Life is totally optional (and this is good)
I recently thought I was in a very long, numbing and irrecoverable rut and thought screw it, this is it.
Surprisingly it took me just a couple of hours to set everything up. I wrote a reasonably expressive email to my parents, shared a doc with all my passwords etc and scheduled the Gmail delivery for the next morning. Made sure that my 401K had them nominated as next of kin.
That's it, it was that easy. Obviously I changed my mind. But knowing that it's literally this easy made me realize that that I *get to* live versus *having to* live. This made a lot of difference.
Epictetus has a nice take on this.
It's somewhat analogous to waking up and deciding whether you want to have a cup of coffee or kill yourself. Both options are arguably within your rights. (Contrary to popular opinion)
I advocate having the cup of coffee but sometimes accepting the alternative makes the coffee taste better/ makes you more grateful for the coffee.
Another take is like being in a room full of smoke. There's always a door if the smoke gets unbearable. You should stay while you can. But sometimes just knowing that you can always leave if the smoke gets too much makes you stay.
Also, thanks Gmail for the scheduled mail delivery feature. Kind of a life saver :P
TC: 221K
#health #wellness
PS: Thanks Blind for the kind words. I'm better now and definitely don't feel the same way. The point of writing this was to share this perspective for others.
Hopefully you don't feel this way often and don't have to think this through, but the point was that even the direst of situations isn't beyond your locus of control. Merely knowing the fact that life is optional sometimes makes it worth living.
A lighter analogy:
Lots of mediocre/bad runners run marathons every year. If you forcibly made someone run a marathon though, they tended to have a far worse experience than a runner of the same caliber who volunteered to run. Just having the option to choose made people see similar experiences in a very different light.
comments
Do you have friends here?
The lockdown has been a great filter to my friendships as well, we tend to rake up too many social connections. Picking up the phone and calling a friend or two is so much harder but much more rewarding.
The social part of our animal instincts are much stronger than I ever thought!
It's amazing you got the realization before doing anything drastic you couldn't undo. If you're in a rut, change jobs, move, take up an exciting hobby, travel, take a sabbatical, quit your job. Do anything jarring. That's better than suicide. Take care and hugs.