Darwin Had Better Ideas
Life is unfair, relentlessly so, and no amount of reframing changes the basic arithmetic: you start losing the moment you start. Crushing heartbreak, wrong expectations, dreams that dissolve on contact with reality—all of it building toward an ending that is, statistically, undignified. Given all this, the long tradition of finding the exit early has a certain philosophical respectability. The problem is that most people go about it boringly. There are better options.
The most committed approach, and arguably the most conceptually interesting, is bug chasing—the practice of deliberately seeking HIV infection, known in certain communities by the slang term Pozzen, derived simply from "positive." The motivations are more varied than you’d expect: some want to escape the perpetual low-grade anxiety of possibly infecting someone they love; some want unprotected sex with a positive partner without the ongoing cognitive overhead; some have apparently decided that surrendering to a specific outcome is its own form of control. It’s objectively deranged. It’s also, in its backwards logic, a kind of active choice—which puts it ahead of most of what passes for agency in daily life.
Less ideologically intense is the feeder arrangement. You’re a man going nowhere in particular, unloved in the specific way that’s worse than being alone, eating badly for reasons you don’t examine too carefully. Enter the feeder: someone whose erotic investment involves stuffing you with ice cream, fried chicken, and cookies at regular intervals—massaging your thickening legs while you work through an entire run of reality television, photographing your progress for corners of the internet where this kind of devotion is deeply appreciated. It sounds like a horror scenario. There are people for whom it’s paradise. You’ll find them at fast food chains around 2 AM, which is where this particular romance tends to begin.
If intimate self-destruction feels like too much commitment, there’s always the legal route. In New York, it is technically illegal to jump from a tall building—a law that has never once resulted in a posthumous prosecution, but one that means you can at least go out in violation of municipal code. Most people leave no mark on civic law whatsoever. That’s not nothing.
The truly elegant exits are the ones that look, afterward, as though the universe was planning them. Michael Anderson Godwin was sentenced to die in the electric chair for double murder. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Months later, he was electrocuted while sitting on the metal toilet in his cell, trying to fix his own television set. Whatever you believe about how the world is organized, there’s an authorship to that story that feels deliberate in a way that demands acknowledgment.
And then there are the Darwin Awards, which formally commemorate those who’ve removed themselves from the gene pool with particular creativity: the robber who fired at pursuing officers over his shoulder and shot himself in the face; the man who believed he was Jesus and drowned attempting to walk across his bathtub; the driver who stopped on a bridge to urinate over the railing and went over with the momentum. What they share, aside from the outcome, is a quality of absolute certainty that held right up until the last second. That certainty—unearned, total, fatal—is in some ways more purely human than anything that came before it.
None of this is easy, which is either encouraging or infuriating depending on where you are right now. The universe has opinions. So does gravity. So does the electrostatic charge running through every metal toilet in every prison in America. Good luck out there.