To live or to die, what’s harder?

If you honestly don’t know whether living or dying is harder, your life must not be very difficult.

Living requires far more and sustained effort. Therefore: living is harder.

I don’t think “which is harder?” is even relevant. Obviously, sustained effort to remain healthy and avoid unnecessary suffering, is quite difficult… but also, overriding all the fear and psychological programming, to cause life-ending damage to oneself, is not exactly “easy,” for most people.

Suicide requires confronting all that from which most people actively shield themselves. Death typically carries a spike of a high degree of pain and extreme discomfort.

But living spreads that pain and suffering over a much longer time, while bringing spikes of its own.

Inviting that tsunami of a lifetime of pain, condensed into a few mere minutes, is no small feat. But neither is the endurance required to survive that same lifetime worth of pain, over the longest possible duration.

However, i think there’s a higher total of suffering, in a full-duration life, even if the degree of agony spikes much higher in the moment of an invited death. Death ends the requirements. Life remains subjected to them.

So, do you want to sprint? Or run a marathon?

Do you want to pour all your effort into covering the most distance in the least possible time?

Or do you want to reduce your rate of exertion, increase your duration of endurance, and cover as much distance as possible, in the maximum amount of time you are allowed to use?

Which is more efficient?

…too often, i have been required to sprint, just to stay in the race. Now i can’t even come close to catching up, or even finding an acceptable pace; each further step is sheer agony. I cannot hope to finish this way.

What’s “harder,” is when you realize that none of the available choices are acceptable. I don’t particularly want to die… but i don’t see any viable option to make my life livable, since i’m already too exhausted to even survive… and don’t even have any way to gain anything from merely surviving, except more unbearable suffering, for no reason.

It’s tragically ridiculous.