Suicide and Inertia

"I" continue to exist to the extent that my behaviors are meaningful to others.  This is because socially determined meanings are necessary for movements to be actions, and actions are further subsumed as meaningful with reference to "me" as the person acting. 

In other words, "I" am a product of the attitudes held by others about the meanings of my behaviors.  

But this implies a kind of enslavement, since my self is constructed from outside of me and apart from my own choices.  When I recognize this slavery, I may feel threatened and become disillusioned with my world.  This results in my innate desire for freedom, a desire to be self-determining in the construction of my identity and my choices for acting.  

But I can only attain this freedom if I refuse to behave in ways that will be meaningful to others.  Self-determined "actions" lose the meaningfulness that makes them "actions," so that they become mere events.  As a result, my desire to escape from enslavement is also an embrace of inaction.  

Freedom, then, is only achievable through inertia.

Inertia and suicide are two ways of describing the same experience.  The desire for suicide is the desire to abstain from meaningful movement (action) and suicide is the successful attainment of such abstinence.  It seems, however, that that such a mission cannot be entirely authentic since it sets up inertia (escape, suicide, etc.) as an objective.  By replacing old objectives with a new one, I have simply assumed another socially construct that underwrites the meaninfulness of my behaviors (making them actions).  

This suggests that, to really commit suicide, I cannot not use a gun or a knife (which would involve meaningful behaviors and objectives, ie., actions).  The authentic suicide requires a resting in inertia, voilitional stillness.  This is death through inaction, outside of choice (illustrated by the passive starvation of the protagonist in Knut Hamsun's Hunger).

On this account, suicide is the cessation of action, sustained non-movement without deliberation, complete inertia.  I have described this elsewhere as "trading places with the vagrant," by which I relinquish all possessions and commitments that provide me with identity.  This is "death" in a very profound sense, is it not?  

So, in the end, freedom can only occur in the process of pure suicide.  If tomorrow I will not exist, I am free to do anything today.