Transcript of ON SUICIDE: If Life Has No Meaning, Why Go On?

There's a question most people will never say out loud, but it sits quietly in the back of their minds, especially at night. If life feels so empty, why keep going? Not in the poetic sense, not for drama. I'm talking about real silence. The silence of a father who hasn't spoken a word in 3 days since losing his job and being told he's no longer needed. Not at work, not at home. The silence of a teenager whose phone is filled with hundreds of contacts, but not one person who actually sees him. The silence of a widow who still sets the table for two every night just to remember what love once felt like. There are millions living lives that feel like slow suicides just without the blood. You want to talk philosophy? Let's stop pretending that it's all about books and classrooms. Real philosophy begins here where the pain is raw and the questions are real. As Albert Kamu said, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Before we ask if truth exists or what freedom means or whether God is dead, we must first ask why not end it all. Because if we can't answer that, what use are any of the others? This is not a self-help video. This isn't about quick fixes or motivational slogans. We are going to stare into the abyss. We will confront the most dangerous, most forbidden idea in human thought. The idea that maybe, just maybe, it's not worth it. But we won't stop there. We'll walk through fire with Camuz, stand in the ruins with Nietze, cry out with Kirkagard, descend with Kioran, and claw our way out with Victor Frankle. We'll look at life through the eyes of those who've suffered, who've broken, and who still chose somehow to breathe again. We'll rip the mask off meaning, strip hope down to its bones, and ask the hardest question of all. If life has no meaning, why go on? Every year, more people die by suicide than by war, natural disasters, or murder. No enemy, no battlefield, no villain, just a quiet collapse inside the human mind. And the most disturbing part, the world keeps moving as if nothing happened. Because nothing happened. Not to the world, just to one person. This is the absurd, the unbearable gap between how much life demands from us and how little it gives back. Albe Kamu called it, "The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity. We wake up. We work, we love, we suffer, we lose, we age, we die. The machine keeps running. The sun rises whether your heart is full or shattered. You want answers. The universe doesn't even give you a reply. Just silence. Kamu argues this silence is the real enemy. not death, not pain, but the realization that no matter how deeply we cry out for meaning, the universe offers no script. So, we're left with a binary choice. And Kamu doesn't sugarcoat it. Either we admit life is meaningless and choose not to live or we admit life is meaningless and choose to live anyway. There is no middle ground. Kamu is merciless in his clarity. There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. If you can't answer why you're alive, every other question is irrelevant. Metaphysics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, all of it collapses under the weight of this one brutal question. Is life worth the trouble? You don't need a PhD in philosophy to feel this question. Talk to the teenager working three jobs to support a parent who doesn't care. Talk to the elderly woman whose children never call anymore. Talk to the man who made it to the top. Money, power, recognition, and still wakes up hollow. These are not cases. These are not mental health statistics. They are living testaments to the absurdity Kamu wrote about. So what's the response? Denial, religion, distraction. Kimu rejects them all. He calls them philosophical suicide. Inventing meaning to escape the lack of it is still a kind of death. It's selfdeception. His answer is revolt. The absurd man is he who is aware of this crushing fate yet denies its power to destroy him. You do not escape the absurd. You face it. You carry it. You live without appeal, without hope, without lies. And in that defiance, Kamu argues, you become free. You want a way out of the absurd. There is none. Not through faith, not through reason, not through love, achievement, or distraction. You either kill yourself or you live in full knowledge that life is meaningless and decide to keep going anyway. Not because life is beautiful, but because you refuse to let meaninglessness win. That is the absurd hero. Not a victim, not a coward, but someone who looks into the void and doesn't blink. Every year, more people die by suicide than by war, natural disasters, or murder. No enemy, no battlefield, no villain, just a quiet collapse inside the human mind. And the most disturbing part, the world keeps moving as if nothing happened. Because nothing happened not to the world just to one person. This is the absurd the unbearable gap between how much life demands from us and how little it gives back. Albe Kamu called it the divorce between man and his life. The actor and his setting truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity. We wake up, we work, we love, we suffer. We lose. We age. We die. The machine keeps running. The sun rises whether your heart is full or shattered. You want answers. The universe doesn't even give you a reply. Just silence. Kamu argues this silence