Discussing fatalism, Doomerism, and Self-annihilation

26 April 2026

This blog post is a slight rewrite with additional links based on a thread I posted on Mastodon.

I'm certainly not somebody who is free of suicidal tendencies, episodes, and struggles with internal validity. However, I think something that is genuinely under-discussed is the value in keeping yourself alive even in the worst possible situations. So much debate and reassurance in my circle of scared anxious trans people involves some degree of asking "is it time to kill ourselves before they send us to camps". The answer is obviously "no," but not "no, now is not the time", but "no, live even through the worst imaginable outcome."

It is not time to kill ourselves even if they send us to camps. it is not time to kill ourselves even if they put us in gas chambers. Many people online treat the concept of fascist violence as either a bullet to the brain or a fate worse than death: That there's some point where it's valid to kill yourself because the fascists are literally going to make being alive worse than death. However there is a huge problem with this: it presupposes that the meaning to being alive is to be in a pleasurable state. That therefor if you are in a torturous state you now have no meaning to live. This is not a universalizable principle.

To take the contrapositive for a second, if that were the case, how would you reasonably survive tonsillitis, or appendicitis, impacted wisdom teeth, or any sustained period of pain? Without perfect knowledge of the future, any torturous state is theoretically unending, and thus would trigger the universalized self-annihilation. But many of us can think back to a period of such where we endured and came out the other side. Therefor, we clearly cannot use "am I in a pleasurable state" as a bar for preservation.

Instead, I think we should examine the writings of holocaust survivors, such as my personal favorite, Viktor Frankl. Frankl engineered an alternative praxis of self-preservation that opposed Nihilism, known as Logotherapy. It is explicitly a praxis for staying alive in the very worst most inhumane positions. In Logotherapy, the presupposition of your philosophy is that you exist to create meaning. Logotherapy then articulates a methodology of proving that you can find meaning in even the most tortuous life.

Then comes the central tenet of Logotherapy: That you can create meaning in any situation by choosing your attitude in response to it. Stoicism, Empathy, Zen, whatever attitudinal response you wish to hold to, it doesn't matter. But by defining your attitude even in the worst situation, you force your life to have meaning. And therefore there is always meaning in staying alive.

If you would like to know more, my personal recommendation is his seminal work Man's Search For Meaning, a book which literally kept me alive when I was nineteen (19). Remember, our ancestors struggled too. In them we will find the strength for our resolve.