For Your Consideration

Have your considered killing yourself today? If you havent - please take a few minutes to think about it - think about the method you would use, think about the folks who will have to clean up the mess, but most importantly, try to gure out why you would do it. Or why you wouldnt. Take your time, Im not going anywhere. Are you still here? What made you stay amongst us? Is it just the fear of death? The pain you might feel when the bullet blows your brain? The tension in your neck while you hang and choke? Those few seconds of uncertainty before you hit the ground at the bottom of your building? If youre still alive after giving suicide a good long thought, then certainly you have a good reason to live. As Socrates would tell us, The unexamined life isnt worth living - in other words, if you havent considered killing yourself, you havent truly considered living. Obviously, death awaits us all from the moment we are born, so why rush it? Thats fair, but living amounts to more than simply not dying, dont you think? So if you are going to bother getting out of bed, you should have a darn good reason other than going to work? Why do you work anyways? So you can afford food and shelter - again thats fair, without food youll die and living in the streets can be fun, but on the long run, its rather uncomfortable. Perhaps then, you work so you can buy nice things or simply to go on a vacation (which you wouldnt need if you didnt work, but thats not my point). Besides, you dont live to work, thats just something you do to stay alive, so why didnt you kill yourself today? Dont try to tell me, its because God said so because we all know that God is dead and I would bet it wasnt an accidental death. Most likely than not, God killed himself and is currently burning in the Hell as he rightfully should. But Im getting sidetracked - most folks would say that life is all about the simple pleasures. They enjoy sharing a good meal with their loved ones, they enjoy sex, laughter and drugs, they enjoy arts and philosophy or simply watching the sun set, but those are only ways to get your mind off your impending death. While you enjoy yourself, all the misery and the pain in the world seems to fade away and for a few moments, perhaps a few hours, you might forget that entire nations are starving, that sexually transmitted diseases kill millions, that overpopulation has led us to ravage the Earth, that laughter is a derision of truth, that drugs and alcohol only pushes reality away, that art never solved any problems, that philosophy (including religious and scientic ideas) caused the most horrible atrocities in history and that sunsets are nothing more than pretty illusions just like

all the other pleasures described above. Actually, the more you think about the nature of pleasure, the more you realize that pleasure can hardly be considered as a valid reason to stay alive. Like work, its just something you do to pass time, so why are you still here? The only honest answer is - I dont know. We have no idea why we stay alive instead of killing ourselves. Its certainly not because living is easy - oh no! Life a daily struggle and it would seem that we simply love torturing ourselves and each other. And when you think about it, if only we would all commit suicide, all the wars would be over. No more rapes. No more murders. No more child exploitation. No more violation of human rights. No more religious hatred. No more violence in the name of peace. No more overpopulation. No more starvation. No more suicides!!! And the list goes on - no more pollution. No more deforestation. No more animal abuse. No more nuclear wastes. No more water contamination. No more trash. No more concrete jungles. No more global warming. No more oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico or on the virgin Alaskan snow. No more satellites sent in outer space. No more mountains blown to pieces to extract gold, diamonds and coal. No more plastic bottles forming islands in the Pacic Ocean. No more genetically modied organisms. And the list goes on - there are so many more benets than disadvantages to our death that it is hard to understand why we havent killed ourselves yet! Well - were incredibly selsh and short-sighted, thats not hard to understand, but even that isnt a valid reason to stay alive. The sad and simple truth is perhaps that we stay alive because we never truly considered killing ourselves. Because were already here and we just dont know any better. We stay alive because we were told that life is sacred, that its a magical cycle that should never be broken and that it is our responsibility to keep it going. After all, isnt it what all other lifeforms do? Rock, plants, bacteria and animals never ask themselves such silly questions and they never commit suicide. They just go through the motion of time without questioning their existence, however they never made quite as much damage as we have. Besides, we may have a heart of stone, but we are not rocks. We may be the root of all evil, but were not plants. We may be the deadliest virus the earth has ever known, but were not bacteria. And we may live in concrete jungles, but were not animals. Not the primal sense at least. We have the burden of consciousness and therefore we have choice. To be or not to be. To kill ourselves or not. To keep the cycle of pain and destruction going or to put an end to it. Its up to you... Have your considered killing yourself today? Think about it - it might be only valid reason you have to be alive.