Why did he kill himself?

>>8744073
The better question is why haven't you?

>>8744076
no u

>"Hmmm, how can I be remembered on /lit/?..."

>>8744073
he was too afraid of being considered a fraud because his real self and the image he was projecting to the world where complete opposites. He couldn't handle that pressure.

Just imbalanced. Honestly he killed himself a year earlier.

>>8744073
It was a misunderstand accident, he was just trying to stretch his belt out in his garage

>>8744073
He stopped taking the medication that kept him from being suicidal.

>>8744207
Glad to hear he was woke to the end

>>8744207
Did he tell anyone why he stopped?

>>8744223
Because they're cuck capsules obviously

>>8744223
his wife, but we knew later she wanted him dead. She knew.

>>8744185
So like Hunter S. Thompson?

>>8744207
he didn't stop (he's not an idiot, after all), he just switched meds and that did not become him well, apparently.

>>8744379
>tfw gotta go back soon and say these meds aren't working
Makes me feel like such a burden.

Kikes. Almost certainly.

>>8744379
>>8744207
>it was le anti-depressants

Fuck off redditors
The absense of something that may has prevented a suicide (and thats a big fucking MAYBE) does not constitute a motivation for suicide

>>8744395
what did he mean by this?

>>8744073
He couldn't come to terms with his own faggotry.

Smartphones.

He killed himself because he knew he hadn't any talent.

He found 4chan

>>8744673
had smartphones already had a significant impact by that time?
why not computers or the internet at large?

>>8744185
isn't that what everyone does?

>>8744396
When you want to kill yourself all the fucking time and you finally find a medication that helps you, the day it stops working, you just don't want to feel that anymore.

I started to read Infinite Jest two weeks ago, I'm at page 150 or something. I really like it. He talks a lot about drugs and I guess he took a lot of drugs when he was young, but do any of you know if he had problems with alcohol?
Also it makes me really sad that he killed himself. I can already feel he was a great writer, despites what you edgy cunts might say.

>>8744756
>When you want to kill yourself all the fucking time and you finally find a medication that helps you, the day it stops working, you just don't want to feel that anymore.


Duh follow your own trail of thought. The suicidal thoughts precluded the medicine so they're no adequate description of motive

>>8744073
He lived in the USA. That's prolly why.

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Wishing I could read his essay on Trump.

>>8744782
He would have voted TRUMP!

>>8744770
Not who you're responding to, but I don't think you know what the word 'precluded' means

>>8745105
doubt it, he was the proto numale cuck

"Suicide". he had info on Clinton.

>>8745167
he was a conservative
he voted reagan

but later in life he flirted with obama and even thought about writing speeches for him
he killed himself soon after

>>8744073
He was probably going bald, and as a Gen X manchild he couldn't live with that.

>>8745136
I stand corrected

>>8745198
Huh, so that's why the Guardian, Salon and Huffington Post hate him.

>>8744073
no A V E R A G E korean gf Tbh

>>8745198
The Trump campaign is the apotheosis of the destructive irony he was bitching about. There's no way.

>>8745363
Hillary is the opposite of sincere

He was sad

>>8745363
You think people support Trump ironically or his campaign was ironic? When was the last time you left campus senpai?

>>8744770
holy fucking shit this is weapons-grade stupidity

>>8745555
No it isn't, a lack of a "medicine" is not a motivation you retard. He had a reason for doing it regardless of the existence of anti-depressants, changing the meds was simply a catalyst

>>8745604
right, but the question was "why did he kill himself?" and not "what were his reasons for killing himself?"
the latter is more interesting, for sure, but none of us have any idea, hence the contents of this thread

>>8745615
Still doesn't qualify, again the lack of anti-depressants can not cause anyone to commit suicide any more than a lack of chemotherapy can kill anyone.

