I hate my life – there is nothing good, everything sucks and even if something good happened, something else bad will happen and makes it all shit again. I am sick of life sucking and just want to die. Life is so pointless anyway- we all die eventually, why not now? Suicide and dying is better than dealing with this life that I absolutely hate. Has that or similar thoughts ever gone through your mind? While it seems impossible, some version of that, maybe instead of suicide it was “get cancer and die” or “get in an accident and die”, or even just “fall asleep and never wake up” but something similar has been in nearly every person that ever lived thoughts at some point in time.
Anger, despair, hopelessness, and depression effect everybody at some point in their life. For the lucky ones, it is a bad afternoon or few days and then things get better. Not everybody is lucky though. For some these thoughts come back within a short time after they go away, and for some they keep coming back until they never go away and that is how they feel most if not all of the time. People will say that person’s problem is their negativity. They will offer lectures about the glass half empty attitude, and say that if that person were not so pessimistic then good things would happen, implying it is all their fault.
So what is the answer when you hate life? What is the answer if you sincerely wish you would never wake up again? The answer is 100% dependent on what is the question being asked. Do you hate your life? Yes, probably so, who are we to say that is not true? I have felt that way before and it was 100% true- it was not dramatics for attention or proving a point.
Is suicide the answer to feeling like that? Well, if there is no other valid alternative presented what would your answer be? Take anything you hate – an old sweater with stain on it that reminds you of the night your ex dumped you- you hate it so you want to get rid of it. If you hate something getting rid of it certainly seems like a reasonable thing (once you jump past the knee jerk reaction of how sacred life is and the “you don’t really mean that” automatic responses).
That is why the question is so important. Because life is not like a sweater, a broken toy, or an old clunker car. Those things you can hate and get rid of them, because you can replace them. In the case of hating life, it is not life that is hated, it is being forced to undergo the pain, the series of events, and even the memories of the things that have made up that life to that point in time.
If you could instead throw away the abusive alcoholic parent, the bullies in school, the brown-nosing co-worker that gets all the credit from a jerk boss at work along with the memories of being laughed at when you asked out that one person you really liked, and being alone on the last 3 holidays- then just maybe you would not hate life. That list is a small list compared to many that hate their lives.
It is Okay to Hate Life
When bad things happen it is okay to be unhappy. It is okay to not want to embrace bad things and to not want to stoically take it on the chin yet again and act proud to have learned another hard life lesson. When your life sucks it is okay to hate it even. What you need to think about more carefully though is the idea of throwing that life away when all you really needed to do is have it be different. We cannot change the past. Neither do we have to live in the past. We can change things now, and when we change things it changes our present and our future.
Why is it so hard to change things when you hate life? Because it does not seem worth it. If you hate something you don’t want it. It is garbage in your mind and not worth the effort to fix. When you hate your life, all wrapped up in that package is a hatred of yourself since you are the result of that life. Because of that self-hatred, it is hard to see value in fixing it or changing it.
When it is Time to Compare Yourself to Others
Everybody tells you not to compare yourself and your life to others. When you start thinking about suicide it is often in part a result of comparing yourself to others and feeling like you always come up short, so what is the point? I will suggest instead you might consider if your life was different, if your life was more like others, would you still hate it? Most often the answer is no- you hate your life because it has been different than what you wanted and expected, and different than what you see others getting out of life. That is really the key point. The “what if”… What if your life was different?
Life is an ever moving thing. History does not define the future. You can change what is happening in your life. While all people are scared or adverse to change on some level, and many that proclaim to hate their life proudly stand behind the axiom of “don’t ever change yourself” “always be yourself , don’t ever change” – If you hate your life and the way it is going then why not change? I hate diet Pepsi, so I don’t force myself to guzzle it all day, day after day. If you hate your life, don’t keep doing it all the same way, day after day.
Make the changes needed so that the future has a chance to be different from the past. Nothing changes until something changes- if you want a different future then change the way you are doing things. Putting the energy that is currently expended on hate and avoidance into change can and will make the future different.
No matter how many examples somebody comes up with of what went wrong in the past, the only way you can know the future will turn out the same is if you continue to insist on doing it the same way and refusing to change the way they do it. “Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results” comes to mind. It is just as true that if you do things differently each time you will not get the same result.
Nothing changes until something changes- what can you change?
It does not matter what situation you are in:
- Lonely and not leaving the house- need to go out and start seeing people again
- No relationship or not dating – have to be in a place to meet somebody
- In an abusive home and abused- will have to leave for the abuse to stop
- Always end up with bad person- meet people in another way or choose different qualities in dating selection
- Nothing to do on weekends – plan something during week for the weekend
- Can’t stop crying, feeling sad – stop listening to sad music and fixating on sad things
- Can’t stop thinking about suicide – stop searching for methods and start making plans and goals for the future
The list could go on endlessly and it is easy to say those are over-simplifications and then rationalize and explain why none work. It is also just possible it really is that simple and we are just trying to make things far more complicated than they are.
The Question you need to look at is not “do you hate your life”, but rather “what do you hate about your life?” It does not matter if that list is 1 thing or 100 things, looking at them one at a time and figuring out what can be changed, what is in the past and needs to stay in the past, and what you want in the future, will allow you to change your life into something that you no longer hate. It will allow you to have a future where you do not struggle with suicidal thoughts.
