Suicide As A Fashion Statement

Here's a good way to start a conversation, just ask someone "Is there any rational purpose to cosmic existence?" Can they give you a serious answer? What are we here for? The intellectuals took a stab and walked away bloody. The misfiring synapses in Nietzsche's syphilis corroded brain spoke in mystical tones on the expression of power embodied in the Zarathustrian superman. Carl Sagan took a few hits off his joint and told us it's all about fathoming the infiniteness of the cosmos, man. One has to pause a moment and consider that there is no ultimate purpose, and even if there is we wouldn't know it until it's too late. Absence of identifiable purpose prompts people to define their own and seek social and cosmic validity via religion, cultural traditions, work, species perpetuation, and so on. But what happens when someone is immune to these socio-cultural drugs and cannot find a purpose, or rather sees the big picture and realizes that there is no long-term purpose? Is anything today going to matter a million years from now? A thousand? A hundred? In the grand scheme of things we're just guests on a giant spinning ball of dirt housed in one of the universe's billions of galaxies. The beauty of this universalist point-of-view is that it's unassailably logical; we all share the same fate. Why complicate it?

Culture is really the vehicle with which all irrational beliefs and practices are conveyed. The information being conveyed within culture doesn't have to be useful, indeed most of culture is purely arbitrary and of no functional utility. Garbage and poison spread just as quickly as health and optimism. Some people are so defined by their body of beliefs that they commit suicide when their ideas and values are discredited. What would you do if everything you'd been taught and all you thought was true and your entire way of life was turned upside down overnight? Mass suicide is so common anymore it's practically a fashion statement.

Twenty-seven million Americans are now on some form of antidepressant medication. That's no big surprise if you think about it. We're raised to believe that there is inherent value in being a floating, baseless consumer. We are finding out that there is no value there after all, and that realization leaves a void in our lives. Americans strive to be bourgeois careerists and allow corporations, government, and "the other" to provide them with artificial identity. We're content to be just another cog in the faceless machine, working all our lives until we finally retire, only to end up in a hospital bed and die like a bitch with a tube up our nose. Surely there has to be more to life than working, consuming, and fucking? It's easy to get lost in an anomic world, but remember that as long as you are alive you're changing the world if by no other means than your sheer existence.

Many people prefer denial, they choose to believe in fantasies and get high on the veritable buffet of pop-drugs from god to TV to heroin (it's all the same) in order to escape the crushing burden of existence, but the price they pay for a temporary feeling of happiness is going through life wearing a thick blindfold with both arms tied behind their back. In truth most of humanity is far, far too weak to accept anything but cultural narcotics and self-delusions. For the enlightened suffering, confusion, and anguish are their only rewards. French writer Nicholas-Sébastien Chamfort lamented, "And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead." Ideally we should strive to interface reality with its beauty and unpleasantness with our personal sense of the tangible because the two are the same. But that's easier said than done, as Chamfort illustrates in his suicide note. The sooner people realize that nothing matters the easier it is to accept their inevitable death. As soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Suppose you elect suicide. Then what? Nothing too much. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Some people might miss you, perhaps your family and friends, but in a surprisingly short time everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you never existed.

In the 1961 novel The Moviegoer, Kate remarks, "I thought to myself: is that what I'm doing? - and ran out and took four pills. Incidentally they're all wrong about that. They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself - ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide." In what way has Kate been freed by the serious entertainment of her hypothetical suicide? Since she has the option of being dead, she has nothing to lose by being alive. She is free to consider the tragic dimensions of her humanity, to contemplate the awkwardly comical mystery of existence - being lost in the cosmos with no news of how she got into such a predicament or how to get out. Indeed, there are infinitely more questions than answers. Though if you think about it, in a world as mad and a universe as random as ours, suicide is one way, the only way, to truly take control of your destiny.

I'm reminded of the scene in American Beauty where Lester asks, "Remember those posters that said 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day but one - the day you die." Be sure to wear your crimson stained wrists proudly, they're the hottest accessory of the season.