“Killing It” Isn’t Worth It
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'm sure this will be an unpopular position, but I question this. If an individual reaches a point where the pain and misery they are experiences outweighs the joy, or even the hope for joy, in their life then maybe the rationally correct thing to do is to take your own life.
I mean, if you reach a point where you can look forward and reasonably say "I'm never going to achieve my dreams and accomplish what I want to accomplish, and being here hurts" then why is one obligated to keep suffering until chance claims you?
I'm not saying this is a decision one should make lightly, and obviously one of the negatives is that it's an irreversible decision. But I can see circumstances where it is a reasonable choice.
If there exists an omniscience being that can factually answer the question of "Will I ever achieve my dreams?" (or "Will I ever be happy again?", but that's for an even broader discussion), then yes, the only rationally correct thing to do is to take your own life for a "no" answer.
In reality, the best we can answer such question is "There would be x% chance thing will get better". At what value of x will the decision of taking one's life becomes rational?
And then, most of the time, depressed people aren't really in their best state of mind. Hence this is one of the cases where the advice should stay on the risk-adverse side, rather than the perfectly rational one.
Stephen Stills famously said, or rather sang, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." Similarly, there are many dreams one can pursue, many things one can accomplish in life. If one dream turned out to be too far out there to reach, wait for the pain to pass (and trust me, it will), then go looking for a closer one. More often than not, it's right in front of your eyes. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Perhaps one thing that the "startup world" could adopt is the practice of postmortems. The game industry, which many have pointed out have many parallels between a new game venture and a startup, embraces failure in the sense that they talk truthfully about "what went right, and what went wrong". There are postmortems at industry events (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLqk4aqpXlQ), and the industry's media publishes them (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/). Of course, in many cases the postmortems are of popular/successful games, but at least they speak freely about things that went wrong ... and there are even some small failures that work up the courage to post about it (http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1289).
The point is that the culture in the game industry does not look down on failure, even while celebrating successes. And yes, I do realize the irony of me using the game industry as an example of healthy culture (ea_spouse, etc.) :P
YES, I say write about startups that struggle and are failing. That can be instructive and interesting too. And of course not in a mocking way like Color, but to chronicle the journey of the underdog, the journeyman fighter, the also-ran.
Why aren't journalists doing more of this? Is it a lack of good writers? No money in it?