Okay, so the last few years I've had time and means to travel, and I'd like to comment somewhat on a perspective I gained while doing so. The list you gave- I've done all of those things. Well, change Machu Picchu to Pompeii and Somalia to the Congo. I realize your list was not comprehensive- but let me realize the spirit of your post and say I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die," save perhaps going into space or winning a Nobel prize and few others.

I made a pact with myself when I was miserable in high-school and my most suicidal, that I would give life a chance and see if things got better as I did more and more things I'd dreamed about and that people told me were worth living for as you've done now. If I did those things and was still unhappy, I felt I should be justified in ending my own life having given it fair chance.

Well, there was a moment, I rememember it in detail, where I was hang-gliding near Interlaken in Switzerland. A man near me said something to the order of "this is the time of our lives, huh!" And I realized then that not only was I still quite unhappy in this most excellent of situations, but that I still wanted to kill myself and indeed had never stopped wanting to kill myself. Not at the Louvre, not in Tokyo, not when succeeding financially, romantically, or in academics.

There was a quote in the Brother's Karmazov which has always troubled me, though I can't find it at the moment, when Alyosha tells a child that he "will always be an unhappy man" and the child says he knows. I believe myself to be fundamentally broken somehow genetically, and I feel that I no longer have any rational reason to expect to ever feel content as a person or free of the suicidal impulse. I will always be an unhappy man.

I can only assume there are others like me in this realization, and to them your words will seem hollow, cliche, and unrelatably foreign. To them what you've said is no different from "but you have so much to live for"- they know that and it doesn't matter. If such a person is out there and is now reading this, all I can say is, well, me too. I keep going somehow, who knows how or why, and I guess all things considered sometimes it really isn't so bad. If I can't ever silence the demons telling me to end it all, I can at least make noise somewhere else that they don't seem so loud. Not a happy result by most measures, but that's the way it is.

I feel terribly sorry that you feel this way. I don't want to mess with this kind of stuff on something this important but, speaking from my own experience, and I do understand this feeling very well, I'd say that this is evidence that the sadness and ideation comes from inside and that the road to resolving it comes from working on that rather than outside things.

I've come to realise this quite strongly myself over the years as various things succeeded/failed, that what I thought would help it didn't, and that all that helps is to face the depression and actively find ways to fight it. I've found schema-based therapy very effective, for example.

I really hope you find a way to resolve these issues, or at least ways of making it better.

If you want to talk (hope this doesn't sound awfully patronising) you can find my email address in my profile.

For many people, what you say rings true, but it's dangerous to imply that that these feelings are purely a product of someone's thinking and that they can fix them on their own. There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed -- likely due to chemical imbalances and structural differences in the brain. Thinking about suicide might be how this manifests.

Telling someone they can think themselves or "figure themselves out" to not being homosexual, schizophrenic or transgender seems crazy to many people, but not crazy when we say the same about depression. Pushing "think about it more! sort our your life!" as The Solution can be dangerous in the case where deferring more radical treatment is necessary or prudent, and the mentality that "I can think/will my way out of this" is a frequent excuse or cause for noncompliance with medication in some patients who actually do need it to not be a danger to themselves, or others.

I'm not implying the poster is such a case, or that such treatment shouldn't be tried, but it can and will fail in certain cases, and it's easy for others and the patient to justify "well I just need to try harder" or to push blame when that's deferring necessary treatment.

"There are people who, no matter how much they sit down and think things through, try and sort out their problems, etc, are going to feeling depressed"

Although you're probably right, it's also dangerous to promote that viewpoint. A depressed person accepting themselves as inevitably and irreversibly depressed is not productive, even if that's the case. It's not analogous to being gay where you can accept it and live a happy life.

I suppose accepting that you're permanently depressed could help you cope with it, but I'd be scared of having people assume thats the case before exhausting all other options.

You're wrong about not being able to live happily ever after: It's never accepting you'll be forever unhappy -- it's accepting you can't be without aid or intervention (e.g. medication, therapy, etc). I never stated that they're doomed to feel depressed, just that they're doomed to feel depressed if they don't do something other than sit and think. Depression tends to lead to a lot of rumination anyways, so it probably will seem pretty ridiculous to them to be told to be more introspective.

To clarify, I put those (schizophrenia, homosexuality, transgender) as examples of brain structure and wiring (just like clinical depression) and mentioned homosexuality explicitly because it seems less stigmatized than mental illness currently. A gay person can accept being gay and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into being straight if they try hard enough. An individual diagnosed with major depressive disorder can accept they are clinically depressed and require treatment, then take the treatment and live a happy life, but they can't think themselves into not requiring outside aid to be in a non-depressed state. Society is a lot more accepting of the gay person than the depressed one though.

I didn't mean to imply that it can just be fixed by the person working on their own, rather that you need to face the depression itself rather than go down the road of trying other, outside, things in an attempt to indirectly fix the feelings themselves.

