Dear Lana,

I have been really attracted to a word lately: injurious.

Google defines it as: causing or likely to cause damage or harm. Like me!

Lana, the nature of the future is that it is uncertain. Yet, we try to understand it in terms of probabilities of how likely it is for things to work out in the way that we want them to work out. As we continue to live life like a random variable, we are exposed to more and more inputs. Eventually, we can understand these stochastic processes through regression, but until then, all we have are our expectations for how much life has worked out depending on how much we have thought it worked out in the first place.

When things do not work out, we develop an injurious idea of our future. Pitter, patter, splatter — and we are left with nothing but contempt for the life we did not have. The injurious mindset develops when expectations did not meet reality; either expectations were set to high or reality swooped in like a dive bomber.

The funny thing about life is that you are not exposed to the absolute range of your experiences until you are close to death. There is no way you can know if you are experiencing a relative peak or trough. Hell, you can even be experiencing your absolute peak, and there’s no way you would be able to know unless you died and looked back, identifying which moment was the happiest you ever felt. It is the sad truth to life — that one of those happy moments you feel in your life will be the happiest you have ever felt.

I suppose that is what ending your life is. You are setting the boundaries of your own life. Your outlook on life is injurious, and there is no future that is not so. You are viewing life as if you have already crossed the absolute peak, and your follow through on ending your life is setting it absolutely. When you end your life, there is no more hope that there will be another peak further down the life. Time can pass by so slowly sometimes. The future is not worth waiting for because it is injurious. The absolute peak is established for good.