is the real enemy. Not death, not pain, but the realization that no matter how deeply we cry out for meaning, the universe offers no script. So, we're left with a binary choice. And Kamu doesn't sugarcoat it. Either we admit life is meaningless and choose not to live or we admit life is meaningless and choose to live anyway. There is no middle ground. Kamu is merciless in his clarity. There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. If you can't answer why you're alive, every other question is irrelevant. Metaphysics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, all of it collapses under the weight of this one brutal question. Is life worth the trouble? You don't need a PhD in philosophy to feel this question. Talk to the teenager working three jobs to support a parent who doesn't care. Talk to the elderly woman whose children never call anymore. Talk to the man who made it to the top. money, power, recognition and still wakes up hollow. These are not cases. These are not mental health statistics. They are living testaments to the absurdity Kamu wrote about. So what's the response? Denial, religion, distraction. Kamu rejects them all. He calls them philosophical suicide. Inventing meaning to escape the lack of it is still a kind of death. It's selfdeception. His answer is revolt. The absurd man is he who is aware of this crushing fate yet denies its power to destroy him. You do not escape the absurd. You face it. You carry it. You live without appeal, without hope, without lies. And in that defiance, Kamu argues, you become free. You want a way out of the absurd. There is none. Not through faith, not through reason, not through love, achievement or distraction. You either kill yourself or you live in full knowledge that life is meaningless and decide to keep going anyway. Not because life is beautiful, but because you refuse to let meaninglessness win. That is the absurd hero. Not a victim, not a coward, but someone who looks into the void and doesn't blink. He had everything. The mansion, the awards, the global admiration. And one day, just after a quiet breakfast, he hung himself. Not out of poverty, not out of tragedy, but out of emptiness. A kind of despair that only grows in places where every desire is satisfied and nothing matters anymore. This is not failure. This is freedom. taken to its breaking point. When Friedrich Nze wrote God is dead, it wasn't celebration. It was diagnosis. It meant the old gods, the old values, the sacred stories. They were no longer believable. And without them, the structures that gave life meaning, order, and weight were gone. You are free. Free to create your own values. free to decide what is good, what is evil, what is real. And at first that sounds like empowerment. But freedom without foundation is not liberation. It's vertigo. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Nze. And the inverse. He who has no why will crumble under even the lightest how. This is why so many break after success, not failure. because they reach the summit and find there's nothing up there. No final truth, no applause that fills the hole, just wind, just silence. And Schopenhau went even further. He believed that life was a ceaseless striving driven by an irrational will, a hunger that never ends. Pleasure is temporary relief. Joy is an illusion. Suffering is the default. Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom. So what happens when a human being stripped of God, of shared values, of teology, becomes radically free, but can't stop suffering? What happens when the meaning makers are gone and all that remains is endless desire, disappointment, and death? The result isn't happiness. It's nihilism. a spiritual exhaustion so deep that even suicide begins to feel like a rational escape. Not from pain, but from absurd pointlessness. Look at our culture. Endless entertainment, infinite choice, limitless freedom. And yet, rising anxiety, rising depression, rising suicide rates. Because when you remove meaning and worship freedom alone, you don't liberate people. You abandon them. You tell them you can be anything. But not why, not for what? Not toward what goal. Nze warned that without new values to replace the old ones, the 20th and 21st centuries would drown in passive nihilism, a condition where people still go to work, still smile, still post selfies. But inside they are spiritually dead. And that's the thing most people won't say out loud. Suicide is not always about unbearable pain. Sometimes it's about unbearable emptiness. A world that tells you do what you want, but never explains why it's worth doing anything at all. Some people don't scream when they're dying inside. They just get quieter, more polite, more productive. They hit deadlines. They send thank you emails. And then one day they vanish. And everyone says the same thing, but they seemed fine. That's the cruelty of existential despair. It doesn't always show up in breakdowns. Sometimes it hides in functionality, in the quiet ticking of someone who has lost all hope, but is too tired to make noise about it. This kind of despair isn't depression. It's not sadness. It's the sickness unto death as Sirinerkagard called it. The despair of being trapped in yourself, of being a self that can't bear its own existence. The greatest hazard of all, losing oneself, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. Kirkagard