If you could push a button and simply cease to exist, would you press it?

this is the question i used to ask myself when i was lying in bed all day pretending i wasn't contemplating suicide. the answer was yes of course. can still find myself leaning in that direction in unguarded moments but in general it's a definite no, and for the change i am exceedingly grateful.

THere are definitely days when I would. Of late, most of them. But there are days when I wouldn't. "no emotional or financial or other repercussions to the people around you" weights it heavily towards the "yes" column.

I asked this question. This question is not about suicide. It is about not-existing.

Please can people not use this as a suicide thread, that was not the intention and I'd really rather the discussion did not turn that way.

Nope. I would miss out on stuff and that is the worst.

i think if this question is always on your mind and you think "it's ok this is just an impossible hypothetical and i'm not actually contemplating suicide" you're basically fooling yourself that your mental state is better than it is.

("you" = impersonal, would have used "one" but it reads funny.)

Historically speaking, you've already missed out on pretty much everything, and are going to miss out on everything else.

Existence is sometimes awesome, but on the whole it's pretty shit.

I would be very tempted.

Would it be as though I'd never existed? Would the actual world simply be replaced with the nearest alternative world in which there's no me? It's hard to know what exactly that world would be like... George Bailey taught us.

I don't think anyone in this thread has any right to draw conclusions about the mental state of anyone except themselves. Thanks.

Historically speaking, you've already missed out on pretty much everything, and are going to miss out on everything else.

On the one hand, sure.

On the other hand, the only things that matter are the things I'm around to experience, and prematurely shutting things down by ceasing to exist makes a bunch of stuff I care about no longer matter.

I disagree with the op regarding what this thread is about. Luckily death of the author etc.

i'm drawing the conclusion that the southern hemisphere doesn't have toffee crisps, which has got be having a serious quality of life impact tbh

darraghmac, what's your opinion of Double Deckers?

we did that thread last week, thomas!

srsly speaking tho any question that asks about self-annihilation necessitates a discussion of suicide imho

even if it is super special suicide

Isn't it great that there are people on this thread who can mansplain to me what the thread I started is about! Because I would ~never~ have known what was in my head otherwise.

who cares what you think the thread is about is really the point. i would happily "mansplain" 20th century literary theory to you, but i'll let wiki handle that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

if you could push a button and authorial intent would simply cease to exist, would you press it?

^^^ yes

I would only ask:

Do you mean, fade out to nothing, leaving behind no body for someone else to sort out, including yr stuff?

And where to go?

Put it this way, would it be the same as going to some far-flung, ooh, coastal area some place 'west' of here, with enough resources to live on?

?

OK, I've looked at that wiki link, it's beyond my ken...

you lot carry on.

The relevance of suicide depends on how we read the question.

If the effect of the button is that at the moment of pressing I simply vanish, whereas my friends and relatives are magically unafflicted, then it sounds like a peculiarly consequence-free self-killing.

If the effect is to change the world such that I've never existed, then I don't think that suicide is relevant. It's a limit case of the question, "How would you wish for the world to be different?" If the consequence of my wish is that someone isn't born who would otherwise have been born, then I wouldn't regard that as murder.

The act of trying to consider this hypothetical anullment in a hypothetical universe which does not contain the concept of suicide is twisting my poor little brain. I'm out too.

That's not why I'm out, just to clarify.

xp Jim, there's still a active act of self-annihilation involved, for which suicide is still the only relevant analogue.

xp ( sorry Mark, didn't mean to speak for you chap )

a better question is push a button and some OTHER person ceast to exist etc?

― nostormo, Friday, October 12, 2012 7:36 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah being a parent makes this whole question more complicated. does my son cease to exist too? would he just suddenly have another guy as his dad? or no dad? because fuck that w/ any of those scenarios. so maybe not so complicated.

hell no

my life isn't even half as great as it could be right now and i still didn't even have to think about this one

You can't cite death of the author in a discussion, you fucking lugnut. This isn't literature, it's communication.

yeah despite being a major stan for death of the author i dont think it applies here at all

xp I don't see why the thread creator should have any special privilege to police the discussion

and some dude otm. even if it would be ethically okay for me to wipe out my own existence, i don't think i can make that decision for the life that is dependent on my own existence to exist.

what about push a button to freeze everything except yourself?

This was a pretty decent novel, fwiw.

If the It's A Wonderful Life scenario were available, I'd totally want to see what the world would be like without me.

― thomasintrouble

Heh, I'm sure I would be miffed to find out everything was EXACTLY THE SAME.

no. i like existing. dealing with crap that it entails is another thing but really that's the crap's fault not mine.

this, but there were times - not necessarily times of great depression (most memorably walking down a moonlit sunken lane in Sussex in my early twenties) - where I longed for such a button and would have pressed it.

Thought experiment. Pretend it would involve no physical pain to yourself, and no emotional or financial or other repercussions to the people around you. Would you hit the Flag Post button?

i'm assuming for the purpose of this question that the button is ideally consequence free. we can argue that in reality our existence has had consequences for everybody we've ever met and many people we haven't, but i don't need to work out the nuts and bolts of how it wd be possible for me to cease to exist without impacting on those people - it's a given of the question, which is reduced to "do i choose to cease to exist or not, given no consequences ensue from my decision?"

my answer is still no, because in the most simplistic Camus-ian sense, i prefer existing to the alternative.

Nah. I mean I don't contribute anything to the well being of my fellow humans or the planet but I'm not bothered by that. There's always a record to listen to, a TV show to watch, a football match to obsess over. That's more than enough for me to want to exist. Being a shallow sort probably helps.

If a thread-starter asks a question which is "do you prefer red or blue?" you don't get to walk into a thread and declare that actually red is yellow for the purposes of this question and claim "ooh, death of the author."

