TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "suicide"
Aaron Swartz 1986-2013
Today, we lost a great mind to suicide, goddamn it. Who knows why. I just wanted to hear him speak and keep speaking so I went to YouTube. This was a good man—watch him express himself and you can tell. He had a good heart and expected the best of the world.
I never met Aaron, but he was one of my first Internet heroes—one of the first bloggers I read when I realized that people make the Internet and some of them have elegant and beautiful voices. Today, I’m sad.
Here are some nice words of advice from Aaron in 2007:
- Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
- Say yes to everything. I have a lot of trouble saying no, to an pathological degree — whether to projects or to interviews or to friends. As a result, I attempt a lot and even if most of it fails, I’ve still done something.
- Assume nobody else has any idea what they’re doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don’t know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you’ll do pretty well.
Aaron, thank you for all you’ve done for the world.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a moving speech to families of fallen troops on Friday, recounted the dark days following the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter and talked about having thoughts of suicide.
This is a really moving piece, but especially for anyone who’s struggled with depression and thoughts of suicide. The thing that pulled Biden out of his depression was when a senator called him and gave him the idea for a grief logbook:
The caller told Biden to start marking in a calendar each day how he felt, and that, after a few months, he would find that he still had dark days but that they would grow fewer and further apart.
“He said, ‘That’s when you know you’re going to make it,’’” Biden said.
Thanks to @michaelschaub for this. Filed under: depression, suicide
Andy Rooney on Kurt Cobain’s suicide, 1994. “No one’s art is better than the person who made it” has got to be one of the dumbest sentences I’ve ever read, refuted by thousands of years of art history. Compare his comments on Cobain’s work ethic to Butch Vig’s recollection.
