Religion is wrong. We visit sweet, sweet death every night when we go into theta sleep. We don’t notice because we’re not there. By the time we wake up REM has frontloaded so much of our subconscious memory that we don’t even notice that we’re back until Oh! I’m not trying to daredevil-scale my way up a skyscraper and stuck at the twelfth floor.

In Heaven’s River (Bobiverse #4 by Dennis E. Taylor) the characters discuss the caloric needs of intelligence. They mention 35% of caloric intake but that might be for the local intelligent species. Wikipedia says it’s 22% of our caloric intake average when at rest. (If you’re jogging, your legs take up more. Also you may find it harder to do complex math.)

After a long ardent search for the mechanisms by which the material world interacts with the spiritual world, with every religious edifice watching for centuries, we’ve found absolutely nothing. Not a sign of souls or spiritual intelligence. There’s nothing powering the spirit, and there’s nothing powering any spirit’s capacity to think (to remember, to receive and process sensory input, to sense the passing of time, to assess current circumstances, to wonder and ask questions, to follow logic and compute arithmetic… all absent.)

The dead have infinite patience. The universe ends in a blink. They give absolute zero fucks, putting every well-dressed goth to shame. They don’t remember The Cure, or flying buttresses.

Suicide is a big choice, but we can’t rely on religion or spirit to keep us here. We have to find our own reasons to stay in this life, which is why some people choose to kill themselves than face the long dwindling fade of dementia or when spies decide to L-pill rather than be tortured to death (even when they have no intelligence to give) or why people will self-immolate in protest or go on suicide attacks in war, to serve a cause they will never appreciate themselves.

When we are suffering, it’s tempting to unlife impulsively, which is why we have some veterans on gun watch, where a friend will hold their weapon until they’re in a better state.

But when you talk to someone on the brink, they’re staring down jumping out of a burning building. They may soon between choosing between getting extrajudicially detained by the federal government’s round-up-the-undesirables plan or going out on their own terms. The US just actively voted to dispose of millions of undesirables (undesirable according to the guy they just made POTUS and to the transnational white power movement). So you have to make it personal: If you go, I will miss you, and there will be fewer of us to fight the Tigers.

The US has a huge and rising suicide rate, (about 50,000 in 2023 according to CDC. ), and this only includes the ones that succeeded that were reported. About three times that just end up in the ER, or end up recovering without medical care. And the new movement is eager to see more of us dead… in fact, anyone not in the movement; anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.

So we have to make a society that doesn’t compel us to consider death just to escape it. And for now, we have to be that society when we can.