Re: Right to die and quality of life
TLDR: "If you want something done right, well, too bad."
life is always worth living, even if it doesn't feel that way at the moment.
Is that true, though?
I grant that people are bad about catastrophizing during temporary crises. (You may recall that I suggested that there absolutely be at least a year-long application process to avoid this kind of mistake). And yes, most people who survive a suicide attempt go on to regret the attempt. (Well, actually, I think the phrasing I've always encountered is "regret it", which has an ambiguous anticedent. -.- but I always took it as people regretting the suicide attempt.)
But, so far, people have finite lifespans, and a number of nasty situations can both shorten them and make that time less worthwhile. (You know, I tried looking up the life expectancy of blind people, but I could hardly find any information.)
We're in a wor
ld where there aren't adequate means to learn from mistakes, rather than let something one did as a minor dictate the direction of one's life. Even then, people don't stop making mistakes just because they're older; they just ideally make fewer of them. There's this phrase that gets tossed around: the concept of a "safety net". That is, a "social safety net" (presumably this means friends/family/etc one can count on for support), a "financial safety net" (anything ranging from careful planning to Insurance to wellfare, AIU), etc. What happens when you don't have those? (Of course, being forced to rely on those without any realistic way to improve is pretty depressing, too.)
We're in a world where we simultaneously complain about leaches and bums, but also tell people that suicide is not the answer. (The only answer's people seem to offer instead are "choose to improve", therapy, medication,
religion, and occasionally some "brave cynic" will suggest alcohol or some other dangerous coping strategy. The first one is particularly infuriating because it implies that, at every step of the process, one actively decides "OK, now I'm going to do something risky without thinking about it, and absolutely refuse to try and fix it if it goes wrong! Bwahahaha!")
Although, I feel like I'm just playing hot-potato with blame, and the important part is not whose fault it is, so much as whether or not there is a solution which can be implemented.
Everyone always, always says "it gets better". When it turns out that it nigh always gets worse, one begins to doubt that anyone knows what they're talking about.
I think I am going to turn it around and pull a Pascal here, though. What I want is to live, in the figurative sense. While being stuck with the literal sense is awful, it has much better opportunities for improveme nt than being dead. This sorta feels like a rephrasing of what you said, except it's more like "Life might or might not be worth living, but death is worthless and is currently permanent." but then you have to ask about seeking immortality, since dying willingly for anything other than a heroic sacrifice would be effectively equivalent to suicide, were life extension viable. And I notice this weird thing where people who strongly oppose suicide also oppose immortality, and people who strongly support immortality tend to support keeping in the option of suicide for those inescapable torment scenarios. (At our current levels of technology, the anti-suicide anti-death, anti-immortality approach almost always results in old people having slow and painful deaths. Would that there were better alternatives than "you will live your allotted time, no more, no less", suicide, and cryonics. The first one kills people. The second one kills people even sooner. The third one is expensive and has way too many easy paths to failure to be all that worthwhile, never mind this weird disgust reaction people have to it for reasons beyond my comprehension.)
My second incident was in my first year of university, in which I had no friends, was barely interested in what I was studying, and was failing courses. Again, I knew that even though my life was horrible then, it was still worth living, and I was going to push through that struggle while learning as much about myself as possible.
Hey, me too! Except it was the first two years for some reason.
I could not figure out what changed precisely enough to come up with what to do after I left and things went right back to hell, so I went back and rated each time period on all the factors I could think of. I was actually trying to figure out how diet/exercise/sunlight/air quality affected outcomes, but turns out, the only things that made
a dent long-term were people, having the demo version of Jaws rather than the full version or NVDA, and having some unsubvertable limitations making it impossible to spend all day on the internet. Wouldn't you know it, I can't do anything about those things. Not for lack of trying, mind you.
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