tawdry

I bike over a nearby bridge, and imagine hurling myself thither.
I arrive home, and imagine tying weights to myself and sliding into the canal.
It is a sadness that suicide is not a more common topic of conversation and debate in this world. If any world ever needed more dialogue on the subject, it is surely ours. But we avoid such talk, as most of us avoid even thinking about it, because suicide goes to the heart of the most primal human fear. This fear is so overriding that we treat death with superstitious aversion, and the mere thought of voluntarily dying turns our brains into misfiring muck. Our culture projects this death fear so thoroughly, that we can only perceive suicide as an act of cowardice.
Nor is that fear entirely irrational. Every last piece of available objective evidence points to one conclusion - death is the end of life. To believe anything else is like calling gravity a lie.
Could gravity be a lie? Of course. But imagine how hard it would be to get converts to the "lie of gravity" cult. Selling life after death is so obvious, it's tawdry. And easy...just as the "lie of gravity" would be an easy sell if humanity's most elemental fear was falling. You'd have gravity-confounders on every corner! What would a gravity-confounding steeple look like?
Or imagine how far you'd get selling the notion that clams have a soul. I promise you, no one ever went broke overestimating human vanity.
But lost in all that is the reality that for many, suicide is far and away the bravest thing they might ever do. How could it be otherwise, knowing our most basic fear?
Sifting through suicide statistics for meaning can be daunting. Women have a higher attempt rate, men a higher success rate. That's nothing, just a relic of a dying era where women are trained to be rescued and "men" are trained to succeed (without emotion).*
90% of suicides are due to mental illness? A spurious bit of partial research cranked out by a well-meaning society with a woefully inadequate understanding of mental health. This statistic allows us to hold on to the illusion of "us/them". Us/them? Is there anyone naive enough to suppose that a majority of people HAVEN'T thought about committing suicide at some point in their lives? Anyone that naive? Anyone? Hello? Why are we not more bothered by the fact that most people have thought about killing themselves? Because if we allowed ourselves to be bothered, we'd have to ask some very hard questions about our most basic beliefs and institutions.
Winter holiday suicides? A myth. Suicides peak during spring and early summer.
The global suicide rate is up 60% in the last 45 years? A lot of that is due to the fact that suicide has long occupied a prominent place - in humanity's closet. A few countries still report NO suicide...which tells you all you need to know about accurate reporting. However, the fact that youth suicide is increasing at a faster rate than any other demographic indicates that that 60% figure isn't just about social stigma. Nor is it about teen angst - within another generation or two, suicide could become the number one cause of death among ALL humans in the 15-45 age range. Clearly, something is going on.
Cranky conservatives will tell you it's because society is going to hell in a handbasket...that racial equality, women's lib, homosexuals, legalized pot, and nudists are tearing this world apart.
And they're right.
Not in the myopic way they intend, of course. But humanity in general is going through revolutionary times. Notions of universal democracy, human rights, the rejection of poverty, tolerance for people who don't believe as you do...these are radical upheavals in our species' history. And at a basic level, suicide rates will always be lower the more stable one's society. When everyone "knows their place", fewer people kill themselves (or others). So yes, things are getting uglier...and it might get worse before it gets better. The human race is awakening from a nightmare of repression, exploitation, and brutality that's lasted for thousands of years. It can't happen overnight. But the more obvious our society's pain, the sooner things will change - for good. Greater social freedom is a wonderful thing, but with people unclear about "who" they are, plus the lack of emotional and financial security incumbent in a society in which nothing is free, plus the profound sense of isolation we all think is "normal", you have a cocktail that often ends at the end of a rope.
I had an insight recently into how sad suicide notes are. Not just sad, but again...tawdry. And before i substantiate that, i'll allow for exceptions - notes which absolve others of blame, or such. But i suspect that most suicide notes amount to little more than emotional pleading...the same nonsense we project every day of our lives, in one form or another. In this world, the fulfillment of our most basic needs (love, sustenance, and security) is so tenuous that we spend our lives trying to convince others that we're deserving. Living in a culture of individuality gone overboard (i.e. a culture of celebrity), our egos get wrapped up into it too. The only currencies this world respects are success, beauty, and money. The more of those one has, the more stroking and security one gets, so we spend our lives reinforcing our own egotistic self-mythologies, desperately trying to get others to agree with our self-image. Relationships become little more than codependent truces in which all parties agree to bolster each other's notions.
As for my own suicide...
It has a lot to do with what the buddha called "removing the veil". People who are able to peel away the layers of bullshit we accumulate by the time we're adults...the prejudice, the vanity, the desensitization...to see the world for what it is, such people are rare. And most of them at some point probably make a conscious choice to go on living, or not.
I have never felt more keenly the absence of a veil between myself and the world. I feel centuries beyond my own time. And along with that understanding has grown my respect for those who take their own life...not as an exercise in self-aggrandizement, trying to grip other peoples' emotions in death like they never could in life, but simply through the realization that we live in a world of staggering barbarism, to such an extent that it requires no small amount of perverse denial to even endure. Objectively, this world is NOT worth living. The more one understands how cut off from our own most basic humanity we've become, the more obvious that conclusion is.
I haven't been held intimately in thirteen months, my bank account reveals that i'm $410 away from having no shelter or food, and every day i am forced to endure a world where people treat each other brutally.
Even family.
Even lovers.
Even when they're smiling.
That's not to say that my suicide will come now, or ever. Hope refuses to easily die. Nor do i have any afterlife delusions to sweeten the pill of death. That said, i've come to a gentle respect for those who correctly assess that this world we've created is no fit place for any healthy creature, and without a whisper of complaint or coercion, remove themselves therefrom.
So if you should chance upon someone contemplating suicide, try offering friendship rather than fixing. In the midst of their misery, they might just be experiencing the most clear-thinking moment of their life.
I love you all.
I know how empty those words are to those who are suffering.
Nonetheless...
I do.

*Okay, there's a little more to it. The era humanity is leaving is a patriarchal one, wherein life is harder for women in every measurable way. Ergo, women have more motivation to want to end life.