Observations from Someone No Longer Suicidal

I didn't know Aaron Swartz. His Wikipedia page lists a number of do-gooder organizations he was involved in helping to create and he died by suicide at age 26.

I've mentioned him in a couple of posts, one on this site. I wasn't there on Hacker News when he asked for financial help and they said no, he's got plenty of money because they didn't know the courts had locked it up.

I know that's how it went because Hacker News can't heal. They do a memorial every year, still wounded by the incident. 

I'm terrible at navigating Twitter and once replied to someone on Twitter trying to explain to some random internet stranger who he was and failed to remove Aaron's mother from my reply. She kind of lectured me about not knowing what I was talking about.

I don't think I replied to her. It was my faux pas in not removing her from the reply list when I really had no desire to be addressing her and she had no idea who I was.

I attempted suicide at age 17. I spent a lot of years suicidal and I've thought a lot about what lands people there.

It's probably not the case that his do-gooder bent is unrelated to his suicide. People desperately trying to make the world a better place are typically people who in some way feel deeply damaged and never good enough.

He was 26 when he died and he was very high profile and successful for someone so young and also involved in multiple activist organizations pushing hard for positive change as if nothing was ever good enough for this young man.

I know my backstory, growing up in an emotional war zone because my father was a Vietnam vet and my mother grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. And I was molested.

I chose to walk away from a prestigious scholarship and the opportunity to attend a world-class university. I wanted to know who I was or whom I could become if I refused to remain the bitchy, sarcastic smart kid hated on by everyone in school for being smart because the teachers designed it that way with their lying bullshit claims that my accomplishments reflected well on their teaching ability and was evidence the other kids weren't trying hard enough. 

Reddit seems to have long struggled with monetization. It was probably dreamed up as another high-minded idealistic do-gooder project with a decision to make it a business and figure out how to make money with it tacked on later.

Historically, utopian dreams of a better society only work as long as it's a small group of self-selected buddies with similar values. The minute they imagine they have proof of concept and open it up to the wider world, they have to deal with freeloaders and other leeches.

At that point, you figure out how to say "You don't work, you don't eat." and enforce it, leading to hard feelings for everyone, or you keep feeding people who are abusing the situation and thereby harming everyone else which leads to different hard feelings. Either way, it's the beginning of the end.

I've never wanted to make the world a better place. I've only wanted to make MY life work. 

I can't figure that out, though by some metrics I'm spectacularly successful, all things considered, like I'm not dead when I really should be. 

I'm sorry he died so young and under such awful circumstances. For all the people still hurting over it, your takeaway should be that if you are under the age of 100, you don't know what's best for other people and if you're over the age of 100 you're a doddering old fool with antiquated ideas.

He was young and idealistic and kind of an egomaniac thinking he could improve the world "easily" just by being "smarter than other people." And when the world didn't readily agree, he didn't survive the confrontation. 

I've never thought something like that. I've never thought that because my sister taught me to read before I started school or because the school taught me tricks for doing well on the college entrance exam it didn't teach most kids -- this leading to me having the highest score in my graduating high school class  -- that I'm smarter than other people or know better than them what's best for them.

I don't have an ego need to be seen as better, smarter, faster whatever. I'm alive because I spent decades suicidal trying to quietly sort my problems. 

I'm guessing he was suicidal before he was put in prison for reasons no one who knew him would want publicly discussed and he kept so busy to avoid being alone with himself and the real trigger wasn't the financial debacle of the court freezing his money and Hacker News telling him no, we won't help.

It was probably just being forced to sit still, be alone with his thoughts and feelings, no computer access to occupy him, no zillion and one projects to try to look good to other people while running from the man in the mirror, a man he couldn't live with when left alone with him though the reason for that may have nothing to do with having done something bad.

No one in their right mind should try to make the world a better place. Just making your life work is hard enough and I'm still failing at that modest goal.