Of course medication/therapy/even acceptance of a chemical imbalance are not off the table at all.

A big problem with depression is that it makes you feel very guilty, unnecessarily, so I really want to make clear that I didn't want to imply somebody should feel that it's somehow their fault at all.

In many ways a large part of it is getting outside help. I really do recommend that, and have found that extremely helpful myself.

I am very much like you. Have you considered, given your minimal value of anything, that the costs associated with recreational drugs don't apply to you? I started (ab)using marijuana this year (daily). It makes life worth it for me. At the very least it's worth considering as an alternative to death.

Its easy to hide. Most the people in my life don't know. You can vaporize to minimize the health effects (also bad breath). If you do it regularly enough the cognitive deficit is less severe. Mostly just occasional memory loss. Again, nothing that you seem to care about anyway.

All three of you are incredible, wonderful, collections of atoms, the chances of whose formation and resultant animation may have been a brilliant fluke in a huge universe.

Your years are 120 or less, and then the universe will reclaim you as its own. For the universe, the span of your life should have been not even the fluttering of an eyelash before a blink. From a cosmic perspective, the existence of our whole galaxy was set to be one giant quantum fluctuation - the birth and death of a mere grain of matter, falling from one eon to another.

But then something incredible, something unexplainable, happened. Inanimate matter came forth from the deep waters. It grew legs, it started to paint on cave walls, not yet aware of the implications of what it was doing. (Have you ever wondered - of all the things the most significant cluster of particles in the whole universe could do, why would they choose to paint?) We started to reproduce. We started to communicate, to love, to build, to live! There is nothing else like us in the vast cosmos, and there may never be again.

The Milky Way should have be one passing glow of light, but somehow this humble galaxy became greater than the remainder of creation. The wondrous flash of light as our galaxy passes through existence will be most glorious moment that the universe ever experiences. You alone - a lonely sentient creature - would be that blinding flash of light even if the rest of us had never existed. The wonder of you, even as you contemplated an end to your solitary existence, would fill space long after every sun died and time itself drew to an end. In such a universe, you alone would have been notable. The fact of your existence is more incredible than the largest sun or the most massive black hole. Your glory - the glory of us all - will fill the universe forever, a single proud memory in the vast emptiness of space.

We tend to take our existence for granted, but it is an incredible fact - a miracle which all the religions on Earth were born, or given to us, in order to explain. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed that this tiny backwater planet on a spiral arm of the Milky Way would end up defining the vast cosmos forever?

Now, here is the important part: All the dead matter in the cosmos - every particle of the sun, the galaxy, and the vast everything - would give it up to be you. Sagittarius A* would disappear in an instant, if it could change places. It would give 13.2 billion years of existence for your measly 120 years of life.

Your life, unfortunately, will some day draw to an end. You know that, your atoms know that. Perhaps you are tempted to end it earlier, but no mistake could be more grave. I know not what you believe, but even if there is heaven or hell, there wont be anything like now. Let your atoms live. They have eternity itself to be inanimate.

A handful of misfiring neurons has no right to bring you to an end. The world is blinding. If your neurons can't see, you must do everything you can to fix them. Depression has easy medical fixes. Being treated for depression, fixing such a tiny flaw, may be the hardest challenge you ever face - but it is minor in the grand perspective.

Lastly, I leave the cosmos behind and appeal to you. Whoever you are, however you came into existence, and no matter what your purpose is, you are capable of understanding deep philosophical arguments and complex equations. I have none of that for you, merely a saying often heard on HN or in rejection therapy groups: Never say no. Ask yourself what is necessary to make life worth it. If you need a vacation to Hawaii to make life enjoyable again, take the next plane to Hawaii. If you cannot live in a meaningless world, leave for the mountains of India, where you may seek enlightenment in silence among fellow travelers in the sanctity of a Buddhist monastery. The parent posts' comment on marijuana is right on, but free will can do more than justify life - it can make it as brilliant and wonderful as you desire. The universe envies your ability to choose.

Before I end, I want to point out that all of you left comments here instead of suffering in silence. You are already ahead of the game. You can email me at [email protected] anytime. If you email me or call me on Skype, you would be helping me take a break from schoolwork to discuss philosophy. If you're in Israel, I would love to meet a fellow HNer in person.

You are brilliant. You are incredible. No matter your flaws, your crimes, your inabilities, I would kiss you. I would hug you. I would bring you into my house and eat with you, only to hear you speak, to hear your stories and your laugh. It may not always feel so, but you are a wonderful, beautiful creature. Love yourself, so that we may too.

+1 Very well said.

