I know there’s already a suicide thread, but this is more of a philosophical thread. I don’t want to ask, “How should you kill yourself?” or “Should you kill yourself?” but rather, “When should one kill oneself?” or really more of a “Shouldn’t EVERYONE consider eventually committing suicide?” And I also wanted to bounce these thoughts around because it’s not exactly like you can have a straightforward conversation with your mom about suicide.
Let’s say I have a desktop computer that I really, really like. I have the games and all the files on it that I want. As time marches on, I’ll have to do repairs on the computer. A power cord might fray, a power supply might go out. A floppy drive will need to be cleaned up. A hard drive will slowly pick up bad sectors. At some point, the net present value of expected repairs exceeds the cost of a new computer. However, say I’m really attached to this thing, and I march on. Eventually, as components become more and more difficult to find, the cost of singular components become more than a brand new computer. And, at some point in age, maintaining a truly authentic, original computer to the one I like begins to exponentially increase in cost. Into the far future, the infrastructure supporting development of old motherboards in an age of quantum computing, would require me to develop an old-school chip processing fabrication shop just to maintain this old computer. At some point, and although that may be far, FAR into the future, the cost simply becomes too much to be justified.
If I perform the same actuarial analysis on the human body, there likewise appears to be an exponential degradation. For the vast majority of people between their 20s to 30s, medical procedures are relatively benign. But, as time marches on, eventually someone gets a bad knees. They stop exercising, the medical problems begin piling on, then they get a heart attack that sets back their mental function to that of an 8th grader for a few years, then they get cancer, and so on. There’s a similar exponential takeoff in cost to keeping our human bodies running.
One strategy is that you could save as much resources as possible, or move somewhere where medical procedures are much more plentiful and cheaper, but even then the same principle applies. There’s an ultimate limit on the available resources available to you, and medical problems grow at an accelerating rate as one ages(*), no matter where one lives
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