This might be the wrong type of thing to post here.
I suffer from a medical disorder that is very unpleasant. I also suffer from a personality disorder that is very unpleasant. For these reasons, and a few others, I planned a suicide for next week (next week because my family member has an event coming up and I don’t want to ruin it). I already kinda precommitted to it by gambling away all of my money and even taking a loan and gambling that away too. I bought the necessary tools to carry out the task.
Even though I understand the position of Eliezer and other people on this site who say that death is the ultimate bad—I found the related parts in HPMOR very beautiful—I don’t personally endorse it the same way. Death is pretty bad, but it’s not that bad. Using Hanson’s language, when I engage in far mode thinking I definitely agree with anti-deathism, I’d really like to party on the moons of Jupiter, hang out with friends, read books, play games and do science, become a being of pure energy and whatever people who live forever do for as long as possible. I mean, life can be very great. But often when I’m in near mode, I just wanna get the hell out of here.
Thinking about actually killing myself feels very unnatural to me. It’s easy to think and talk about it on an abstract level, but whenever I feel like I’m gonna actually do it, I feel absolutely miserable. I like to think that when I’ve properly slept and woken up, my brain has reset to the default setting and I’m in a “natural state” and it’s usually then when thinking about doing suicide hurts the most. It’s taken years of thinking about it and becoming tolerant to the idea so that I can actually do anything about it, and I still feel very shitty whenever I think about it. This all shows how unintuitive it is, but I guess people can get used to anything. The fact that it’s unnatural doesn’t mean it’s a wrong decision, it’s just very interesting to observe my feelings about it.
Despite my precommitment, I probably won’t do it because I haven’t done it before after similar feelings of certainty. (If you think suicide is bad, you might say akrasia is good for some things, eh? I’m not sure if suicide is bad for me, so I’m not sure if akrasia is good or bad in this case.) If I estimate the probability the same way I estimate other probabilities on PredictionBook, there’s probably 20% chance I’m gonna do it during next month. No one dies of hunger in my country and if for nothing else, if I life for 40 years there’s a small chance that I could see an intelligent explosion, an em explosion or some other exponential growth event.
It’s because I’m not exactly sure about it myself. I also didn’t want to make it clear because I feel it’s too embarrassing.
Probably both, but the former more.
I first thought about donating it to GiveDirectly. But I don’t have a 100% will to die. I thought I’d want to live if I had so much money that I could live comfortably and not have to work for years and gambling has a very small chance of achieving that. About drugs, I have no interest in mindless wireheading. I would, if the state of euphoria would last, but in regards to contemporary drugs what goes up must come down so the negative/positive mental states even out and I might as well live in a normal neutral mental state. But I bought some psychedelics and used them for a while until I grew tired of them and threw the rest of them away. I also thought about prostitutes, but I wasn’t excited enough to do anything about it.
Generally, I’ve been sensory binging for some time now and it hasn’t made my situation that much better so I don’t feel like drugs or prostitutes would make me feel very much better on the long term.