The case for suicide

The examined life can be discouraging

For a couple of weeks in late March, killing myself seemed like a reasonable life plan.

Or anti-life plan, more accurately.

Depression was not a factor. I just objectively concluded that I had wasted my existence, and my pitiful contribution to human welfare would be my legacy. 

But while pondering whether I deserved to take up space on the planet, I admit to being a little sad about the prospect of not being alive. 

After all, I like several things about my useless life. There’s baseball, bourbon, fried catfish, writing, Green River floats and a few people, not necessarily in that order. But I was having a hard time appreciating them or anything else, preoccupied as I was with being undeserving of oxygen.

What bothered me, objectively, was that I have lived a relatively long time in a world that is not much better, and maybe worse, than it was when I was a kid, a long time ago. My expectations for the future of the nation and planet are substantially unrealized.

I never really accomplished much in the way of trying to save the world, so it’s not surprising to me that the world hasn’t been saved.

And it’s too late for me to get my stuff together and get the job done. If I was ever capable of the necessary level of efficiency, that ship has sailed.

Along with my generational peers, I’ve been an abject failure. I recognized that, and considered atonement in the most significant way possible.

One day relatively soon, just in the natural order of things, I’ll be dead anyway. So why wait?

Why not make a point, at least to myself, by heading for the exit now? 

It was a good time to feel bad about planetary progress. I was watching Russia demonstrate that we had made little or no headway in the peace movement, to the point of awkwardly mimicking World War II. It was even more disconcerting since we are mostly ignoring equally horrifying combat in places where brown people live.

On that note, I am continually chagrined that racism remains one of America’s favorite indoor and outdoor sports.

Corporations have tightened their grip on America, depressing wages while ruining land and poisoning food and water. In the last 10 years, most of the big-name billionaires have come to be worth about 10 times what they used to be, while the national minimum wage hasn’t budged off $7.25. You can work at McDonald’s for that kind of money, but you can’t eat there.

We aren’t moving forward much in saving the planet from warming, yet we’re embracing cryptocurrencies, a way to simultaneously make money and a huge carbon footprint without creating an actual product.

We should have spread public transportation across the nation by now, but we are still driving, and generally still doing it in gas-powered cars. 

Insane propaganda has washed over the world, especially the United States, gaining a ridiculous number of converts to idiocy. Meanwhile, right-thinking people spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what reasonable people say instead of what unreasonable people do.

While some marginalized groups have been able to pare down those margins, large numbers of people who are doing okay have tried to set back the clock. Rights to control one’s own body are marching double-time to the rear. Millions still can’t afford to get sick.

Almost a million Americans have died from a pandemic over the last couple of years, but we’re now chirping to each other, “What pandemic?”

Even suicide itself is out of control. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans shooting themselves to death rose 43%.

I never got to the point of seriously considering suicide to actually formulate a plan. What stopped me: While I certainly deserve shame and dishonor for not helping to stave off global disaster, it’s more than a little conceited to believe that one relatively ill-equipped person could have been the difference between success and failure.

What about the rest of you slug-a-beds? Heck, some of you actually know how to do important things. I mainly know newspaper stuff, and we all understand how little skill that entails.

I worked for a guy named Conrad Black who told everybody that journalism was not a profession, because people with bachelor’s degrees get to do it. The ideal newspaper office, he added, had one reporter and two ad reps.

Many of you are actually dedicating yourselves to the betterment of humankind. Judging by the state of life on Earth, you’re mostly terribly inept. But somebody could get something right.

So maybe I should leave it to others who might get something done. That thought stayed my hand.

But just surviving my own threat against myself was not very satisfying. The world and I: still losers.

Later, I came up with another reason I should not feel as bad as I did. While doom has loomed, a substantial positive has emerged.

The majority of Americans are on the side of the angels now. That’s new.

For instance, in 1996, 27% of us supported gay marriage. In 2021, the number was 70%. 

Legislators in backwoods parts of the country have passed laws restricting transgender rights, but two-thirds of the country as a whole thinks they shouldn’t do that. Despite some states attacking rights to abortions, aided and abetted by the hicks on the U.S. Supreme Court, 59% of Americans have no objection to people getting them.

Sometime in the last few years, the number of people who believe human activity caused global warming inched above 50%. It may have reached well above the half-way point, but that depends on who is asked and how they’re asked.

Flirting around 50-50 seems weak, since the percentage of studies indicating humans caused global warming rounds off to 100. But we have that wee problem of people who think scientists should prove to them individually everything they profess. Most, if not all, of these doubters could not understand a fraction of a peer-reviewed study on climate at gunpoint. But still.

In the mid-1960s, over three-quarters of white Americans said they’d move if Blacks bought houses in their neighborhoods, and about the same fraction said protests were a bad way to achieve any kind of civil equality. The numbers are reversed now. 

A majority of Americans now support progress, in their heads or on Facebook. That’s positive.

Unfortunately, significant progress is not really evident in real life, so it’s possible I may backslide and again ponder doing myself in. I would be justified, I think, by how I’m treated at a gun store. 

As things now stand, I can’t imagine that an American who has published a tome about his own thoughts of suicide would be denied the purchase of a firearm to easily accomplish that.

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