I like suicide.

Yeah. Deal with it.

Before you burst into your little tantrum, though, hear me out.

I don’t mean attempted suicide. That’s something else, and actually only cursorily related. Attempted suicide is a final, desperate cry for help. Shit thing to do, but sometimes it helps. Yeah, it does sometimes go wrong and the poor fucker dies. Too bad. Not relevant.

Nor do I mean suicide from severe, temporary depression or anxiety. In a sense, that’s not even suicide, since you’re not really in control. It’s the sickness that kills you. The fact that your hand is involved is arbitrary.

No, what I mean is the deeply taboo, morally suppressed and often illegal, premeditated and deliberate choice to stop existing — the conscious decision that you want out of this human fucking condition.

The way I see it, it shouldn’t just be legal — it should be a constitutional, fucking right! It’s your life, for fuck’s sake — or is it? Can it really be your life if you don’t have the right to end it? Think about that for a while. It’s an interesting line of questioning, and it might lead you to looking at society with a more nuanced eye.

The traditional taboo on suicide is ancient. It comes from an age when life was very hard and population increase was crucial. It makes sense to call suicide a sin when you need every last fuckwit in the community to get the work done. That was then. It’s been quite a while since we needed every human bean to stick around and make like bunnies. In fact, as things stand, this slack-jawed veneration of spawning probably needs to go, too — in the name of the survival of the fucking species — but that’s a different topic.

Right, so let’s deal with the supposed counterarguments.

• Committing suicide is cowardice.

  Oh, really? Since when did you become the fucking über-empath? What the fuck do you know about what other people carry around inside? Just because your pathetic little brain can’t fathom that existence is a living hell for some doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Besides, there are people out there who are so fucked up they know they’re likely to end up doing great harm to others. I’d say for them, it’d be pretty fucking brave to end it before they explode.

  You’re living under immense pressure and hate your life, but you go on anyway? Great for you. Write a book about it. Go on television. Be a hero. Don’t fucking go around telling people they have to be like you, you closet fascist pig.

• Suicide is unfair to those that love you.

  And being forced to stay alive against your will is fair? How great will it be to have someone who doesn’t want to live around? It’s fine for you to be the egotistic arse and demand they stick around, but they should do so out of altruistic respect for you? Yeah. Great argument. Real impressed.

• God, blah blah, sin, yada-yada, eternal suffering, et.c, et.c, ad nauseam.

  Fuck you, you religio-fascist shithead. Go back to your cult and let the rest of us make our own decisions.

• If we allow people to commit suicide, we’re going down a slippery slope towards eugenics and other nasty business.

  Getting to choose to end your own life is the same as choosing to end other people’s lives? Give me a fucking break. This is a different argument when it comes to euthanasia where you don’t know what the person really wants. If you do know, this is a nonissue and if anything, it solidifies our value base.

• We can’t ever know if the decision to kill yourself is final and heartfelt.

  Technically, we can’t ever know anything for sure. We have ways of dealing with that. Amazingly, there are people who specialise in analysing people’s emotional states and shit. If we do remove the complete ban on suicide, we can put systems and regulations in place. Give people who really want to die a way to do it comfortably and painlessly and they will come to you. The same system will also probably catch a lot of attemptees before they do something stupid, and hopefully get them the help they need.

So are your taboos swinging, yet? Fears jangling or are you starting to see the grubby shape of the wider picture? Perhaps you’re one of the brave few who’ve already taken a stand for the right not to go on living. If so, I salute you. It takes guts.

As for the rest of you — how the fuck can you claim to respect life and in the same breath say that people should be forced to live, regardless of their own wishes?