How To Disappear Completely

Escaping Eleanor Rigby

"All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?" (The Beatles)

What is the cure for loneliness and depression? I'm not an expert on this, but in my own small experience I've found that defeating alienated self-absorption involves self-forgetting: in others words, disappearing completely; in other words, service. Find a need and meet it. Some of the people you help are not very exciting, but you will have the satisfaction of being significant.

Someone once told me that people have two fundamental desires. I think one of those desires was the wish to be loved, but the second desire is the one that struck me as especially insightful: everyone desires to know that their life has a purpose. Perhaps that is the single biggest difference between self-sacrifice and suicide. Though the initial end result is the same--voluntary death--the first has a purpose. The second method seeks to glorify itself. Perhaps even, self-destruction is paradoxically the most drastic means of self-preservation, an attempt to freeze a frame in time before time's passage completely disintegrates the self. Yet in the end, such a death is pointless--that is why suicide is so tragic. The one seeking to preserve himself by destroying himself never succeeds.

Indeed, "Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it." (Luke 17:33)