: Suicide.

A friend of mine considered suicide a while ago. I'm not gonna mention his name here, I'll leave that up to him if he wants to share it. Some of you might know who I'm talking about, though, as he has written his own blog post about it.

I wouldn't call this post a response to him exactly, particularly as it's been such a long time now, but it's an explanation of sorts on my views and thoughts about suicide.

Some of you might know, particularly if you read one of my recent posts, that the thought of committing suicide has crossed my mind more than once during the last ten years. When your life seems to be an eternal uphill struggle on a giant hill of ice, it doesn't take much to fall from time to time, and the climb back up can be hell. But there is one thing that has kept those thoughts from evolving, one thing that has kept me from falling all the way down to the bottom.

In January of '94, 18 years ago now, my uncle Gustav committed suicide. I don't really know why he did it, I'm not sure if anyone really knows, and I'm not gonna speculate. That's not why I'm talking about him. What I do want to talk about is his amazing talent with computers. He was a computer wizard, plain and simple. He was completely self-taught, having started out with nothing more than a command line on his first computer, and had programmed a lot of stuff all by himself over the years. He was the kind of guy that took computer classes, where he basically took over the entire class and taught the teachers. I've also heard that some of the courses he took he only showed up on test-days, and still aced the tests. Don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

I was still too young to really be affected by what happened at the time. We didn't have too much contact with him either, as far as I remember. But I've thought a lot about him in recent years, and particularly after I got really interested in computers myself. And one of the things that bothers me the most about it all is all the possibilities a guy like him would have if he was still alive today. Back in '94 I don't think there really was too much use for someone with his skills yet, there wasn't really a computer culture in Norway yet, as far as I know. And as I said, I'm not writing this to speculate about why he did what he did, but I'm pretty sure that the lack of opportunities for him to really utilize his talent at the time played a significant role in his decision.

And that is the one thing that have kept me from ending my life; Thinking about all the possibilities my uncle missed out on by ending his life, and therefore also thinking about all the possibilities that I might miss out on by ending mine. Even though I don't have any real talent, at least not in the same way he had, as far as I know. But you never know what might happen.


There's nothing certain about the future. Even if your life seems bad right now, something might happen at some point that changes it for the better.