3 Reasons Not to Want to Live and 3 to Do So

Image: Cayetano Gil, Unsplash

People are engaged with their own lives. The busier, the better. It deprives them of the need to think about life itself. This is good. Life is a difficult subject.

I want to make things easy for you. I have thought about life. Don’t ask me why because explaining that would take hours, and I’m not that interesting.

I’ll give you three reasons why you should not want to live. Not “should” as in “you’re not permitted to live” but “should” as in “If you’re sane, you wouldn’t want to.”

After that, I’ll give you three reason why you should want to live. Again, take "should" with the above caveats. And don’t worry. All ends well here. But there’s the rub: all ends nonetheless.

As I narrate those reasons here, you can eat your cereal before going to the office.

1. Life is meaningless. This is a difficult truth to accept. But trust me, for millennia now, smart minds have been busy discovering that meaning. They’ve produced a mean body of work, but no meaning. And without meaning, there’s no point in being alive. This is called nihilism.

2. Everything ends. You, me, the neighbor lady, Mandela, apple pie, the 9th symphony of Beethoven, birthdays, friendship, the sun, the earth, the universe. Finitude and decay are eating away everything. There’s a black hole at the center of our hearts, in which everything continuous to disappear until nothing is left. Soon, there won’t be anyone to remember you. This is also nihilism.

3. We grow old. Growing old is like being in a stagecoach in the Wild West era that comes to a grinding halt in the middle of the prairie. You are surrounded by bandits and there’s no way out. The stagecoach is your body and your body is the bandit, your adversary. You are your own body, and your body is the thief of your life. I suppose, this too, is nihilism.

But there are also reasons to want to be alive. These are inversely proportional to the reasons to not want to live.

1. Growing old is not something only your body does. You age as a thinking animal. Sometimes you’re lucky. With the advancing years, you develop wisdom. The older, the wiser. Perhaps you can be of benefit to other people. Changes are you will because as thinking animals, human beings have surprisingly little wisdom.


2. Everything is a process, and processes begin and end. It is wonderful to finish a good book or to end a journey with a homecoming. Similarly, it is beautiful to complete a life well-lived with death. Then it is finished. You are not a thing, but a process, a journey, a piece of art that waits to find completion, and completion is only in death.


3. Life is meaningful. But to see this, you first need to acknowledge that life is meaningless. The only reason that we suffer from the meaninglessness of existence is because we look at ourselves as entities that require continuation. When we can let go of the focus on our own self, the fear of mortality, non-existence, and oblivion dissipate.


This way, we can make ourselves available for others. As long as my process is not finished, I can do something worthwhile with my existence. Such as helping other people.

All of a sudden, life is meaningful. Instead of suffering at our own mortality, we see the time ahead of us as a storage barn of goodness to be shared.

Alright, your cereal is finished. Have a lovely day at the office!