>>8745615
>the latter is more interesting, for sure, but none of us have any idea

Oh yeah we only have his massive corpus of works describing his perspective and intimate thoughts. How fucking banal can you be

>>8745640
are you the preclude guy from earlier?
I don't think banal is quite the word you're looking for

>>8745659
Get fucked it is banal, hurr we can't literally mind read him in the seconds before he hung himself so any speculation is hopeless and invalid

>>8745630
if someone was on chemo and her pills were suddenly replaced with sugar pills, you would say in response to "why did she die?" that her chemo pills were replaced with sugar pills
likewise, while we wouldn't call someone's not taking antidepressants the cause of his suicide, we'd call someone's stopping or changing antidepressants the cause of his suicide. we would and we do.
>>8745666
banal just says I'm boring--I think you want to say I'm wrong, no?
also, nice try satan

>>8745685
No she'd have died of fucking cancer obviously, thats the physical reality of what caused her death. The rest is happenstance framing

>>8745700
oh boy
the "physical reality" of the matter is also that her being human caused her to die, that a lack of oxygen in her final moments caused her to die, etc., etc.

there are a million different ways to describe an event, and the only measure of rightness among them is whether (given that they describe the event) they adhere to the way we use words, words like "caused," for instance
it's not happenstance framing, it's the way we use words, which is rigidly defined, but often admits of more than one right answer to a question

>>8745727
Wrong

Its about the contingency of the cause. If she didn't have cancer she would not have died of cancer. End of story. It doesn't matter if the human body was predisposed towards genetic degeneration, it doesn't matter whether she was on treatment or off treatment and so on. The cancer itself is what the event, dying of cancer rested on.

In the way, Wallace's suicidal thoughts were the cause of his decision to kill himself. The rest is not contingent. He could have easily killed himself on the medication if the thoughts were the same.

Did he an hero because of >>8740521 ?

>>8745352
Likely.
Or bf, since traps galore.

>>8745746
there were tons of things necessary for dfw to have committed suicide: he had to be mortal, he had to have access to means to commit suicide, he had to have been born, etc. If any of these things were false, he could not have died of suicide.
this isn't the criterion we use for judging whether a is the cause of b (could be have happened if a wasn't so?)
when we ask "what was the cause of JFK's death?" we might rightly say "assassination," even though his dying didn't rest on his being assassinated. when we ask "what was the cause of JFK's assassination?" we might rightly say "he was traveling in an open top car through a busy city," while this being true wasn't at all necessary for his having been assassinated.
if you want to work with a concept of causation as narrow as what you seem to be trying to point at, the only acceptable answer to the last question would be tautological: "he was assassinated"
none of this is what we mean when we talk about causes; I hope this is clear

>>8745746
You should read more.

>>8744073
According to Franzen, DFW did it to prove to his family/friends that he didn't deserve to be loved.

>>8745833
that sounds pretty false

>>8745838
Nevertheless, it's still interesting to think about, whether it applies to DFW or any suicide "victim."

>>8745844
I think very few people kill themselves to prove anything to anyone

>>8745451
Trump actively becoming a caricature of himself/behaving in the same way that he did on a game show in order to play the media against itself is only really possible in the post-ironic landscape DFW bitched about incessantly. Was it purely ironic? No, but it depended on the culture of irony to succeed.

>>8745386
Right, but the campaign was run in a way that was recognizably insincere that reads as sincere.

“Hello?”
“Hi have you heard the news.”
“No, what?”
“David Foster Wallace is dead.”
Silence for about ten or fifteen seconds.
“How did it happen.”
“He hung himself. It was in the LA Times. That's how I heard about it.”
Silence for about ten or fifteen seconds.
“Huh”/sigh.
“I know.”
Silence for about ten or fifteen seconds.
My phone beeps.
Then again.
“My battery's about to die I'm going to hang up now.”
“Okay.”

I take the phone away from my ear and look at the display and think I should thank him for calling to tell me and for a second he hasn't hung up and I'm a little surprised and somewhat relieved that he hasn't done so yet and I'm about to bring the phone back to my ear but while I'm doing that while the display is still in my visual field I see that he's hung up.

You can't experience that which you create. David Foster Wallace was the only English reader alive who could not experience David Foster Wallace.

My door was just installed with a new lock and I've just locked it for the first time.

