Suicide note of an LW user

That's awful. I actually contacted Mr Capel's local police dept with the information about this, in the hope that they could do something (I ran a Whois lookup on his domain name, got his address, and emailed the police contacts). I'm so sorry they couldn't. I'm afraid, though, that I don't have a copy of this blog post.

Only just saw this comment thanks to the horrible news from 'a friend' - I emailed Mr Capel's local police department that day, but got no response...

You seem to be kidding, but that might actually be a good idea if you can arrange it. He seems to still be actively planning to kill himself.

Edit: Came off as unintentionally insulting to Silas. Reworded to not be.

Sorry for your loss.

Here is a cached copy:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://pdf23ds.net/2011/03/15/bye/

I am so sorry you lost your friend. I was able to find the following Google Cache of the suicide note, which was deleted after being posted early by mistake.

If you’re reading this, then (barring any screwups) I’m gone. Why? See here.

As of this writing, I’m planning on using carbon monoxide to do it. Nitrogen or helium can be obtained by anyone, in tanks, but require a hood. Carbon monoxide is more easily produced with charcoal, and fills a room or car. I worried about the heat starting a fire, but initial tests seem to indicate that this isn’t a huge problem with burned-in charcoal. I think I may still figure out how to set the legs of the hibachi into some sort of water to absorb the heat so contact with the fabric doesn’t ignite it.

If someone would be so kind as to download the contents of my /pdf23ds.net/bzr directory, it would be nice to save that for posterity, and I’m not sure archive.org will save it. Of course, it’s all on my computer, but it’s probably more useful out on the internet somewhere than in my family’s possession. All of my passwords are in the password safe program in the XP vm on my macbook. My user account password is ’salamander’. (That password should only be useful for people with physical access to my machines.)

My primary desire in life was companionship. I never even got close to finding it. My standards were high, sure, but then I’m a very unusual person. At one point I was on track to be in the sort of place where I would meet people like me. But, several times, the opportunities fell through, and now they’re gone. My emotional development stopped where my life ran off the rails. I’m both older and younger than everyone else. At this point I just don’t know how to pick back up, where to go. I don’t know where to look for companionship. I think I could have had a blissful relationship with someone. But men and women aren’t made to fulfill each other. They’re made to make babies. Sometimes I wish I were gay. Alas, I am not.

I’ve thought about escape. Drugs, maybe. But alcohol doesn’t really work for me, and I can’t really obtain any other drugs. I could start playing lots of video games again. But lately video games have started seeming so simplistic. So limited. I’m too creative for video games. I really don’t think there’s any escape for me, short of suicide.

I have a few regrets. I wish I had not been so depressed for very long. There are some many interesting and wonderful things to learn about and work on in the world. The world might not be worth it overall, but it’s not completely negative. Mathematics is truly beautiful. I wish I could have learned about computer proof systems more. And programming languages. And lots of other things. I wish I could have stuck around to see what kind of singularity (or global catastrophe) we end up with.

I wish I could have been cryonically preserved. But suicides aren’t treated well enough for that. We get sectioned. I tried asking the cryonics places about options, but they wouldn’t talk to me. Fuck you, Alcor. Fuck you, CI. I might have lived except for you.

I hate the USA. (I hate closed borders, too.) I hate the educational system, which seriously failed me, and the anti-intellectualism. I hate its healthcare system, its huge reactionary population, and its demonizing of suicide. I wish there were more people to stick up for a person’s right to kill themselves. I passionately hate that all of the mental health people are obligated by law to commit me to an asylum if they think I’m about to kill myself. They can’t be objective. You know, if they could talk to me without such stupid constraints, they might have prevented this very suicide. Fucking idiots. All of them. I hate its authoritarianism, its stagnant political system, and reckless economic elites.

I hate academia. The stupid publishing and stupid requirements and the expensive journals that exclude everyone. Peer review. Credentialism. There’s no attention paid to teaching quality or pedagogical theory.

I hate my parents. They ruined my life. And even now, when they’re supposedly so much more mature, and saying that they want to help me, and allegedly trying to help me, they’re still no help at all. They’re two-faced, like most people. They say one thing and do another. They give lip service to helping me overcome my problems. Maybe they even believe they have good intentions. People can so easily deceive themselves. They completely fail.

I hate people. They’re so petty, so stupid, so deluded. So boring. They so easily become infatuated with power, so easily fall into abuses of that power.

I hate jobs. The logical extreme of employment is slavery. Every improvement upon that condition has to be wrested from the elites with blood. And, to its credit, the western world has made a lot of progress in that direction. We’re probably closer to the ideal system than we are to slavery. But it’s still so bad that I can barely stand it. I don’t think I could ever work for a living. To a large extent this is because I have handicaps, like my emotional issues and my sleep problems. I’m not so stubborn I would refuse to work from principle. But it is incredibly difficult for me to navigate the issue. (Not that other people have it easy.) When you cannot get up at the same time every day, no matter what you do, without experiencing severe sleep deprivation, your options become much more limited. Higher order thought is the first to go. Programming becomes impossible. This is what I had to live with. And the more your work history gets fucked, the harder the next job is to find.

I hate myself. I hate that a creature whose life is filled with so much pain could have been brought into existence. I hate that I wasn’t able to change myself to alleviate the pain and to give myself a life worth living. It was largely a matter of luck, of course. I also hate myself for not being more lucky. (I’m already pretty damn lucky, all considered.)

Human values are but a momentary blip in evolution’s course. Unless we get a singleton, our great intelligence will allow our conscious values to eventually fall in line to match our genes’ values: competition above all else. Reproduction above all else. Red in tooth and claw. Even now, we’re a lot closer to that than most people want to admit. That’s not worth living for. I wish I could have escaped that. I think some people do, to some extent. But I couldn’t find my way out.

The chances of a positive future happening are pretty slim. The future is very likely going to end in the destruction of the world, within the next couple centuries. (If it makes it past then, we’re looking a lot better.) I really don’t think I’m going to be missing out on much.

You’re all fucking morons. Fuck you all.

Hmm. Good alternate explanation. Thanks.

I don't think so. See above.

Thank you. Okay, so he's saying here that people who kill themselves are dissected... which implies that people who die of some other cause are not usually dissected?

If people who kill themselves are dissected more frequently than others, then what is the reason for that? My guess is that they suspect foul play more often, but for all I know it has to do with looking for specific brain diseases that cause depression or it's some vestigial behavior left over from the days when they used leeches.

The first case is quite striking.

The 101st patient of the Cryonics Institute (CI) is an 18-year-old boy who committed suicide by hydrogen sulfide poisoning. He was reportedly "super bright", but suffered from depression.

Very bright, perhaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Induced_hypothermia.2Fsuspended_animation

Yep, which is one reason why I would never choose to be a counselor. I am rather attached to my own existence, so trying to understand people who are not isn't intuitive.