There was a sad post in Reddit today about a guy who had killed himself. The guy was (apparently) a programmer, and so left a really geeky suicide note. And it is perhaps worrisome that as soon as I read that, what came to my mind was "Awesome guy,
this is the way to perform suicide".
The guy had been preparing for it for weeks, mainly by writing a script. Yes, a script for suicide. What the script did was, once he was dead, alert the people who know him via Blogger, Twitter, Gmail and also
a website he built for himself. The script also wiped his Gmail account clean (presumably because he thought someone might guess the password and read his mails after his death). Here is
the script of death. It takes a single (optional) command line argument. If there is no argument, the script runs in testing mode, where it doesn't do the real updating or deleting stuff - it just prints out what it will do when run in 'real' mode. If there is an argument, and the argument is 'NO', it runs in the 'real' mode, where it informs every one that the person has committed suicide. It feels very very sad to write that line - it is a strange mix of the usual program manual and an announcement of a person's plan to kill himself.
Here are the
original post and the
reddit comments on it.
In my own moments of despair, when I considered suicide a viable option, I've thought of writing an encrypted suicide note or a suicide note on Blogger that is scheduled to be posted some hours after the 'event'. This guy went a step ahead and automated the process of notifying via so many venues. That is simultaneously very cool and very sad.
This has given me an idea though. If I ever consider suicide, my note will probably be an treasure hunt involving challenges in programming and encryption (like, for eg., http://www.pythonchallenge.com/). That would fit perfectly as the last thing I want to do on earth, the last thing I want to be remembered for.
But then, that might be too much work, and I might want to just get rid of the world. In which case, it might be a single message in the Drafts folder of my cell phone.
It is perhaps telling that I've thought through this in so much detail. I've not been feeling like working from the moment I read that post. I've been trying to get into the mindset of the person who did this, to think through the thought processes he had. It affects me so much because I could very easily have been that guy, and can understand how one can calmly write a script for weeks while planning for a suicide. I'm happy that I'm (hopefully) out of that state.
I like to believe that I went through that stage only so that I could understand such people who go through the same stage, and be able to help them.
If this post seems a confused mess, it's because right now my mind is, too.
May his soul rest in peace, may his next life (if there is one) be much more peaceful and bliss-filled.