I used to suffer from depression - including suicidal thoughts starting in middle school up through high school. I used to abuse drugs to escape for a couple hours at a time every day. After a near death experience while tripping on a high dose of dextromethorphan, I realized I needed to talk to someone. I spoke to my parents, who put me in rehab. There I met a man who spoke much like you did. He didn't tell me I needed to stop doing drugs, or tell me that I needed to live. He didn't He gave me his impression, a glimpse, into what he felt like living in this universe. He had a minor in physics and would explain to me in detail how everything worked - how lucky we are to be alive. It worked. I wake up each day realizing how lucky I am to be in existence, how all of us are lucky to be in existence. I appreciate everything in life, whether its good or bad, because I understand, to some degree, we are all a lucky arrangement of atoms and when we die our atoms move on to someone or something else.

Cheer's to you good sir!

an incredibly profound post. The rarity of life really is what makes it so precious

This resonates with me unfortunately well. Note that happiness has definite genetic links - twin studies show that it is a somewhat heritable trait, and some mechanisms have actually been found as to how it's heritable (for example, see http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/genes_economics_and_happiness.pdf).

Martin Seligman, who has been mentioned above, also has a book "Authentic Happiness" which you might find interesting. As he points out, and you have experienced, inborn predisposition is the biggest factor in happiness.

However there are other big factors which you can partially control. You've probably already discovered some of them.

I think you would like the book because Seligman recognizes the fundamental difficulty of the problem. As you may have guessed, Seligman himself is predisposed to unhappiness.

It's hard to respond to this. It's extremely honest, and leaves only room for the choices you make for yourself.

> I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die"

At least you have a concept of the things you like, somehow.

I feel like this sometimes, but usually when I'm doing something that I'm really into (I mountain bike, snowboard, wakeboard, road bike, swim, climb, kayak, hike, powerkite, jet-ski, water ski, water tube, motorcycle, and hopefully soon fly, white-water raft, autocross or rally, and skydive) I'm not thinking about being sad, but I definitely get sad during great moments.

I was at the Grand Canyon a few summers ago and I just sat on the edge out past where the fences are where only a few sad kids dare to go. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think at least a few times about jumping, even if it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. I felt like the canyon itself was a metaphor for my life in a way; huge, full of possibility, complex, but still far from inhabitable.

The helicopter ride just before that was crazy fun, though. It was something like $240 and it was worth every penny (I was making about $140 a week at the time working in retail). I can't put into words how it felt to have my first view of the canyon be from inside a flimsy carbon fiber helicopter that was trying to tear itself apart going over the edge of the canyon at what felt like a 90* angle and jumping from ~200ft above the national forest to about a mile up above the canyon floor. I highly recommend it, if you ever have the chance.

For the curious:

Before you dip in: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5441+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5430+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...

During: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5495+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5496+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...

After: http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5578+%28Large%29_exposure.JP... & http://pics.seanp2k.com/phx/DCP_5545+%28Large%29_exposure.JP...

I figure that there will be more moments in the future like that too, and I guess that's what I live for, just to see everything there is to see. My 9 day for-no-real-reason-with-nothing-planned vacation to San Francisco was also great, and I met more awesome people DOING STUFF there in a week than I have here (Detroit/Metro area, Michigan) in years, which is why I'm moving out there in a few months.

I probably have many more stories about majestic woods that I've biked and hiked through, hidden passages on rivers in a kayak, etc. but what I'm getting at is that life is an adventure, so go explore, because the worst thing you can do is live a boring life and die old without having done anything (risky|exciting|challenging|scary). Talk to the girl. Go to that party even though you're already in bed. Apply for that perfect long-shot work-from-home job. The worst failure is not even trying.

And I know how hard trying is.

I've experienced something similar, not as bad as you. But, some things have helped me. I'm sorry if this is somewhat cliche, but based on my own thought and decisions I've continued my faith in Jesus and God from my childhood, and this is also consoling.

On the other side, I've almost if not completely become an atheist at one point, and even then I realized that suicide was too final a choice for how little I knew about reality. In fact, atheism also consoled me, in that the thought that nothing lay beyond death meant I needn't fear death, nor anything in life, at least rationally (instinctual fear remains).

Finally, starting from an atheist perspective, that I didn't need to fear life, I realized I was searching for something that I haven't found yet, and that is a large part of why I've felt bad. Suicide again was too final and inadequate an answer to that desire inside of me. My desire and ignorance of reality give me hope I will find what I am seeking, and even the seeking is fulfilling to a degree.

+1 for Willa Cather's "Paul's Case"

But the problem with serious depression is that you lose interest in even the things you used to love, let alone things you could love. You find it hard to find meaning in even the most meaningful things. The things you have done become meaningless. The things you could do in the future don't even cross your mind.

You become horribly short-sighted and pessimistic. The key is regaining a fair perspective on life, which is on par with "finding meaning" -- something many spend their whole life trying to do. It's no easy quest. There's no easy answer.

I'm never sure what to say to friends who are depressed, besides what's cliche.

Glad, you mention Anna Karenina. That's my all time favorite book. Read twice :-)