David Foster Wallace changed my life. David Foster Wallace was probably the most important person to me in my life. This includes the woman who I will probably marry and who I consider the love of my life and my soulmate and who I have known for almost ten years now and who I am closer than than anyone and with whom I share a greater understanding than I think probably most people experience with anyone in their lifetimes. This includes the man who called me who is the other half of that phone conversation at the start who is probably my best friend; this includes the man I was obsessed with for years. This includes everyone in my family.

I dropped out of university halfway through my third year and got a job teaching in China. My parents came to visit me after I'd been there for eight months. When they asked me if I wanted them to bring anything from Canada I said only one thing: Infinite Jest. I told them they could find a copy in any bookstore. They looked around and couldn't find one. The day before they left I sent them an email telling them to make sure to bring that book, it was the only important thing. If they couldn't find a copy in a store I told them to go to the house of a friend of mine and get his copy, he would be willing to lend it to me in China. They did that. They brought it and I read it and I had been languishing unemployed in a small apartment in Kunming shared with a Slovenian girl who didn't like me and whom I didn't like. I had enough money so that I didn't have to do anything at all ever. I lay in bed and did nothing until Infinite Jest arrived, at which point I read it all day every day until I forgot it on the ledge of a railing of the back deck of a hostel from which three travelling Brits whisked me for a mountain-hiking donkey-riding trip. I had been about 700 pages in. When I returned a week later the owner of the hostel, a friendly middle-aged woman, told me she'd thought it was the property of the hostel and had lent it to a girl who had been on her way to Thailand. I ran around the hostel asking everyone if they knew that girl. Someone did. She gave me her email address. I emailed her and gave her my address at the hostel. Months passed. I moved out of the hostel into a new place. New Year's arrived and I went to a party at that hostel. I arrived early and had dinner by myself at a table. The middle-aged woman owner approached me after I had been served. She had a big sky-blue book in her hand. I couldn't believe it. She said “Merry Christmas.” It had come in the mail from the girl who had left for Thailand. It was the best Christmas present I'd ever got, by far by far by far. I finished the last 400 pages in two days.

David Foster Wallace changed my life.

He said Fuck You to the idea that using obscure words is a bad way to make fiction art.

He also said Fuck You to obscurity, to every artist that tries to pass off mystical obscurity as profundity. Every time I looked up a word I didn't know that David Foster Wallace used, which in Infinite Jest was on average twice per page, the sentence became crystal clear. The sentences weren't obscure because they had no meaning; they were obscure because I didn't know their meaning. But there was a method for me to discover their meaning: the dictionary. This is like that Chomsky quote about why he doesn't like postmodernism.

>>8745976
Don't write. You are terrible at it.

David Foster Wallace said Fuck You to people who don't understand postmodernism, to the idea that just because something is tricky and intractibly complex and ultimately resistant to clear classification it's necessarily useless to think or talk about. He also said Fuck You to postmodernism, as he defined and understood it as a discrete and coherent movement of art in fiction from the 1960s to the 1980s. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows he was post-postmodern. Everyone wrote about it, called him the harbinger of the post-scientific age.

Holy shit. I just remembered what was going through my mind 25 minutes ago.

I always meant to write him. I'm going to write that now.

But first, I always intended to meet him. I intended to meet him after I became a famous writer. I told a friend less than a week ago: “I really believe I'll meet him. I think we'll get along. I think I understand now all the ways that I'm different from him enough so that I won't be discouraged by the fact that he is smarter than I'll ever be. I think we'll get along really well.”

I can't tell you how many times I've thought of writing him.

The first thing that came to my mind when I heard he was dead was that I should have written him. Maybe if I'd written him he wouldn't have died. I was going to write:

I know you probably have a lot of confidence now as a successful writer, and I know you don't know me and so what I say may not mean much to you, but I also can imagine the position you're in having published Infinite Jest, and feeling the pressure of having to follow that up. I just want to tell you, that in case you feel at all concerned about the critics that say you aren't emotional enough, that I really hope you don't listen to them.

I can't remember everything I wanted to say.

