Yes. Exactly the same here. For me, I have the "intellectual understandings"... overwhelming reasons for me personally to end my life... and I have the means, all ready to go... but I seem to lack the conviction/will to do it. I think I have at least 3 major things "holding me back"...
- Cultural Conditioning: Throughout our whole lives, we have been "programmed" that death is a "bad thing" and we should be afraid of it... and, more precisely, we need to avoid it at all costs. It can be so very hard to break these ingrained (and very likely false) "beliefs".
- Fear of What Happens Next: (of course a subset of "Cultural Conditioning") Although I'm personally 99+% sure there is no afterlife, I'm still afraid of the future after I die. Perhaps best summed-up by Shakespeare's Hamlet: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? ... But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.
- Egoism: There is a vain part of me who covets and cherishes this mind and its knowledge. I think it is a twisted form of "greed"... certainly there is nothing honorable in it. It just doesn't want to let-go.
Yes. But, it will end (by default) eventually... regardless.
So, is it not better for me to do it intentionally? Isn't there something more courageous, something with more integrity in doing it myself than merely "by default"?
In the end, I'm thinking for me, it may be necessary to whip myself up into some kind of "manic/'just do it' state. But, this is easier said than done.
No need to apologize: I thought you were a native speaker.
