15. WHAT DO WE OWE TO OURSELVES? - A student reflects on his attempted suicide
WARNING - This article contains descriptions of depression and suicide.
We often ask ourselves what we owe to others, as we should. Not asking ourselves this leads to being alienated from our fellow man, as well as unpaid bills. But one question that I have found myself rubbing up against recently is what exactly I owe to myself, and much more importantly, do I even owe anything to myself?
My immediate and innate answer to this question is both obvious and contradictory; of course I owe something to myself, whether I know what it is or not. But this statement, upon some preliminary examination, doesn't appear to be as sound a reaction as first hoped. Imagine, for instance, I said that I owe myself £10. Sure, the statement itself isn’t exactly nonsense, but how exactly would I pay myself £10 so that I was no longer in debt to myself? If I actually tried to do this, I would have to get another £10 from myself and then give it to myself, leaving me another £10 in debt. The situation would not have been resolved. Whereas if I am in debt to someone else, I can very easily pay them the money I owe them, as much as I may try and weasel out of it. However, I cannot owe myself £10 because there would be no way for me to ratify my own debt, and if there's no way to ratify the debt then there must also be no way to accrue it. Put formally, it may sound something like this (if you're not a fan of formal language you can skip this bit, but I would recommend you read the rest of the article as though it's being said in a posh accent, or perhaps with a twirly mustache, to really give it that "formal" feel):
● Imagine I owe X to myself.
● If I did owe X to myself I would have no way to pay myself back as I would be both the payer and the payee.
● If there is no way for me to pay myself back than there is no way for me to owe myself X in the first place.
● Therefore I cannot owe myself anything.
"But wait!" you shout at the screen, forgetting that this is a one-way dialogue and I can't hear you, "I once read this fantastic article about the promises we make ourselves, and it showed me that we can make promises to ourselves that we often feel obligated to complete!
While I would agree that we can make promises to ourselves and we do owe it to ourselves in some capacity not to break those promises, there is a definitive difference between what we promise ourselves and what we promise others, and it's distinct enough that we can observe it happen in that “real world” I’ve heard so much about.
It is at this point, a whopping four paragraphs into this article, that I will now discuss the philosophical ramifications of my suicide attempt.
Yay.
In October of 2018 I tried to kill myself twice, and only failed due to a miscalculation. While I have not attempted since and do not plan on doing so, I still struggle with suicidal thoughts. I bring this up not just to make you think “man, that got heavy real fast”, but because it shows how doing something destructive to yourself doesn’t elicit the same legal response as doing something just as destructive to another person. Let's say, for instance, that instead of telling my teachers and close friends that I had tried, and subsequently failed, to kill myself, I had instead told them that I had tried, and failed, to kill someone else. The reaction I would have gotten would probably have been a lot less sympathy and a lot more prison time.
Just as an aside here, I know that it could be argued that in fact the reaction to both cases could be incredibly similar if I was forced to go to a mental institution. This is a good point, but fails to account for two key points, the first being that I'm not (currently) writing this article from a mental institution, and secondly that mental institutions differ from prisons on the basis that prisons are about protecting society, rehabilitation and punishment, whereas mental institutions are only about the first two. Although the fact that prisons and mental facilities only differ on one major aspect of their existence is a whole other debate. Anyway, back to the article. Pretend you never saw me.
The reason that I would give as to why the reaction between self-destruction and destruction of others is so different is that my life is something that both belongs to me and me alone and the fact that I didn’t ask for it. In other words, the idea that my life belongs to someone else is an unhealthy one (as opposed to simply being a part of some else’s life, which I would recommend). As well as my life belonging to me, I didn’t ask for it because I didn’t ask to be born. Combining these two premises, I can conclude that my life is something with which I can do as I wish as long as it doesn’t infringe on others. Ah-ha! I hear you say, once again forgetting how this works, killing yourself would infringe on the lives of those you left behind! So stay alive ya big dummy!
A few things. One, there’s no need for insults, we’re all friends here. But more importantly, this is where the premise of “I didn’t ask to be born” comes into play. If I have been given something that I had explicitly asked for, then it could be argued that I should treat what I have with some respect and be grateful for it. For the sake of this argument, let’s say I really wanted to sign up for a football team, and then my parents finally sign me up to it, after a heap of screaming and childish behaviour. Imagine I then stop caring about football and move on to another passion project, such as sleeping in until 2:00pm, or processed carbohydrates (my favourite food group). Because I explicitly asked to be on the football team, and not to stuff my face with chips and chicken nuggets, if I then squander what I have been given I am wasting an opportunity that I asked for.
