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I encountered a post from a random Facebook account. While the Facebook account, called "Ysten Zizek," never provides the user's real identity, one of its post about life and death is particularly revealing, not just because it mentions suicide, but also because it reflects censored voices on the suicide issue. Suicide is an anomaly in the animal world, as no non-human animals have ever been confirmed to actively and consciously hasten its own death. The world "suicide" itself is also divisive because if how it is defined, ranging from "self-killing" to "consciousy causing one's own death." Also take note that French writer Albert Camus implied in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (ISBN 0-679-73373-6) that suicide is the most serious issue in human philosophy.
People around the globe opposed, prohibited, and criminalized suicide, with limited success. This was because they targeted the outputs of suicide but did not pay attention to the causes. From a more objective perspective, institutional and systemic cruelty is what drives people towards sucide. Closer looks into human survival instincts would suggest that the human species is hardwired for comfort and ease. Human anatomy clearly implies that the human animal is not designed to endure suffering. The resilience trope only serves to distract people from their defenseless nature. To reduce suicide more effectivly, humanity as a whole should abandon the resilience cult and accept their vulnerable nature. There are ideas that readily accept and accommodate the defenseless and comfort-oriented nature of the human animal; people should adopt such ideas should they ever see one. On Twitter/X, when you search "stop romanticizing suffering," you can see posts aplenty that criticize the resilience trope and urge the acceptance of the survival instinct to prioritize comfort and avoid pain. There is a post that says, "Master the art of ease and you will see true power unleash."
Now, I would like to show you the text that I collected from Ysten Zizek's suicide post. Due to the anonymity of the Facebook account, I could not verify the authenticity of the text and the author's context behind it. The text so concerned is incredibly nihilistic, as the final paragraph implies that death is final. I encourage you to check out Wikipedia's philosophy of suicide article (live article, might differ significantly from the November 2025 snapshot). Some philosophy or philosopher might have indirectly influenced Ysten Zizek's view of suicide.
The text by Ysten Zizek
I hate the idea of being born. The very notion of existence makes me sick. It's no more consoling if a person accommodates my experience and thinks for themselves as if they have any reasons in the world to find existence delightful and bearable worthy of such endurance. It's as if they have discovered the meaning of life in the high mountains, icy stones, and serene valleys and were eager to share it among their compatriots; the will to self-preservation for a higher purpose. It becomes more terrifying than one may imagine how the life-affirming individual is ignorant of the world's indifference towards them. They rarely acknowledge the motivators and motions that drive them to suffer, yet they suffer, and that suffering turns into a cowardly neglect of pain, transforming into a more familiar, adaptive experience of inspiration. The seemingly futile struggle becomes a dance with their own demons. Through the intricate choreography of existence, they waltz through highs and lows, striving to find meaning in the abyss of uncertainty.
They, however, find their suffering necessary under the guise that every inflicted pain—sickness, poverty, loss of sight, or reason—means an end. Every work that a person does under the sun's rays seeks compensation, serving an underlying purpose for the object of their will against suffering to not be in vain. Take for instance, a man that works tirelessly and expects to be rewarded for his hard work. If he, isn't rewarded, he feels as though his fate has forsaken him. He would do anything to seek atonement if he had the power to do so. He would destroy the things that wronged him, or cripple the values which his civilization established, or altogether destroy it. One who otherwise has no means of power to leverage against their fate would turn it into their equal or become an ally behind it instead of its despiser. Such is the condition with every civilization that has existed and will exist, their loathing for Nature turn into devotion. They develop emotional attachments to the things that govern and exploit them alongside their negative feelings towards them—first they fear them, humanized them, personify them, and then worship them.
At last, we feel the moral resignation of our fate. Who is the individual that has not questioned whether their existence has any meaning at all? If the concept of God no longer holds and life no longer has meaning, then it becomes necessary to construct a new sense of meaning ourselves. Despite the advances that civilization has made in providing and mitigating the existential risks posed by nature, death still remains a mystery, uncharted by the territory of medical science. It is indeed a captivating that all cultures, individuals, and societies spend a great deal of energy trying to avoid it. Death stares at man's suffering, with a terrible intention to make them cease to exist at any time. It is a bleak reminder of the inevitable conclusion of existence, a fleeting verse in the grand ballad of life. By humanizing heaven, the forces of nature which time and time again, strike them down and let them rise, they were liberated from the terrifying fear of an omnipotent nonsense. The Immobilizing forces which were worshipped elsewhere were familiarized as a projection of man's ideals, the perfection of moral values, the perfection of everything that is human, the things which were not available to them inverted, and now, in God's domain. God becomes the robbery of their imagination; man has created God in their own image.
While some embraced the sentence of death, others rebel against it and think that it could not be true—
- "There must be something higher than this life!"
- "A place where everything is fixed, a realm where suffering doesn't exist! A place of luxury and ease, where every Romeo obtains his Juliet at once and without any difficulty!"
