Feb 16

Feb 16 Why You Should Contemplate Suicide

The French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus famously said:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)

This is a bold claim, that the fundamental question in all of philosophy—indeed all of human life—is the question of suicide: whether life is or isn’t worth living. Some people take the answer to this question for granted: “Of course life is worth living!” they say. “How could it be otherwise?” In contrast, some people are so far gone down the existential rabbit hole—so to speak—that they have lost sight of the things that do make life worth living from day to day.

My own take on this is that any truly intelligent person, at some point in his or her life, has seriously contemplated suicide—letting the bleakness, meagerness, mundaneness, ordinariness, and disappointments of life reveal themselves for what they are: absurd, as Camus once said, and with nothing to fall back on but ourselves, as fellow existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre also said—no universal meaning of life or universal moral principles, no God, no objective answers to the meaning of life but those answers we impose on ourselves.

So with all of this potential bleakness, why don’t more of us commit suicide in actuality instead of merely contemplate it? (Don’t misunderstand me here; I’m saying that you should contemplate suicide, not actually do it!) The vast majority of us are able to find (perhaps ultimately futile) consolation from the objective bleakness of life by losing those feelings (either consciously or unconsciously, either with full awareness or out of blissful ignorance) in the day-to-day trivialities of our own lives—our own projects and goals and relationships and hobbies and friendships.

These myriad individual distractions aren’t a genuine answer to the lack of objective meaning in life because they are deeply seated in the first-person, in the “I” of a particular person in a particular situation in space and time, not in objectivity. They are, however, effective distractions from the existential dread motivating us to contemplate suicide in the first place. They are meaningful, if not objectively, to us, as individuals, here on Earth, not in some Platonic or religious heaven or sent down on tablets with Moses for us to ingest. We humans are responsible for the meaningfulness of our own lives and projects and relationships and ambitions.

I think of existential dread and suicidal thoughts as falling into two main categories: Existentialism 101 and Advanced-Level Existentialism:

Existentialism 101 (“baby existentialism,” or perhaps “amateur-level existentialism”) is letting the bleakness of life overwhelm you—not only to contemplate suicide but actually and seriously to entertain it—in other words, to let the objective meaninglessness of life drag you down and cause you to cease to see the subjective value in your own life or in the things and people you care about.
Advanced-level existentialism, in contrast, is much more nuanced; it takes seriously the objective meaninglessness of life but sees positive hope in the subjective and personal and highly individual meaningfulness that we make and manufacture for ourselves merely by and through our own personal acts of care and concern and interest and liveliness. In other words, advanced-level existentialism does not see the objective meaninglessness of life as mere bleakness; instead it sees the objective meaninglessness of life as an opportunity for our own authentic selves to create meaning for our own lives—to see ourselves as a blank canvas filled with possibilities and promises of joy and fulfillment and passion at every turn—not because of some ethereal and objective meaning of life, but because of the life that we build and make and create for ourselves, hopefully as authentically as possible.

So, yes, you should contemplate suicide as Camus suggests. Don’t actually do it, as that would be a form of defeatism that advanced-level existentialism ultimately rejects. But do spend some time dwelling on the objective meaninglessness of your own life. Realize that your own personal cares and concerns and projects and hopes and ambitions are just that—yours and no one else’s. They weren’t handed to you from on high and they aren’t written into the fabric of the universe. But they are real and they are yours. Make the most of them and let your own contemplations of suicide light the way to being the most authentically you version of yourself that you can be.