What do you live for?

[Whateverist]

I've got to say how put off I am by the equivocation between "the examined life" and the question of "whether to kill oneself".  It is a symptom of identifying with the conscious mind as the totality of the self, or at least the only important part.  It goes to show just how extreme an adaption it was for a creature to invest so heavily in just one part of its mind and to so thoroughly separate it from the rest.  We so often think of humans as the apex of evolution.  But we are really just one more extremely specialized organism.  Fortunately most of us do not immediately jump from being reflective about our life to deciding whether or not to kill ourselves.