What makes existence interesting is the unsatisfied urge that needs to be satisfied: pain to the relentless pursuit of pleasure, loneliness to companionship, suffering to well-being, and preservation against death. Arts, ideals, and sports provide a certain amount of satisfaction within every civilization, but they won't amount to anything when compared to the highest satisfaction obtained in an ideal place where everything is equal and all the urges that arose immediately satisfied—a paradise. How would men occupy themselves if not for these urges that motivate them? The underprivileged who envy the privileged ones? They who motivate them to free themselves from the excessive lack and sought for the attainment of better conditions. In such a state of affairs, man will either kill themselves or die of boredom.
Like most living beings, our aversion to death is obvious in every respect. We desire continuous existence even beyond the flesh. Reflecting upon the motivations of every civilization that chooses to progress demonstrates this inclination to exist further. If an individual no longer seeks more and instead chooses to dispose of themself, they are either too old to meet the demands of life and now satisfied, or they are young who succumbed to the loss of meaning and no longer want to advance any further. What gives life meaning? When the echoes of our desires fade, we find that meaning lies not in the pursuit of something great but in the quiet acceptance of the present moment. When we are faced with the inevitability of our circumstances we focused on our most immediate needs rather than distant dreams, valuing even the smallest comforts in front of us and finding such thoughts about it fulfilling. Today, there are a growing number of individuals who possess the means to live, yet they often struggle to find the means to live for. Since the primary goal of our existence has long diminished and been replaced with a commoditized environment, we find that the pursuit and demands of material comforts and societal expectations leave an existential void within—a void that can't be filled by mere possessions alone.
Indeed one can be the richest man on earth, yet still feel an overwhelming angst for their existence. They are routinely checked by the obscurities behind the glittering facade of success, without ever touching the profound truth hiding beneath the mask of flattery and veneers. The purposelessness chasm failed to be filled by external worth, and the substantial amount of pain and suffering that surrounds them echoes in their deaf ears. They convince themselves that everything is according to a served purpose while battling an internal turmoil that threatens to consume them anytime. It's no wonder, then, that every man who has achieved a considerable amount of success is never whole. They never feel satisfied with what they have, nor do the poor feel happy with their riches or the things they lack. Man strives to acquire and focus on the predicaments of their follies. Their struggles and failures amplify, the poor learn the best way to cope with their failures to acquire is to accept what they can't have, the rich learn to balance wealth with philanthropy some driven by self-interest, while the rest take it as a responsibility. The underprivileged develop a relationship with their fate, finding fulfillment by accepting what they can control in the present moment while others try to exert power over it. Wealth can never certainly buy true happiness, by "happiness," I meant being satisfied without ever wanting. What's the first thing a man does when they acquire wealth? It is not to satisfy their wishes? What about the second time? The third time? And so on. These insatiable wishes are never satisfied. But it can make life awfully comfortable while being miserable from ontological and cosmic meaninglessness.
"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain
The very notion of dying always puts a halt in our minds. We constantly distract ourselves, directing our energy into the things that promise a semblance of permanence. We immortalize loved ones, through photographs, capturing uplifting and lower moments while they are still present by our side, we get a job pinned to the hours of work, watch time fly, and are rewarded with occasional vacations as an escape from the monotonous hardships that come with life, provisioning a structured routine and a sense of purpose in order not to lose the illusion of meaning that we created. These frozen fragments of time serve as windows into the past; they allow us to look at the moments that have slipped away, moments where great memories reside. It's as if, for a brief second, we strive to defy the ebbing tide of time itself, consoling ourselves with every second that passes, and trying to make it not the last. Others tell us with much enthusiasm—
"Enjoy life! You're too young, there are a lot of things you can do! Life is short!"
It's these mementos that's holding us to the lifeline of these memories that shaped the person we are today. When a loved one departs, whether it's a family member, friend, or dear colleague, we find ourselves consumed by profound grief. We wish for that final opportunity to embrace them before they are gone, wishing we had been present when they needed us the most, often pondering if there was more we could have done. We wish the situation were a bit different, even if the end result remains unchanged. We wish we had more time to spend the last time we were with them; we wish everything were different. We wish they didn't die hating us; we wish we had treated them differently, and been more gentle and understanding. I think it's all the wishes we could have done. But they're wishes nonetheless. When one thinks about their lives after they were gone, the principles, beliefs, values, loves, losses, hopes, dreams, fears, and regrets on the hourglass of existence, nothing of it remains.
Nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition, are there prohibitions on suicide. In particular, neither in the Christian accounts of the New nor Old Testaments is there disapproval of killing oneself. If life is a gift from god but one that cannot be refused then it ceases to be a gift but a debt. One needs only to look at the logic of the pacifism of this statement: "Thou shalt not kill!" In order to understand how defective a moral prohibition of this kind is. It's evident that there is nothing in the world to which a man is more entitled to than their own life. If we assume that life is not a divine gift, free from the charges of superstition, a much more rational argument may arise from this notion; existence, involving care, nourishment, and upbringing, is often seen as a gift parents gave upon their offspring. This establishes a relation of moral debt—an obligation from the child to the parents—which is reciprocated through acts of filial devotion. When one's existence is viewed from this particular angle, it implies the need to acknowledge that one is born with burden of moral responsibility: a duty to care for one's own parents in old age, an object needed to be subjected to others' will. For example, the mention of grandchildren is often used to support the idea of having children. The absence of which is frequently expressed in terms of the fear of dying alone, "walang mag-aalaga" ("no one will take care"). From this argument, the challenges of having children tend to outweigh the benefits that parents can derive from them.
