Excellent article.

I have loved ones who have attempted suicide, struggled with suicide. Fortunately no one who has actually gone and done it.

I have felt moments of despair, and significantly longer periods of depression and anxiety, as well as emotional numbness as a way to cope.

However in my opinion, to live is to strive. In order live, you must have hope. Staying alive, indicates a hope in something, a future, whether your own or someone else's, a cause, an ideal.

As Viktor Frankl, a man who experienced the utter worst of what humanity is capable of, who felt true despair of the Holocaust, wrote in his book "Man's Search for Meaning", life is worth living if you have something to give it meaning. Whether that's helping others, or love, or a cause, or hope things will get better for yourself, or religion.

Humans need meaning in order to live and persist in the face of the undeniable suffering of life. The way we make meaning is through stories. That is why personal essays normally have a "lesson" at the end, crime stories have a resolution, dire articles about climate change tend to end with a call to action. Because without a meaning, without a story, without hope, there is no point.

Honestly, even with everything I've experienced, even with the possibility of climate change causing civilisational collapse, even with that, I am still glad to be alive. Obviously if I had never been born I would not be able to make any judgements at all, but now that I *am* conscious, I delight in life. In beauty, in art, in writing, in love, in nature, in idealism, in the striving towards something better. I am a tiny speck of the universe experiencing Consciousness, and it's beautiful. Even when it's not.

Something to think about.