I just read “this generation's Hunter S. Thompson.” I don't give a shit about pissing matches but I think that will seen to be laughable. The only writer I have ever read that I consider David Foster Wallace's equal is Tolstoy. I think the only reason Wallace hasn't been deified to the stature of a Tolstoy is because of Tall Poppy Syndrome of contemporaries, and because it's simply so difficult.

I just read “with Hal on the floor.”

Fuck everyone that says not surprising.

I have been depressed all day. I have been depressed all day because of bullshit. I was was writing this ten minutes before I got that phone call:

“'Men and women are treated differently.'
“'By who?'
“'If I'm going to have to explain that whole thing, and the whole history of that oppression, that's not a conversation I'm interested in having, I don't want to do that.'
“And suddenly I felt like I was wrong and I was lazy and an asshole and everyone knew it and always thought I was an asshole. I became afraid to say anything at all because I thought anything I said would sound annoying and self-indulgent or else totally transparently fake and gratingly annoying, just empty barking of sound to try to call attention to myself to try to not seem like a silent loser, or else self-indulgent and disgustingly icky and sticky fly-trap emotional garbage that no one wanted to hear because they didn't care because they weren't my real friends and I hadn't had a real friend since I was a child or maybe even never, maybe my sister had been a real friend but she was gone or maybe she hadn't even been very close to me, but now that she was gone I idealized that relationship to make myself feel like such a thing was possible to compensate for the chronically unsatisfying and half-assed and barely-there friendships I've made and been too lazy or self-involved to work on the whole rest of my life since.
“The last thing I remember is lying face down on my bed with my head to one side and seeing a black thing on my forearm that I thought might be a bug but when I followed it with my eyes moving down and up my arm and didn't feel anything I noticed it was the shadow of a piece of dust that was caught in my fan which was rotating on its axis back and forth between me and the light on the other side of the room.”

Then I put clothes on and got an umbrella because it's raining right now here in Toronto and I was going to go buy a bean salad at the corner store and I was responding to a text message my roommate had sent me that just said “Unlearn” because that's a funny word or at least is to us in the context of our friendship because I had told him I was depressed, and I was writing him a funny text message back and I was starting to feel okay and I was standing in front of my house in the rain with the umbrella over my head and one hand typing that text message when I got that phone call, and after that phone call I didn't know what to do because I felt so strongly. I didn't know where to walk, I walked into the street, I thought about killing myself, I stood still on the sidewalk behind the apartment complex for a long time in the rain with my uncool clothes on I had put on just to walk to the corner. I cried. Then I stopped and came inside.

Oh my God David Foster Wallace I love you. The world is a very different place without you. My life is different now. Life is a very different thing now. My problems are different. The rest of my life as I currently understand it is different.

Sorry if this is bullshit. If mods want to delete it that's fine. David Foster Wallace, I love you. Oh my God.

>>8745982
I think it's actually pretty good.

>>8744073
He was a hack and he knew it.

>>8746482
true

>>8746482
hey at least he was sincere about it

>>8745804
No then the quesiton becomes why Lee Harvey Oswald popped the mother fucker, you are daft beyond daft

>>8745907
I disagree, I think Hillary posing as sincere (while being incredibly insincere) would have rubbed him the wrong way.
The Trump campaign is more ambiguous, I don't think you can deny that Trump was out to MAGA and got a large following with it.

>>8747482
But was he NEW™ sincere????

>>8744185
Probably the best explanation, although he was also chronically depressed for most of his life, so there might not be a fulfilling answer re: his artistic output

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he read pic related

>>8747485
jesus christ

>>8744073
>Why did he kill himself?
He didn't.
He was assassinated for contesting the Jewish plan for the 'education' of the public.

>>8748986
please go on

>>8748991
Look up George Soros, it will blow your mind

>>8744073
He took himself too seriously. If he had a chemical imbalance in the brain, well that sucks for him. Exercising and being outdoors helps counter that.

>>8748723

kek

>>8749082
I can't overstate how completely worthless this post is

>>8744756
this best not be b8
IJ shows he understood depression and drug dependence too well for him to not have had some personal history - I think it was with weed rather than alcohol or hard drugs (based off my interpretation of IJ only), he attended Boston AA as research but then lied to interviewers about continuing AA/NA afterward IJ (the end shot of End of the Tour is based on these lies).

