Kill Yourself!! It Might be Fun

 I was strolling along on my way home from my place of work employment when I encountered a little poster in the window of an office building.  The poster had one of those little "seize the day" type messages that the author probably thought was profound.  The message read as follows;

"If you are are afraid to live your life because you might die then you have already died"

Which to me sounds like a marketing slogan for heroin.

There are no end of the supposedly uplifting little messages all of which boil down to "Behaving like a reckless idiot is fun."  Of course there is a certain level of truth to such statements.  Behaving like a reckless idiot is fun right up until the moment when it isn't.  At that point you just have to hope that whatever horrific consequence you're about to suffer doesn't destroy your memory as then you won't know why you're confined to a nursing home at the age of twenty three while an underpaid staffer mops drool off your chin and bathes you in kerosene.

I have my own glib little message, it goes; "Live every moment like it's your last and it probably will be."

 I am basically a positive human being and I always like to think the best of people.  For this reason I have ditched my original opinion that the writers of such gems are gabbling idiots and have come up with a far more respectful hypothesis.  I think they're trying to kill us.  I am always prepared to believe that a person is malicious rather than stupid because I think that is the nicer thing to believe.

In a stroke these comments are transformed from statements of vapid idiocy into an incredibly subtle attempt by the indirectly murderous to thin the human herd.  By wrapping up their nihilistic messages of doom in an apparently upbeat package they can persuade the more gullible to proactively engineer their own destruction.  

Let us take a moment to admire the self effacing genius of these killers.  Not for them the opportunity of gloating over a mutilated corpse with a bloodied axe in hand.  No; it is sufficient for them to sit at home, comfortably anonymous, perhaps watching television with loved ones/future victims secure in the knowledge that thanks to them someone somewhere is attempting to seize the day and will wind up with their vital organs several feet from the remainder of their body. 

Such messages have a long history dating back to the hoary old original "there is nothing to fear but fear itself."  This was the first attempt at indirect murder but it wasn't particularly successful because the statement was so obviously untrue.  There are plenty of things to fear apart from fear itself; bears, wolverines, traffic accidents, outraged husbands, infuriated wives, mildly annoyed second cousins with anger management issues and access to firearms.  The list goes on.  

Todays indirect murderer has advanced long past such neophyte attempts at execution.  Not only can they claim a healthy crop of victims but if they are really good then one day one of their creations will appear on a desk calendar; discreetly credited to "anon" of course.  For the truly exceptional the need for anonymity disappears and they can have speaking tours, book sales and interviews on whatever passes for prime time television these day.  Meanwhile professional assassins stare with seething jealously at their kill rate and start making their own plans.  Oh that's something else that can kill you; jealous assassins.  Possibly it would be better to stick with the discreet desk calendar after all.