Name: Suicide is the Wrong Answer
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T01:10:07.000Z
Duration: 9 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

大家好, I'm Nathan Rich, aka 火锅大王. When I was a young man, I struggled to thrive.

If you've seen the videos I made about my life story, or you've read my book, then you know what I'm talking about. Life got pretty rough. I almost didn't make it, but I'm happy I did, because life is worth living. And today,

I'm going to explain to you why I think that's objectively true.

I used to be a real nihilist, and in some ways, I still am. There's certainly a lot to be said for the concept that nothing is real, or nothing matters. But I want to specifically declare what it is that made me realize life is an exception to that idea. I made another video that explores some of the nihilist ideas floating around in my head. You can check that one out if you like. Okay, so life.

First, let's point out some concepts. Time, we should all be aware, is a relative thing. Now, I don't just mean that it's actually altered by gravity or speed.

I'm also talking about the experience of time. Your experience of time changes with your mental state. When you're a baby, everything seems so important and eternal. Everything is so long. But these days, things go faster and faster. If you're old like me, days are like how hours used to be. So we know time in relation to a person's experience changes. Do you remember how long it felt to grow up? I mean, for me, it seemed like an entire lifetime just to survive my childhood. I hope no one thinks I'm exaggerating. But what does this have to do with anything? All right, well, I start to think about what happens after we die.

I find the notions of death pretty interesting if you consider some of the deeper philosophical theories about how reality actually works. I mean, it's quite possible that if you die, the universe you were in actually ceases to exist.

Maybe it doesn't, but that's one of the many possibilities in my mind. And before you scoff, I wonder, how could you know it isn't possible? It certainly works out in theoretical exercises. Christians, Muslims, etc. all pretty much believe the same thing about the afterlife, actually. You die, you're judged, and you go live in paradise or hell or somewhere in between. I was raised to believe death only leads to living another life, a reincarnation. Others believe nothing happens when you die. Your consciousness simply stops. But what if the process of your brain powering down for the last time brings with it the slowing of time? This means you could theoretically experience an eternity of thought. You see what I mean?

Even though it's only a second for the rest of the world, because your sense of time is distorting, it could seem literally like an eternity to you. I died in my 20s and was resuscitated over a period of 10 minutes. The inverse happened to me. That is, the experience seemed much shorter than the actual time had passed. But there was an experience.

The time could have just as easily gone the other way in the end. So there are many possibilities here. But the interesting thing is, when we think the other way, what possibilities are there for life? We can control some parts of life by our own actions. But what about when life becomes too hard to suffer?

What about when we know we've tried everything and can never be happy again?

Well, this is the other case your personal sense of time comes in. It's actually amazing how much can change. You know, when I was young, everything seemed important and everlasting. All-encompassing. Every insult from another kid at school was the end of the world. Every album I listened to was epic.

Everything was huge. But you know, the interesting thing is, all the problems I thought I had at any given time are gone now. That girl who laughed at me in school, I don't even remember her name or what she looked like anymore. In some sense, it's like they never existed at all. What I'm telling you is, no matter how much I thought my life would never change, it did. No matter how much I thought something was important, it wasn't. Life is funny like that. If you give it some faith and focus on putting in effort, you actually can fix your life.

Just remember, it takes time to do so. Because it's actually you that's changing. And you're stubborn. That won't make proper sense to you until you go through it. The only thing that's different between the unhappy version of you and the happy version of you is you. The material differences are a result of those changes. As you shift into pressuring your life to move in the direction you want, appropriate forms of wealth start coming back to you in the form of happiness and success. A lot of people get depressed about relationships. Believe me, I've been there. But what I didn't know then was as you get older, you actually start to appreciate those losses. You learn from them and they slowly become part of your life's experiences. You let go of the pain and the hate or regret or other negative emotions. You grow, you learn, and it makes you a more interesting person. And one day, you look out on a beach or at the sky and you slowly realize that you've grown. In some strange way, you're actually happy those bad things happened to you. Imagine that. So we know time can heal you during your life. We know that suffering actually does end. And after the suffering, you can become a better person. But what about death? Isn't that an option? Can't we just skip the suffering? I used to think so. When I was a young boy, I tried to commit suicide, which I talk about in my book. I felt like my life was already ruined. It was totally real to me. I was nine. When I was 15, abandoned by my family, I tried again. To me, there was just no point in pushing on. Why bother when I could just start over with a new life? But you see, I was actually wrong about that. I was too young and cocksure to get it. What I didn't realize then is this combination of ideas. First, like I said, life actually does get better with time. All you need to do is be patient. More patient than you think. And you need to try. But also, after much careful thought, I realized that death is not a way out. If there's a heaven, we can't get there without a full life of trying to do the right thing. And a natural death. If there's reincarnation, we need to adhere to the same standards. Try to be good and die a natural death. And do you remember how much being a baby sucked? Think long and hard about what life is like as a baby. Are you in a hurry to do that again? Or what about reincarnation as an animal? Have you ever seen a documentary before?

Watch one again sometime and imagine carefully what your experience would be like if you were one of those poor animals on the screen. Nature is the most proven hell I've ever heard of. I'm not in any hurry to go there. If our brain has a prolonged consciousness experience, then we're going to be thinking about our lives for a very long time. So what do we want to see? I don't want to see myself giving up. I don't want to see myself doing regrettable things. I want to see myself giving it my all. I want to see myself doing my best to help others.

I want to make up for past sins and help future generations have happier lives than I did. Isn't that worth fighting for? If consciousness simply disappears, like

I said, maybe that's literally the end of the universe. If that's true, and this is gonna sound a little esoteric, but hey, that's me. If that's true, then don't you owe it to the rest of us to allow us to try? I mean, when I look at my cats, for example, I don't want them to end. I don't want them to stop existing, even if

I'm not there to see them. See what I mean? So if you go, maybe that means we all go. And honestly, I'd like to keep trying. Don't take that from me. Okay, maybe you think that's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Fine. What about if just nothing happens? A person dies, the rest of the world goes on, and there is no experience. So what's the problem there? Well, death is an admission of carnality. It's a voluntary or forced acceptance of this reality being superior to one's own. I don't like that idea. I want to fight it. I want to prove the world wrong. It may feel like you can win the struggle by submitting to death, but what you're really doing is more like winning a trial by signing a confession. You might feel right in the moment, but you weren't. There was still hope, you just didn't see it. Believe me, the hope is real. But in a more practical sense, the thing to pay attention to here is that there are hundreds or even thousands of people out there that you have affected. As you get older, you occasionally start to run into them and realize this more and more. We humans like to pretend we're cool. We're unaffected. We're individuals, independent, cold. But we do feel you. We are affected by you, even when you feel alone. Even when you think we're all against you. Even when we say we don't want you. Don't believe us because it's a lie. We love you and we need you here. Because underneath it all, we're scared too. So stay with us and let's push through this together. Thanks everybody. Xiexie.