He changed medications and died a year later. In an interview his sister blamed the new prescription.

>>8749082
best post in this thread

>>8744073
too much 4chan

>>8744396
One symptom of major depression is called psychomotor retardation, a severe slow down of physical and mental processes. This is why depressed people notoriously stay in bed all day, for example. So even if someone feels compelled to commit suicide, they can essentially feel paralyzed and unable to do so. Starting new medication or change an existing regimen can solve one of these problems but not another. So you get someone who's been itching to kill themselves, living in misery, but physically incapable of going through with it, when suddenly the retardation is fixed but the urge remains and bam they find the power to tape their hands together and hang themselves by a belt in their garage.

This is the same reason why commercials for these medications list suicide as one of their top side effects.

>>8750372
This is why you shouldn't fuck with your body's natural defense mechanisms. There's like billions of years of evolution ingrained in them.

But no, we have to be happy all day everyday.

>>8749075
>George Soros
that's just the tip of the iceberg m8

he meme too close to the sun.

Test

>>8750767
did it work?

>>8744674

Don't be a dichotomist—he had plenty talent. The problem was he didn't have genius and knew it, realizing that at some point everyone else would know it too. Just think about the pressure of being compared to Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, et al., knowing full well that you're just a teenage welterweight who's been thrown into the ring with Ali, Tyson, Mayweather.

>>8750770
Yes

>>8749082
End yourself

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Why do you hate him now, /lit/? You liked him a few years ago.

>>8751141
it's good to change things up every once in a while, just for variety's sake

>>8745985
>the idea that just because something is tricky and intractibly complex and ultimately resistant to clear classification it's necessarily useless to think or talk about.

(It is.)

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>>8749082
BASED
A
S
E
D

>>8744073
He killed himself because he's a nu-male cuck, nothing more.

>>8750372
good post

>>8750707
what is the 'purpose' of depression

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>>8747482
>>8747950

>>8744185
What was his "real self", and what was the image he was projecting?

That Kate chapter explains why. I sometimes think that if he had children it might have given him something to live for but if you are depressed like he was you might just be depressed either way.

>>8745340
Huff and Salon I get but the Guardian? They wrote a massive piece about the 20th anniversary of IJ and praised him throughout.

He realized that it's not possible to be a decent human being.

>>8753756
and a real hero...

>>8744197
>just finished off the draft for my new piece of fiction in the form of a suicide note
>hmmm what else to do... ah, stretch out my leather belt! It keeps curling in on itself
>well the best place is probably from this rafter in the garage, I'll just nail it up
>oh I can't reach, I'll just use this chair
>oh what the hell, it's already looped in on itself while I wasn't looking, I'll have to take it down again
>first I'll get some duct tape ready to cover the buckle and attack a weight
>the damn duct tape is stuck to my hands!
>oh well, I can still do this even with my hands stuck together
V plausible

>>8750372
This

>>8744223
They'd stopped working, part of why he did the electroshock therapy.

>>8744698
The first iPhone came out the same year he died.

>>8750372
>This is the same reason why commercials for these medications list suicide as one of their top side effects.
This is not true. SSRIs cause suicide mostly by suicidal ideation being a side effect for example, they actually cause people to focus on killing themselves where they had no inclination to before. It's incredibly strange to see it happen btw, and often people don't really actively remember that part of their lives after coming off the medication again.

>>8751535
>what is the 'purpose' of depression
good question. probably too deep for a 4chan thread.

maybe if we knew the 'purpose' of say, cancer, we'd know where to start answering this question.

You know that feeling when you get high and you're balancing between hyper social anxiety and half-baked genius? Well, my theory is DFW felt like that all the time, as evidenced by the first Erdedy chapter, and by Wallace's paranoia (e.g., him thinking the cruise ship director was trying to kill him with the flush of the toilet), and by his longwinded writing style, which, face it, is just how someone who has the most control over his paranoid high would write.