Especially if that means drawing dubious psychological conclusions about what it means for anyone on the thread who chose "yellow" (when they actually chose red.)

i'm sure i've had a lot of times when i'd've pressed it, maybe. i think i'd've been wrong. (inasmuch as i can speak for an i that isn't me, now - complications!)

but to go back to something else i thought upthread, i think i'd be comfortable with a consequence-less removal from the world of other people as long as i cd go on experiencing, including experiencing that world, without belonging to it.

what if the thread-starter asks: 'if you could eliminate yellow or blue, which would you eliminate?' and someone declares that eliminating any one of those colors would also eliminate idk green (if i remember my primary and secondary colors correctly?) and then the thread starter said: "NO. ONLY ELIMINATING THOSE COLORS DON'T TELL ME HOW TO FEEL"

Thought experiment. Pretend any hypothetical situation in which you cause yourself to "simply cease to exist" can be discussed without ever referring to suicide.

maybe it's like that dr who thing where the crack in the wall eats you and then everyone forgets you ever existed.

'if you could eliminate yellow or blue, which would you eliminate?'

blue. man city. obvious.

Mordy, you're a total arsehole and I wish you would cease to exist. Or at least keep your unpleasantness off threads that I start. Can you please just go away and just not do this, for once?

If you can't do that, I'm going to ask for the thread to be locked, because I'm really, really sick of this.

Get over yourself.

I'm becoming completely serious, before you start with your "oh noes, women be being emotional" garbage again. Please just stop this.

always, always include a poll option that states ”YOUR OPTIONS DON'T INCLUDE MY PERSONAL CHOICE YOU THOUGHTFASCIST” is the key rule imo

WCC, any issue I have with you has nothing to do your gender.

fwiw, I don't really have an issue with you except that you love to escalate ILX arguments. I don't even have a problem with that tho! Go with god.

Please let there never be such a thing, because it'd be on my desk and I would get absorbed in something and absentmindedly p

not until i finish final fantasy vii, the wheel of time and another thousand toffee crisps

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Friday, October 12, 2012 5:28 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

good god, did you ever defeat Sephiroth???!?

destiny is calling me
open up my eager eyes

Long thread, didn’t read it all, maybe already been noted, but OP “does not exist in the ilx database.”

Kinda makes you thi— aw, never mind

lol

OP's still here occasionally, in a different guise, so there's life after death after all.

Really? Strange. iirc, the OP has left ILX at least four or five times, each time seemingly convinced they'd never return. This place has a weird effect on people.

they've been perma-banned now

had the decision made for them ig

i've very much grown fond of the "button" thought experiment

not in the form posed by white chocolate cheesecake, that's just anti-natalism adjacent. i experimented with antinatalism for a while, but mostly i just think cioran is fucking hilarious. that dude was seriously funny.

the version of the thought experiment that was most important to me was "if you could press a button and become a cis woman, would you?"

i'm framing it this way because i want to center the binary bias. i heard it as "a cis member of the opposite gender", which isn't a framing i'm into, i don't think of the idea of two genders _or_ "opposite" genders. i do come from a generation where i know a lot of women who genuinely wish they were cis. i don't know if a lot of zoomers think that... anyway, the only way to live with that, i think, is radical acceptance.

personally, i love not being cis. i can't think of any point since my egg cracked that i would have pressed that button. i've seen the framing help a lot of people, get past a lot of imposter syndrome. you ask a lot of questioning people that, and they'd push it without having to think about it, just instantaneously, it's not a question they have to think about. it helps with... a lot of the "questioning" is just imposter syndrome, people gatekeeping themselves. people don't need answers, they need permission. i guess that's a lot of the "button" framing... it's an acceptable way to ask these questions.

---

re: the original question... "do i _want_ to exist?" is a... to me, it's a dodge, it takes something personal and makes it impersonal. to me the real question is "am i happy being alive". if the answer is "no", that's something a person can _do_ something about individually. i don't mean that someone can choose to be happy. if i'm unhappy, though, there are paths i can pursue.

having said that life often hurts for me. it hurts a lot. i do wonder a lot if life is worth it, do often wish that i could disappear. passive suicidal ideation, it's called. people can argue all they want about whether it's actually suicidal... i think the clinical consensus _is_ that it's a form of suicidality... certainly it's my bias, it's my feeling. as someone who has struggled with suicidality for most of her life. often that suicidality expresses itself passively.

the tension is that i have, for pretty much my entire life, wanted very much to _not_ kill myself. that's the dialectical tension there. if i just disappear i don't have to deal with the fact that i want to _not_ kill myself, i can tell myself i'm not. i'm not hurting the people around me and... if i'm hurting myself, it's instantaneous and painless. by removing myself from existence, i _would_ be hurting myself and the people around me... it's just that none of us would know it.

grossly unfair. grossly unfair and even cruel. to oneself. considering others... considering others, in a situation like this, is... when i'm in that situation it's easier to care about other than it is to care about myself. i can't ever hate other people the way i can hate myself. i can learn to love myself, though, and that... there's no dialectic there. the whole "love is stronger than hate" glurge... there's truth to it for me. when i feel both self-love and self-hatred, the self-love is so so much stronger as to make the self-hatred... just fundamentally meaningless.

it's one of those things where if i allow myself the choice, there's... it's so lopsided as to not seem like a choice at all. once i truly allowed myself to _ask_ the "should i transition" question, frame it genuinely, it was the same way... it didn't even seem like a _question_, even though it was, in fact, a genuine question.

---

the point is the meme version of "the button" is one i really love a lot... it's a drawing by someone named jake clark.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/daily-struggle-two-buttons

it intersects really well with the "why not both?" meme, also really popular among... i mean i'm gonna be really honest a lot of the people i know have executive dysfunction and just hate making choices. is all.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both