13 Reasons Why

Taking one's own life is the ultimate disservice to all who sacrificed to give you life. It the most selfish act one can ever take.

Everybody is so damn busy with their own lives. So wrapped up in their own shit. It can at times feel like a very lonely planet. I can sadly relate too closely to Hannah in the times I feel isolated from the world.

However where I feel the show missed it's opportunity is to focus on the lasting devastating impact a decision to commit suicide has on everyone else. It's simply the most selfish act anyone can ever do. It's of course the one decision you can't reverse direction from, and the boldest (yet most selfish) statement you can ever make.

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13 Reasons Why...

Pros & cons list

Consider the value of creating your own pros/cons list for life. What I hope others use it for is to remind themselves all the reasons to live. Why given your life was a miracle, and thus living itself is a miraculous experience.

You should live (Pros)

Yoga
Ukulele
Meditation
Entertainment (books, movies, music)
Love can't exist without you (your friends and family need you here)
Laughter
To create and collaborate
To explore, be with nature, and travel
Nice people need to be recognized
Gifts (both giving and receiving)
Further technology and expand our knowledge (never ending learning and making the impossible possible)
To learn from, nurture & inspire each other (to teach)
To discover what you are capable of (in the future)

And if for no other reason... Because you've made it this far. The team called 'the living' that needs you. You need to live, because not living is letting the assholes win. You need to play 'all out' to show the rest of the world how great life can be.

Why you should die (Cons)

To end isolation (you are alone)
Eliminate stress (more than you can bear)
Avoid politicians & taxes (takers) Imagine a world without either.
Avoiding shitty people (takers) You have not idea what lies beyond if you are reincarnated into another life.
Peace† (I get it in meditation too)
Greed (takers)
To give up a game you can't win (time & money) but, neither are real, they are only measurements

I can't come up with 13 reasons why you should ever kill yourself.

† Peace. Is death peace, or the absence of it? If you can't experience peace, how can it exist? In death, experience as we know it will cease to exist. Therefore, any of the items on the list that require experience (all of them) get zero'd out.

Death means none of the pain, but it also means none of the pleasure. Indeed, there are cycles in your life where one is more prominent than the other - and thinking about all of it too much isn't serving you. To constantly ask why you are happy is to question happiness altogether. The common thread I see in those who are happy is that they don't fret on whether or not they are!

Perhaps the most misleading path you can take a child down is in believing that there won't also be a lot of pain in their life. It would great to not have to ever see a loved one suffer through pain, but pain is an evitable part of life. Not that it should linger - but it does exist, and no pill or secret will ever stop it.

Thankfully... my list of why you should live is longer than the one of why you should die. Living wins.

What this list does for me is remind me of what's really important in my life, and how when the funk I sometimes fall in can be attributed to letting the cons outweigh the pros (which I fail to recognize at those times). It's when those 13 things are absent from my life that the darkness comes into view. I encourage you to make your own list.

So what drove Hannah to do it? She made a few bad decisions. She let the opinions of others define the opinion of herself. She further isolated herself before others could isolate her... until she finally isolated herself into non-existence.

While I respect that a decision to take ones life is their own, I would hope that if I ever got to a point of despair, that there'd be more signs of life than Hannah ever got. What the show I know intended is to show that we need to really be there for one another and try to recognize when someone is feeling that isolation.

Why to get up tomorrow (22 reasons why)

To do what's never been done before
To love (and be loved)
Yoga
Ukulele
To Meditate
To listen to a good song
To read a good book
To write
To complete the incomplete (your life is incomplete)
Because you have money left to spend (you've got a balance on that giftcard to spend!)
To discover your soulwork
To go to the beach
To go for a hike
To go for a bike ride
To go kayaking
To prove it can be done
To discover what you're capable of
To write a song
To write a poem
To help someone else
To fix what's broken
To break what's working
To discover what's worth adding to this list

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