What Would Make Your Life Worth Living?

This Is The Question I Wish Every Suicidal Person Would Ask Themselves Because Something Incredible Happens When They Do

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

I understand why people kill themselves. It’s harder for me to understand why people don’t. To me, the argument for suicide seems obvious and compelling. If you’ve ever been suicidal, you may recognize it:

I’m not happy. I’ve never been happy. I will never be happy. There’s something wrong with me. If I can’t be happy, then all that’s left is suffering. So, what’s the point of living at all?

It’s a serious question and it deserves a serious answer. At least 48,344 people in 2018 alone answered that question in the negative — that there is no point in living and so they killed themselves.

But what if they were asking the wrong question to begin with?

The Ethical Question of Suicide

I don’t buy any of the conventional arguments against suicide.

I don’t buy the argument, for example, that suicide is a “permanent solution to a temporary problem.” It can be. But some people suffer their entire lives with these thoughts. To those people, it’s not temporary. It’s a permanent fixture of existence. But even if it…