love exist?” which when considered leads to evidence that no one loves us, and if we are honest, that we don’t actually love anyone else… perfectly at least, or even close. Love is an odd thing, because for love to be love the intentions would have to be pure, and so when we find possible ulterior motives, it’s really hard to not dismiss the rest as being just a cover for love. In this respect I think we are harder on ourselves than others, because we know, or think we can know, our own motives.
     The second question is, “If love doesn’t exist, can we make it exist if we believe in it?” Not all seeds planted bear fruit at the same time, a pea plant will give you peas in two weeks and an apple tree takes at least a decade. This is frustrating to know that what we are doing might take a long time, and a lot of sacrifice, but what makes it unbearable, is trying to figure out what chance we have of learning how to truly love in our lifetime if no one of any age figures it out around us. It’s pretty hard to be five years into watering, weeding and nurturing an apple tree without any seeing any fruit and seeing that much older trees have no apples yet either… expectation of outcome is the fuel that motivates sacrifice, and to press forward with hope despite evidence of outcome is against our biological nature. The law of biology is survival of the fittest, and so if something works it is reinforced and if it is not, it is not. Has love worked for us? Has it proved to have survival value? Or has the belief in love made life worse? If we have concluded many times that love doesn’t exist, why can’t we believe it and just move on?
     It would be so nice to close the case of whether love exists, even if that meant it didn’t exist, because we all wouldn’t have to worry about wasting time and energy making ineffective sacrifices for others when we all could just worry about ourselves. We all know ourselves more than anyone else, so, it is logical that everyone just worrying about themselves would work out better.
So, what do we do when we realize that we can’t close the case on love and therefore can’t decide between self-consuming love and self-preserving logic?
     It is at this point we really question the nature of existence and try to figure out how all this started, because if it was a god who put us in a mostly cold and dark universe and allows us to be born into a society where there is not a single example of pure love to learn from and with traditions that are counterproductive, and with natural drives which are ruthless, then that god is not worth playing with, and death in that case would be either preferable separation from Him or a plaint that could possibly get His attention and possibly motivate a positive change in the structure of life He has created. If there is no god, and if chaos somehow produced just enough consciousness so that we could exist, only  to merely spectate the chaos but not rise above it, that would be equally not worth spectating.
     The problem with trying to figure out if there is a god, is it is a distraction from the original question, which is, “can I make love exist if I believe in it, even despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise?”
     I have yet to meet a person who has not serious considered unplugging from this weird mortality game, and so it is very odd to me that hardly anyone ever talks about it. I have found that the word “suicide” is extremely taboo, but that if you ask someone what time in their life felt the most meaningless, that people generally will open up and tell you about it. I think as a whole humanity needs to talk about how cope together with the fact that we can’t close case on love. I don’t believe we will ever have definite evidence that love exists, but I have found that we don’t need evidence that love exists to believe in it and act as if love exists. I think the choice we are faced with is whether we want love, or the certainty that our efforts aren’t wasted, unappreciated or being exploited.
     I think love is a one-way road and that’s okay. Love is that little voice in us that says to love first and never look back. We scrutinize whether that kind of unconditional love exists in our parents when really we should just be planting that seed in ourselves because likely they are not coping well with the failed attempt to do the same thing with their parents. Yes, it would seem logical that if love existed that it would exist where biology also compels it, and that if a nursing mother who will feel pain in her engorged breasts if she doesn’t give and still she doesn’t give, that we should wonder whether without that biological compulsion there is any hope, but love is not logical, it is what our heart tells us to do despite the logical reasons not to.
     Love first.
     Be the love your thirst for.