suicide note manifesto

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this guy shot himself at harvard

here is the article

and here is the 1,905 page suicide note he left online.

suicide note manifesto pdf

interesting.

That is not a note. That's a suicide tome.

indeed

Yeah....


I'm gonna wait for the sparknotes... or maybe the sparknotes of the sparknotes.

And no one noticed anything weird during the writing of the 1900+ pages?

Sounds interesting just reading the table of contents, maybe I'll give it a whirl, got nothing else to do.

It's strange that something similar to this was apart of a concept I had for a movie.

tl;dr

A 1900 page suicide note is a decidedly unnihilistic gesture.

Last edited by wornlight on 25 Sep 2010, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

How'd he kill himself? Old age?

I just got done reading the first 100 pages....WOW, is all I got to say, I'm not a big reader of philosophy or anthropology works, but this hit the spot for me.

Gawd DAMN! I can understand people wanting to leave behind the reason for their deaths, but 1905 pages?! I'd say he was writing his autobiography, but I can't see how a student who offs himself at 18-25 has enough life experiences to fill two thousand pages, especially if he used a word processor. Written, maybe.

he was 35.
i've read the first fifty pages, and it is interesting so far.

Golly!

Thanks for the links.

Just read the first tenth or so, and the last chapter, plus excerpts between them.

I don't understand why he killed himself. If he was convinced of the equal value of life and death why did he feel the need to do anything to change his state from one to the other?

Sounds like someone out of his head on casein and gluten food opioid peptides to me! :lol Hardly aware of being in a body at all. Sounds like someone for whom the world is entirely in their head, two dimensional, virtual, a MMORPG. He switched the game off.

Was interested to see him struggling with the issues of objectivity and subjectivity, but I think that he missed something. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression ( from what I did read ) that he still believed in free will; that he may have managed to convince himself that life was of no more value than death, but that a huge part of his dilemma and decision to kill himself were the result of taking free will for granted. ie. He still believed that his ( "self"-invested ) "I" was some sort of sovereign power which could only be annihilated by killing his physical self.

He mistook his thoughts for his body.

I agree with him though about the fundamental paradox or inconsistency at the heart of every single philosophical system/framework, the forever solepsistic nature of all thought, and how if one is actually able to hold onto that understanding, even for a microinstant, it makes one laugh and laugh and laugh. Any thought/belief system taken to its extreme is like a piece of ice which turns into water and flows away whenever try to hold it. It won't stay still, won't stay the same; it's a slippery fish.

The only reason that I can think of for his having killed himself is that he was rather "full" of his idea, overflowing with it, with not being heard or believed, and wanted to "make a point", and yet ... why would he want to make a point? He pretends to believe in nothing, to believe that nothing has meaning, that nothing has more value than anything else ... and yet he acted. He did not simply stop eating, drinking, washing, going to the toilet ... .

He exposed his own "bad faith", the extent of his pretence, by killing himself; he proved that he was not indifferent at all. He proved that he did not believe ( or fully understand ) what he was saying.

What his body actually did showed that what he really believed was that death was preferable to life ... or that his ideas were worth dying for, neither of which beliefs he expressed in his "note".
.

He talks a bit about Asperger's on page 1859.

I noticed that.

He seemed to be wondering if it was perhaps a factor in his philosphical inclinations but had decided that it was not enough to explain "away" or "dismiss/invalidate/devalue" his belief systems.

I thought that he seemed confused about the whole issue of biological vs environmental influences, ... using them to explain everything but still apparently believing in an "I" that could act independently of them, and perhaps he killed himself because unconsciously he wanted to prove that it could. ... prove that he had an "I" above biology, as if biology had never induced an animal to self-destruct. No way did he believe that nothing had meaning!

I can believe that he was in some serious "existential pain"; trying to hold onto his belief in free will, etc, while "seeing" the extent to which biology and so on determines civilisation, individual actions, etc.

I didn't "get" the solution to that particular conundrum until a couple of years ago, aged 44; but it had been "bothering" me for ... well, if I include the first questions, ( stuff like "if tried to live against one's genes", which he reports thinking aswell, "what would it feel like?" and an ex-catholic friend's reply; "that the devil is described as being in unending agony", etc ), 17 years! :lol So I can see why he wrote so much! :lol

But I'm not sure that there is even anything good to be said for his suicide publicising his "book", because the suicide proves that he didn't actually believe what he wrote, which is pretty sad/pathetic.
.

I thought the bits about how god doesn't exist until we create him, the part that explains biological=natural and post-biological=supernatural, and how the Ten Commandments by Moses was a great attempt(although not the symbolic first) at bring people closer to one day devising a real God were interesting. Had some parts that kind of paralleled with the book The Singularity is Near.

If I were to commit suicide, I wouldn't write an entire book about it. I'd just say "I hate my life. I'm going to kill myself". How long did it take him to write that massive "note" anyways?