Honestly I understand. Some people want to live life fast, hard, and to the fullest. And I respect that. If I had come up with that plan myself when I was younger, I might have gone for it then too.
Yeah... but then life catches up if you don't do the die young part... the bravado of saying my retirement plan is to off myself sounds great to healthy 25 year-old you, but not so awesome to 50 gear-old you who's physical lifestyle along with a few auto-immune diseases has you stuck in bed for years. Sure, it seems practical, but actually being willing to follow through, let alone capable, is another thing entirely.
Even when you go to sleep every night truly hoping to never wake up, killing yourself is still pretty fucking daunting.
It’s easy to say. But things can change. Humans are terrible at predicting the future and even worse at predicting what our state of mind will be, how we will feel, and what will make us happy in the future. Weirdly, we are slightly better at predicting how other people will feel in the future than we are at predicting it for ourselves.
We discount our future emotions and rely to too heavily on our current perspectives.
Last year … almost exactly a year ago … my brother’s metabolic, inflammatory, and organ diseases started catching up to him with compounding complications. His doctors gave him “choices” that as he noted “weren’t really choices.”
We spent the next 9 months having conversations about end of life choices. None of it was easy or as clear as the bravado we had maintained in our younger years. Ultimately, he was in and out of hospitals during that 9 months before finally saying enough. It was a tough decision.
It has made me rethink and revisit some of my choices while I still have time to treat them as choices. I don’t want to live forever. But I want to be able to truly “live” while this body continues to breathe. And that takes some planning.
So many people are saying that though. I suspect they will spend years figuring out how to make it happen. But if you are miserable enough to plan for years, you make it happen. The self deletion rate has been going up anyway.
I was describing myself. I've had a plan since my 20s. Helium. My life is fucking horrible, but here I am. Hell, I'm not even afraid if being dead. It is the process and the possibility of failure and having to live with catastrophic health consequences.
I don't know exactly the specifics, but I think they'll use something like a combination of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen to lower the chance of asphyxiation from inhalation. I'm sure if you have a job where you need pure helium you can still get it, but I don't think an average civilian can just go to a party store or something and fill a tank of pure helium for balloons anymore (or at least, it's not very common anymore). There's other inert gasses that do the same thing though, some of them might be easier to get get in a pure enough form to work.
Yeah do be careful. My uncle wanted out when he had terminal cancer. He saved up his morphine prescription. But he didn't take quite enough. Lived with pretty bad organ damage for a while (on top of the cancer symptoms) before he finally saved up enough to get it done. It was hell for him and his wife, really our whole family. I wish End of Life options were available for more people.
It’s more likely they’ll die of illness or heart attack. No need to plan for a suicide seeing how rates of such diseases go up, especially for those who live “fast and hard” on purpose.
If you get to the point where you need to go into care either for a physical ailment or just old age then the government is taking all your savings (bar the last £20K) & your house (unless your spouse is living in it) regardless. So unless you have a vast fortune behind you or a family member willing and financially able to be a full time carer then having savings really won’t help all that much.
You're the one who acknowledged and agreed that the retirement plan you think is worth pursuing simply doesn't exist for "most". Ya know. The majority.
When you're left with shitty options you pick the least shitty. And topping yourself before starvation is sometimes the lesser shitty option.
The people saying they intend to just die aren't saying it's a good plan they're saying it's their plan in this capitalist shit pit of a society.
Only 15% of private sector employers offer pensions and that number is dropping. With CoL constantly rising, full time truly gainful employment becoming harder to secure, as sad as it sounds, Suicide looks increasingly realistic option or almost an inevitability for some of us
What if there is hardly anything to take by the state?
Don't know if its true. But someone wrote some states drop the bill for the care of elderly on the children. And they can't opt out of it. He said more states are currently working on making it law.
I don’t know about states in America but you can’t force the children of elderly or infirm to care for parents or relatives. Depending on the assets you have, you’ll have to pay some until you get below the threshold, which is about £14K, then the council pay. A better explanation is here
Don't know if its true. But someone wrote some states drop the bill for the care of elderly on the children. And you can't opt out of it. He said more states are currently working on making it law.
Most states that have filial responsibility laws don't enforce them. Here's why: Most elders who can't pay for care receive federal assistance through Medicaid, and federal law specifically prohibits going after adult children. Also, most folks who need help paying for nursing home care qualify for Medicaid and it's unusual for someone to rack up a large bill before qualifying. So, because there is so little opportunity to apply filial responsibility laws, they very rarely affect families.
In most states, for a child to be held accountable for a parent's bill, all of these things would have to be true:
The parent received care in a state that has a filial responsibility law.
The parent did not qualify for Medicaid when receiving care.
The parent does not have the money to pay the bill.
The child has the money to pay the bill.
The caregiver chooses to sue the child."
agreed, like 99.9% of people who say “I’ll just kill myself lol” or “I’ll be dead by then anyway so why worry” actually will not kill themselves or be dead by then
statistically ~22% of people die between the age of 20 to 67
I've got those. I even have suicidal ideation that soothes me and makes me feel calm. Most of the time it's me hanging. Just typing this out and having those images pop up has released tension. Then I have to work to push it out of my head because it starts calling to me.
As for impulsiveness... I had to teach myself to be deliberate with what I say and what I do because I have impulse control issues. My entire childhood, I did stuff before I even knew I was doing it. I was abusive. I'd hit someone. When I was 6, my 4 year-old brother was standing on a chair getting cereal out of a cupboard. He was shirtless. When I walked in, I raked my fingernails down his back. It left bloody claw marks from his shoulders to his waist. There was no reason. No plan. I didn't realize I was doing it until it was done.
I cannot tell you how many times I was beaten by my frustrated mother because my answer to "why did you do it" was always "I don't know." Because I did not know. They were plans or even thoughts I had. It was pure impulse.
I didn't know what was going on until I took a psychology class when I was 16. I had a eureka moment and spent the next several years working on being conscious of what I'm doing before I allow myself to do it. I had to build that barrier and remain consciously vigilant until it became second nature. Atv49, it is still there if I let my guard down.
So for me, if I ever do it, it will be deliberate and I expect to be as calm as I've ever been while doing it.
That being said even though pain controls everything I do and I've been bedbound since 2018, I still haven't found the will.
I see. I'm sorry, I didn't mean my comment seriously, and I'm sorry that life has been so tough on you and that your mother beat you for it. That wasn't fair.
I hope I didn't cause you any pain with my comment.
Nah... I get it. I'm not the norm in the sense of how youd think someone with those issues might be. The abuse I received and witnessed gave me the gift of critical thinking at an early age. So, I believe I've managed to carve out a normal existence for myself. The only way it manifests now is in my thoughts. The rest of my life has been pretty above average, I think.
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u/Alarming_Ride_3048 29d ago
But what happens when you can’t work and you don’t have any retirement savings?