>>8754008
no, you're wrong

>>8744223

He was on an old fashioned anti depressant that was destroying his liver if I recall, either his liver or his kidneys. When he got suicidal and tried to go back on it again it didn't have the same effect

>>8754143
Not being funny, but the idea of increased proactivity being the cause may be true in a small number of cases, but mostly it's people actually getting more depressed and starting to think about suicide more that causes it, especially with SSRIs. It's very apparent when you see it in a clinical setting, and you can hear it from the horse's mouth. I would go so far as to say the alertness theory is a concoction of drug companies if it weren't for the immense variation in people's reactions to drugs.

>>8754345
[Citation needed]

please suggest a plausible mechanism by which SSRI's might, to a clinically significant extent, increase suicidal ideation instead of just asserting repeatedly that they do; if you can't, show us the data

what you've said runs contrary to my personal experience and my experience working in suicide prevention

>>8745982
Not even him, but why don't you write something?

Throughout his childhood, David was psychologically and emotionally abused by his mother. He was led to believe that being the smartest guy in the room was all that mattered to the moms, and once he got to Amherst he realized he could not be numero uno forever. His worth was 'performing' intellectually for his family, and this really fucked him up.

He tried to piece together an ad hoc life philosophy from AA and self help books that (obviously) would ultimately fail. This required him to make a villain out of something (irony) and paint it as the ultimate debilitating evil. The only problem is that his self-image as this aww shucks midwest everyman was a lie. Irony v. sincerity is not a real problem for your average suburbanite. So DFW is writing this big long book to perform for mommy and maybe figure out how all these people in the world manage to make it past age 50, waging war against some distorted boogeyman of a literary device, and fuck it you know the rest

>>8754486
Look at the side effects for anti depressants. Depression and suicide are some of the first mentioned side effects of some depressants. Dont have any sources other than my own experience, and one can easily look up the side effects for many commonly prescribed anti depressants.

To ask, "can we prove that its the anti depressant causing more feelings of depression and/or suicide?" is misleading. Any data that can be acquired on this phenomena is statistical at best(and subjective), but correlation=/=causation.

A citation isnt really necessary, its common sense and i can attest to my own personal experience that when i took anti depressants, i felt more depressed in general. Apathetic. And i knew a lot of people who had the same experience. But i also met others who had taken anti depressants and felt better in general.

Besides, we dont understand how many ssris/anti depressants work. But its clear to me that for some, they dont work, and seem to make it worse.

>>8752677
Real Wallace:
> white supremacist
> Conceited
> did not care for anyone else other than his dogs and the audience pussy
> he was a writer just to show the world how smart he thought he was

Wallace projected to the world;
> Wholesome
> Humble
> Selfless
> Pathological honesty/sincerity

He just needed to get out more and think positive thoughts.

The lively arts of the millennial USA treat anhedonia as hip and cool, which is why DFW necked himself (RIP). Infinite Jest was a great book.

>>8749075
6/10, made me look

>>8754486

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/08August/Pages/Antidepressantsandsuiciderisk.aspx

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353604/

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/InformationbyDrugClass/UCM096273

Gives you the motivation/energy to off yourself.

Suicide prevention is not in anyway a medical license

>>8754605
>This required him to make a villain out of something (irony) and paint it as the ultimate debilitating evil.

You'd think he would've done a better job, eh?

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>>8755939
>Real Wallace: white supremacist
>Wallace projected to the world: Wholesome
He was definitely open about it, tho. The press just declined to cover it due to some unspoken gentleman's agreement.

>>8755939
>>8757466
source regarding his white supremacy?

>>8757532
cant u see the fuckin pic u mong

>>8744073
thingken of normals

>>8745604
>. He had a reason for doing it regardless of the existence of anti-depressants
Yeah, it's called depression.

>>8757696
Depression only affects a libidinal framing, it does not provoke intent
The question remains why did he kill himself

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>>8754008
Are SSRIs the real redpill?

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>>8757702
>Freudianism

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>>8757751
Not an argument

>>8757709
Blue pill is the word you're looking for

>>8757757
Exactly.

>>8744228
Wut?

>>8745105
Trump is basically a famous crooner

>>8745198
>>8745198
source?

>>8751420
but he would've definitely beat the living shit you of you if said that to him.