Critics of suicide often follow this similar line of moral precepts: the person who kills themselves violates duties they have towards others. In medieval Europe, for example suicide was not only morally condemned but also criminalized. This stemmed from the fact that the person who took their own life thereby deprived the king of one of his subjects, as they had a moral debt to serve him. It is considered wrong if one takes their own life in general because it deprives others of interests—whether to God, one's parents, or a king. It's a theft from those who own them, making it worthy of despised and frowned faces. A possible aspect to consider is that suicide affects the emotional state of family members, the moral community, or the material well-being of the state. The reasoning stems from the notion that the overall well-being of the community or the state hinges on the productive contributions of every individual involved. Therefore, its participants have an obligation to contribute—a duty that is clearly violated by suicide. Even if, in such circumstances, the community or the state does have an interest in each of its participants, it is likely that the interest each individual has in themselves will outweigh the state’s interest in them. If life has become burdensome to the point where continued existence is not in their best interest, it's hard to see how the state’s interest in their continued life would be sufficient to benefit themselves or others, to render suicide wrong.
Another argument often shove against the throat of the permissibility of suicide is possibly the most common one, even Plebians appreciated its sensibility—the rationality of suicide. A madman who kills themself often presents a fairly reasonable excuse: the self-destruct inherent in human nature is no longer suppressed by societal prohibitions, the renunciation of instincts, and the privation turns into a form of deprivation. Thus, anybody who kills themselves is a madman—individuals who lose sight of reason and are now devoid of rationality under this conception. But it's worth pointing out how we can distinguish rational choices from irrational ones. Someone might be irrational by adopting means that do not lead to their desired ends. As an example, a madman who commits suicide under the provision that they do not possess the mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong, that forego any prospect of their future, if they are competent to understand what future can potentially serve them. On the other hand, eating is a rational choice for the reason it is clearly a means of attaining one's end—in order, to avoid starvation and death. It's obvious therefore, that not every suicide is done on a rational basis. But it should also be equally clear that suicide can often be entirely rational under the "ends-means" conception of rationality. Gelian Bennett serves as an example of suicide carried out on this precept. If one's end is to escape the burdens of life that can only be evaded by ending oneself, then suicide is rational. The burden of life does not obscure the mind to render sound judgment regarding whether to kill oneself or not. The decision about whether life is worth continuing is independent of the agencies of rational choice. Involuntary euthanasia is one example of this. In this state, the burdens faced might not necessarily cloud one's thinking but bring it into sharper focus.
Do I ever think that what comes to my mind warrants others to commit suicide? If they ever do, I hope their suffering and pain they feel will be worth more than death. After all, our natural fear of death ensures that only after careful deliberation and assessment of our future prospects will we have the courage and clarity of mind to consider ending our lives. A common conception held by everyone is that suicide is immoral by reason they believe it to be cowardly. This belief is largely influenced by religious teachings, which often emphasize concepts like repentance and accountability. Judas's death is often interpreted as an attempt to escape responsibility for his actions and the guilt he felt after betraying his teacher. But figures like Socrates or Samson are rarely thought of in this same light, calling it martyr doom, killing oneself for a cause. The objection is that suicide is the easy way out to a way to escape problems. To some extent that's true. I already addressed this reason in the preceding parts; life is an inescapable and never ending problem of wanting. This conception may resonate with some who have a poor sense of what courage means, believing that those who always face-to-face with the monsters head-on are always acting out of courage. But a more precise analysis of what is courageous, imply that the relentless embrace of danger and hardship is often stupidity rather than courage. Rushing thoughtless into danger or confronting challenges when there is no potential gain is not an act of bravery but rather stupidity.
In circumstances where suicide is warranted, meaning that death is a better choice than ongoing suffering, it becomes reasonable not to continue living, at least from a practical standpoint. If there is also no unselfish reason to keep living, it becomes a wise choice instead of a cowardly action. There are conditions where suicide is the most courageous decision, perhaps the most courageous of all. Despite our strong drive to live, people cling very tightly to the lifeline of life every day. Only those who are brave enough can muster the courage to let go. When our hands slowly become weary from holding on too tightly and it is no longer wise to cling to life, we lose our grip. By participating in the battle of life, one already wins half of it; one just chooses to surrender wisely. Whenever individuals cling to life, it is not solely because of their courage of wanting to exist but because they cannot bring themselves to put an end to their lives. To put it simply, their lack of courage prevents them from taking that step. In situations where one's life lacks value, summoning the courage to defy our instinct to self-preserve and end one's life becomes an act of great bravery.
"Why is there need to weep over parts of life? The entirety of it calls for tears."
—Seneca
Why weep about individual matters when life in its entirety is filled with misery? Why mourn a single death when every life eventually succumbs to it? Life has no consoling aspect except the fact that all things brought into this world have only one inevitable course: death.
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