‘Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?’
A teen is learning that life is what you make it after considering suicide
“Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”
This famously-mysterious quote was shared with me by a Valparaiso teenager who once pondered taking his own life. Not strictly from depression or desperation, but from a philosophical stance summed up by this absurdist quote, often attributed to French author Albert Camus.
“Heavily influenced by Camus myself, I, too, have taken a great interest in suicide,” the 19-year-old man told me. “I had been raised Christian, but after losing my faith, I took a sharp turn into philosophy. I started as somewhat of a pessimistic nihilist, and I was in deep with existential angst and depression amongst other things.”
The teen, whom I’m not identifying to protect his privacy, wrote an absorbing essay on this dark subject, which he plans to feature someday on his blog. When, or if, he does post it on the internet, I’ll share it with my readers, along with his name.
“I never felt such a weight like the existential one I fought for about a year,” he wrote in his essay. “Shouldering it completely influenced every aspect of my life. Since seemingly nothing mattered, I became isolated from people. I became less social at school, and retreated from family and friends alike to be alone.”
Sound like a teenager you know? Or possibly too many teenagers we know.
“I went from the bright and engaged student I was to one who did the bare minimum to get by,” he wrote. “If I could have gotten away with not going to school at all, I wouldn’t have been there. In fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything other than sleeping, crying and wallowing in my nihilistic nightmare.
“It was around this point I began seriously pondering suicide,” he wrote to me.
Suicide is again in the news (as if it’s ever not in the news), with the father of a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim taking his life just days after two Stoneman Douglas High School students also took their lives. Their deaths were likely prompted by mass shootings at those schools, officials said, pointing to survivor’s guilt as a factor.
“The scars simply don’t go away with a fresh coat of paint,” Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, told the Associated Press.
Their suicides come amid a rising national trend, with more than 47,000 suicides occurring in our country in 2017, the highest rate in more than 50 years. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for teens in the U.S., a statistic I’ve written too many times in this column space.
I thought I had covered almost every facet of this sensitive topic until I talked with the 19-year-old Valparaiso man. I met with him to talk about his earlier feelings of angst and alienation. His fixation on suicide seemed to be more about a philosophical viewpoint than a death wish. Similar to Camus’ writings on this subject, he spoke about suicide as if it were an intellectual debate within his mind.
Camus’ theoretical argument reflects the quote attributed to him, “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” In other words, if there is no definitive origin or inherent meaning in life, as Camus and other existentialist authors believed, than there is no difference between, say, sipping a cup of coffee and slitting their wrists.
Both acts would have the same meaning, or lack of meaning, according to absurdist-minded followers, including the Valparaiso man.
“If nothing mattered, why should I carry on?” he asked rhetorically. “I carried on day by day, essentially killing time before something would eventually kill me.”
This gloomy thought process can be characterized by the textbook term “teen angst,” but there’s a dangerously-thin line between adolescent apathy and suicidal ideation.
According to a recent study by the National Institutes of Health, one in three preteens screened positive for suicide risk during emergency room visits at three urban children’s hospitals last year. The study says social media and bullying are two of the main motivators.
“Typically, suicidal thoughts and behaviors are seen in older teens,” Lisa Horowitz, a clinical scientist in the study, said in a news release. “It was troubling to see that so many preteens screened positive for suicidal risk, and we were alarmed to find that many of them had acted on their suicidal thoughts in the past.”
It’s a tragic irony that this generation’s teens, who are seemingly connected to each other 24/7, feel so disconnected and distraught despite all their technology. This prompted me to ask the 19 year old what pulled him out of his personal despair.
He said his “relationship with life” shifted as he stumbled onto classic books, just as he stumbled onto Camus’ self-reflective work.
“Although our universe may be inherently meaningless, we can still find purpose in our self-determined meanings,” he said. “Essentially, life is what you make it.”
This is the same path I eventually found after trudging through the initial bleakness of existential thinking, which essentially suggests that our existence precedes our essence. In other words, we arrived before our meaning or purpose. Finding those elusive assets in life can take time — sadly, too much time for too many people with suicidal thoughts.
“Camus … convinced me to choose the coffee,” the 19-year-old man wrote. “My life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I struggle frequently. I can quite easily fall into a pessimistic nihilism bender of depression, suicidal ideation, and other calamities.”
Yes, some days that proverbial coffee can be bitter, or cold, or tasteless. But, I told him, there’s a fresh cup waiting for you the next day and the next.
“For all we know, the life we live may be the only one we ever get,” he said.
Exactly, I replied. So drink it slowly, and savor every drop.