The Last Time You Felt Like Dying

OK. Let me get this clear.
I’m not contemplating suicide any time soon. Neither will I in the future. Unless something drastic happens that I can no longer account for my own sanity and psychological state. (Yeah, always make a statement with a qualifier, haha)
I’m just curious: is there anyone who has never thought about dying before?
Dying as a form of escapism. You think you have a life so bad that it’s not worth living.
The last time I had this thought was aeons ago. A time so long I couldn’t remember exactly when. Probably during my secondary school days when my raging hormones put more ideas in my head than I would wish for.
But my friend thought about that very recently. How nice it would be to just die (with or without suicide) and end it all. The only thing that stopped my friend from committing the act was, ironically but thankfully, cowardice.
I’m not trying to be moralistic here. I really am not. But we really do seem to take many things in life for granted.
Are Singaporeans having too good a life? A life so good that one can think about dying because of poor academic performance. Because of broken relationships. A life so good that one becomes too selfish to think about how his death translates into living hell for his family? The guilt. The pain. The agony.
In this little, sunny island of ours, have we forgotten how much suffering there is in other parts of the world that we fret over a chipped pedicured toe?
During my final year in uni, I took a module called Conflict Reporting. Sounds cool right? My enthusiasm nose-dived when our lecturer told us that we’re supposed to cover conflicts happening in the African states.
The smart alec in me spoke: Why are we covering stories about African states? Readers are uninterested in reading about conflicts that happen miles away! (Or at least that’s what we’re told as students: proximity is a factor in determining news-worthiness)
So there we were reading about conflicts (civil & cross-border) in African states. Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Burundi, etc. There were about 15 of us in the class. We each tackled a different country. Yes! There were that many wars ongoing in the African states. Some had been fighting for years. The Africans seemed not to have passed a day without blood being shed, a fight being stoked.
Humans killed in cold blood because of caste issues. Children forced to become child soldiers, dragging weighty M16s to fire at fellow Africans.
For them, opening their eyes without the deafening sounds of bullets is a blessing they will count. So is it too a blessing when they can walk along the streets without the fear of being clobbered.
While you are fighting with your sister over the remote control, the Africans are probably fighting over a piece of bread.
We certainly don’t need the misery of others to remind us how lucky we are. Yet knowing about them puts many issues in perspective.
Yes, you have it going hard for you and you certainly wish that you could be born into a different family, a different place at a different time. Say, how about Africa?