Suicide is definitely the weakest option someone can take. Maybe you’ve never been suicidal, but I have, and that feeling is so strong. It wouldn’t feel like anything to end it, just a release. But it takes absolutely everything to keep going.
You may have a point about surviving being instinctual, and therefore someone who is too dumb to even consider suicide I’m any situation, isn’t stronger for not having the thought. But I really don’t think that’s most people. I think most people that would have to struggle to survive an apocalypse, would absolutely be pushing through the urge to end it. Unless all that’s left is savages, suicide is weak as hell.
I guess you’re right that it takes an enormous effort to hold on to life in those situations. It reminded me of the book by Viktor Frankl, the one about his observations on who died and who lived while he was in a concentration camp. Man’s Search for Meaning. Although I wouldn’t say all cases of letting go are weak. Sometimes depressive states are like allergies, an organic reaction to low light, lack of nutrients, etc. But I can now see your point.
The thing I cannot agree with is the ulterior reason. You speak, and probably many people would do too, as if life were an obligation or the right path to follow. As if staying alive was the point, and therefore to submit to the desire to leave or to escape was inherently wrong or mistaken. But there’s no mandate to live in my book. Whoever decides to persevere in life has the right to do so, but, to me, it is just as valid to leave because there is no point in being born nor in dying (again, as far as we know) anyway.
Suicide is definitely the weakest option someone can take. Maybe you’ve never been suicidal, but I have, and that feeling is so strong. It wouldn’t feel like anything to end it, just a release. But it takes absolutely everything to keep going.
You may have a point about surviving being instinctual, and therefore someone who is too dumb to even consider suicide I’m any situation, isn’t stronger for not having the thought. But I really don’t think that’s most people. I think most people that would have to struggle to survive an apocalypse, would absolutely be pushing through the urge to end it. Unless all that’s left is savages, suicide is weak as hell.
I guess you’re right that it takes an enormous effort to hold on to life in those situations. It reminded me of the book by Viktor Frankl, the one about his observations on who died and who lived while he was in a concentration camp. Man’s Search for Meaning. Although I wouldn’t say all cases of letting go are weak. Sometimes depressive states are like allergies, an organic reaction to low light, lack of nutrients, etc. But I can now see your point.
The thing I cannot agree with is the ulterior reason. You speak, and probably many people would do too, as if life were an obligation or the right path to follow. As if staying alive was the point, and therefore to submit to the desire to leave or to escape was inherently wrong or mistaken. But there’s no mandate to live in my book. Whoever decides to persevere in life has the right to do so, but, to me, it is just as valid to leave because there is no point in being born nor in dying (again, as far as we know) anyway.