I am aware that at this point you're probably wondering when this article became about suicide and stopped being about what we owe to ourselves. The answer is almost immediately, by the way. But it's because of these experiences that I've had that have made me think about this question. If I don't even owe it to myself to stay alive what can I really owe myself? I distinctly remember when I was younger, during another particular low point of my life, telling myself that no matter how bad it got I would just keep moving forward, a promise which I have now broken. I also promised myself that I wouldn't ever drink, as I didn't see the point of it, another broken promise. I even told myself that before I turned 18 I would have at least had a relationship, and if anyone who knows me even slightly is reading this article, they are now probably on the floor uncontrollably laughing. But the point still stands; if I can't even owe myself the most basic human right of life, then what canI owe myself? How can I even try and owe myself a good life if I can't owe myself a life of any kind?
For the concerned reader of this article, don't worry, we're about to get to the classic nail-biter of a comeback to save the day from Zod, or Hannibal Lecter, or whatever was popular last century. This is largely because it is possible to owe yourself not just a life, but a happy one, and because articles advocating suicide aren't what I want to be known for. They kinda ruin a CV. Despite everything that I’ve been through in the past few years, I still think that it’s possible to owe yourself a good life precisely for the reasons I listed before about why you don’t; you didn’t ask to be born and your life is your own. However, instead turning this into the ultimate downer of “I don’t owe myself anything” you can turn it into the opposite; if life was not something you asked for, but it belongs entirely to you, then surely you owe it to yourself to enjoy it. Sure, the fact that you didn’t ask for it means that anything bad that happens that you’re not in control of just sucks and you have to roll with the punches. But because it belongs to you, and only you, it also gives you the freedom to do whatever makes you happy as long as it doesn’t infringe on other people’s happiness. It doesn’t even have to be happy, people aren’t always doing what they do because it brings them some form of innate joy. I’m happy I wrote this article, but I’m not currently beaming from one side of my mouth to the other with each and every word I type because it’s just so much fun. I’m doing it for a different form of pleasure; the pleasure of looking at something I made, the pleasure of looking at the hours spent on it and feeling relieved that it’s finally done, the pleasure of two whole people reading this and thinking “this dude is a real downer”. None of those feelings are happiness, yet I strive for them nonetheless. Humans don’t always seek out happiness all of the time. It’s why we watch sad movies, or tragic plays, or horror movies, or thrillers, or really almost all forms of entertainment. There isn’t a real market for movies that are just happy people doing happy things for 2 hours.
At the end of all of this, what I’m really saying is that you, along with everyone else on this miserable wet rock, deserve to feel how they want to feel. And as long as how you feel those feelings doesn’t stop others from feeling how they want to feel, then go nuts. Watch a football game, eat a kilo of shrimp, go to school, listen to speed death metal, drink, don’t drink, write philosophy articles, write songs, write poems, become a sports captain, become a YouTuber, grow a beard, grow a tree, run away from your problems, run towards your problems, run around nude in the rain. Wait, no, not that last one. But run in the rain anyway. You have a tumble dryer, you’ll be fine. Feel how you want to feel.
Or don’t. Again, not a cop.
To summarise this journey that we've all undertaken. First, we started with the innate idea that you can owe yourself something, before quickly rejecting that idea and realising that we cannot realistically owe ourselves anything because our lives were not asked for and belong entirely to us. To reinforce this idea, we (but really me, you're just reading it) took a trip down memory lane and looked at how my suicide attempt showed me that I cannot even owe myself my own life. Fortunately, I was able to bring us back to a slightly less depressing place, as we realised that, yes, life is something that wasn't asked for, it is something that belongs entirely to each and every one of us. And because our lives belong to us and us alone, it gives us the opportunity to do with them what we want, even if that opportunity wasn't one that we asked for, it's still an opportunity. In this way, we do owe ourselves something; specifically, we owe it to ourselves to do want we want to do, but we can’t do that if we’re dead. To quote one of my favourite authors, John Green, “suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems”. You can’t be out there doing what you want to do if you’re in the ground. Unless a zombie apocalypse happens, in which case disregard this part of the article. In fact, disregard all of it, there are zombies. Find fresh water and shelter and run.
Author: Benjamin Allen
Editor’s note: If you have been affected by this article, or similar thoughts of suicide, and are struggling to talk to somebody, The Samaritans or CALM are good places to start…
