Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem

A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life.

We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice.

I also congratulate the author on writing a piece on suicide without resorting to tired Schopenhauer quotes; something I surely wouldn’t be able to do!