Die for Others
Every New Year brings with it its own problems. In this blog, we will review easy ways to reduce your budget by confronting these problems, in order to pay-off outstanding loans and allow you to trade in your distress for the happiness of others (i.e. suicide). This existential transformation can be accomplished in 10 simple steps.
- Break up with your girlfriend (or make her break up with you, which you sense she will soon, after the holidays). Although this may seem like a bold move, you won’t notice her absence after a few days. What you will notice is the money you save on fancy dinners, movies, jewelry, condoms, beauty products, fashion, and gas. Being single is the first step to renewed financial stability.
- Isolate yourself from your friends. You’ll find, again, that you won’t miss them. But the money you will save at bars, restaurants, on housewarming gifts, etc., will once again increase your financial stability. Consolidate your loans into one single monthly payment, choosing a monthly value that will erase all debt within a year. This will allow you to kill yourself without worrying about surviving family members having to pay your loans.
- As a corollary to (1) and (2)—assuming you have a job that allows you to telecommute—you will save money on utilities. Since you will no longer leave the house, you can wear the same clothes all day and remain under the covers in bed, thus not having to turn up the thermostat on cold January days. With nobody to impress, laundry, showers, dishwashing, and other chores will become unnecessary.
- Reduce your phone’s plan to simply data. By now, you won’t be receiving texts or calls. This complete alienation from former friends and family will result in savings of up to $100 a month, plus the time you save texting and talking with people who don’t really like you will allow you to lay in bed and think about what charity to disburse your money to when it’s time to commit suicide (see 9).
- Start a robust social media presence. Use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest to recreate a virtual life to replace your previous life. Get likes and followers. Likes and followers, you’ll find, are at least as rewarding as sex and friendship, at least in your current depressive stupor. Also, invest in technology like HD TVs, satellite radio and perhaps, if you still have a sex drive, a “Real Doll,” so you will be endlessly entertained and won’t have to think about your feeling that life has passed you by, which feelings are even more common when you wake up than they were in (1).
- By following these simple rules, within one year you can quit your telecommuting job (the job involved Doctors Without Borders, which had once been a passion that you took out all those college loans for in the beginning) and live off the savings for at least one more year, by which time you will have spent so much time in bed, atrophying, that your health will suffer and you will be diagnosed with [some weird fatal disease].
- As a supplement to your will, write a final statement about how you feel about your life. Thank your old family and friends for their kindness, remark on old anecdotes in a humorous way, and speak about your life with appreciation and tact. Say that you want to die with dignity and have embraced the inevitable. (If you have trouble with grammar or mechanics, visit a local library or school’s Writing Center.)
- Choose the proper charity to donate all the capital you have saved. This part is, admittedly, the most difficult part of this process, because the amount of suffering in the world exponentially exceeds the philanthropic resources raised to remedy them.
- Check with your primary care practitioner before suicide to determine the final state of your organs and your body’s overall deterioration (which you consider the same as your mind and/or heart’s disintegration, a disintegration that started as a teenager, alone in your bedroom, playing along with Nirvana songs, waiting for Mariah Harper to call).
- Finally, kill yourself in an efficient way (pills are good; carbon monoxide is good) and as you float among the clouds looking down, appreciating how your money makes people happy, you will feel connected and satisfied for the first time since you were little, because (even if nobody cared enough about you to know it) all you ever was wanted was to be a nice person all along and leave the world in a better place, which your dad, who was a “Successful Man,” had once told you was the Goal of Life.
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James McAdams has published fiction in decomP, Literary Orphans, One Throne Magazine, TINGE Magazine, Superstition Review, per contra, and B.O.A.A.T. Press, among others. Before attending college, he worked as a social worker in the mental health industry in Philadelphia. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he also teaches and edits the university’s literary journal, Amaranth. His creative and academic work can be viewed at jamesmcadams.net
He tweets at: @jamestmcadams
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