From here:
Suicide notes were found with the bodies of a couple who took their own lives last week, police sources said.
Lynne Rosen, 46, and John Littig, 48, who worked as ‘happiness gurus’ and motivational speakers, allegedly left two notes at their home in Brooklyn, New York.
[…..]
They hosted a monthly radio show together called ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ on WBAI-FM.
A sad but fitting metaphor for the land that has enshrined the pursuit of happiness in its Declaration of Independence. There is nothing that makes happiness more elusive than pursuing it.
As William Blake observed:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
I think most suicides are tragic. This couple, if they had been teaching: “Through your own efforts, through your own will power, you can be happy, you can be successful”, this message could be dangerous, because, when failure or setbacks occur, a person may have an increased likehood towards self blame.
However, one ought to be careful of simplistic explanations of a suicide.
May I pass on a quote I read in Markings, by Dag Hammarskjold? (his journal writings):….” at times, it seems so much more difficult to live than to die”. This occurs on page 47 in my copy. It is at the end of a long entry, about dealing with a difficult worker in the office. Hammarskjold and others avoided confronting this worker for a long time. Finally, there was a crisis.The worker is told many problems and difficulties happen around him. He blames others,and won’t admit responsibility. Finally, he complained, why didn’t you tell me sooner about your complaints? Hammarskjold, uses the “we who are stronger ought to bear those who are weaker” thought, and agrees, because he and the other workers avoided and procrastinated, they also bear responsibility in the malfeasance going on in the office. He writes:
“For it is always the stronger one who is to blame. We lack life’s patience. Instinctively, we try to eliminate a person from our sphere of responsibility as soon as the outcome of this particular experiment by Life appears, in our eyes, to be a failure. But Life pursues her experiments far beyond the limitations of our judgement. This is also the reason why, at times, it seems so much more difficult to live than to die.”
We all have to cope with our disappointments and difficult challenges. We don’t really know why people commit suicides; we don’t fully know their final mental state of mind. Perhaps they are extremely depressed or possessed by demons.
Yep, pursue Truth and lots of good things (inc. happiness) will probably come along with it, almost imperceptively – but if happiness and contentment don’t come, you’ve still got Truth (and, for me, that means the gospel of Jesus Christ; better to have that and also a constant feeling of unrest, than to feel really good about life – yet miss its (only) real purpose). Christian believers can realistically feel a lack of “happiness” as a result of having to live in a world that is clearly going very bad …