he wrote like a man bleeding in private. For him, the human condition is not a rational problem. It's a spiritual crisis. The human being is not just a mind, not just a body. It's a paradox, a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporary. And when this tension is broken, when we try to become only body or only soul, only freedom or only structure, despair is born. There's no escape through logic. Kirkagard believed reason will only take you to the edge, to the cliff. But to go on, to truly live, you must do something unreasonable. You must leap. The leap of faith isn't wishful thinking. It's not naive hope. It's an existential act of defiance to believe in something beyond comprehension because the alternative is spiritual death. And yet, not everyone leaps. Emil Kuran, the Romanian philosopher of doom, stood at the same edge and refused to jump. He looked into the void and found not God, not meaning, not transcendence, but freedom. A terrible pure freedom. It is not worth the bother of killing yourself since you always kill yourself too late. Kurin, he saw suicide not as a tragedy, but as a philosophical safety valve. The fact that he could end it all was what gave him the strength to continue. Because suicide, in his view, is the last form of honest metaphysics. The only question that matters once all illusions are gone. And here we are between Kirkagard's leap and Kuran's abyss. Between faith and nothing, between surrender and sovereignty. Both saw life as unbearable. But one chose to trust what cannot be proven. The other chose to endure what cannot be escaped. No cheap hope survives here. No sentimental consolation. Only the most brutal freedom. The freedom to choose what to believe or whether to believe at all. And if there's a more terrifying burden than that, no one has found it yet. Some prisoners survived Ashvitz not because they were stronger, not because they were luckier, but because in the darkest furnace of human cruelty, they still had something to live for. A name, a face, a sentence left unwritten. A promise whispered in a dream. Victor Frankle, a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, watched as men around him dropped into the snow. Not from bullets, not from hunger, but from the death of purpose. Their bodies were still alive. But their why had vanished. And when the why dies, the how is irrelevant. Those who have a why to live, Frankle wrote, borrowing from Nietz, can bear almost any how. This isn't philosophical poetry. It's anatomy. Frankle observed it like a surgeon. Men who lost their will to meaning stopped eating, stopped moving, stopped resisting and within days they were gone. He called his approach logootherapy, not therapy through happiness or pleasure or escape. Therapy through meaning. He believed that human beings are not driven by power or comfort, but by the need to make sense of suffering. Meaning is not comfort. It's not pleasure. It can be brutal. It can demand everything from you, but it gives suffering a frame. And with a frame, pain becomes endurable. In some way, Frankle wrote, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning. And this is where the modern world fails us again. We are told that pain must be avoided, that struggle is a sign of failure, that if you suffer, something has gone wrong. But Frankle, standing amid piles of corpses, said something far more offensive and far more true. Sometimes pain is the path. Sometimes meaning is not found in spite of suffering, but through it. This doesn't justify evil. It doesn't sanctify trauma. But it dares to suggest that there can be something on the other side. Not healing in the soft sense, but integration. The forging of a purpose that didn't exist before the wound. A man who survives the death of his family and spends his life comforting orphans. A woman who endures cancer and becomes the voice of 10,000 silent patients. This isn't optimism. This is transmutation. It's the fire that melts identity and reshapes it into something with weight. Meaning is not a feeling. It's not always joyful. It is a structure, something that can hold you when nothing else can. It doesn't remove despair, but it can contain it. And in a world stripped of gods, stripped of absolutes, stripped of inherited truth, that might be the most sacred thing we have left. Not hope, not happiness, but the refusal to suffer without reason. Frankle called this the last human freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances even in hell. And maybe that's what it comes down to. Not escaping the pain, but transforming it into something that makes you say this. This is why I'm still here. If you've made it this far, it means something in this video spoke to you. Maybe not with answers, maybe not with comfort, but with truth, raw, untamed, and unafraid to ask the questions most people avoid. And that alone matters. Because in a world that often feels numb, choosing to face the uncomfortable, to reflect, to feel, to think, is a quiet kind of rebellion. And if this space, this channel gives you even a fragment of clarity, courage, or company in the dark, then it's already doing what it was meant to do. But this work takes time. Energy. A piece of the soul every time. If you believe this kind of content deserves to exist, there are ways to help it keep going. 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