I submitted this article a while ago when it was first published in The Atlantic, but it received no up-votes, so I deleted it. I wanted there to be a discussion on HN even though I doubted whether this was the appropriate place to have such a discussion.

The reason I posted it was because I wanted to see where people's logic would allow them to go regarding happiness and human action. I wanted to contrast what The Atlantic had written on Frankl with one of his contemporaries and Auschwitz inmate, Jean Améry. Améry was a Holocaust writer and survivor, but his ideas were in extremely stark contrast to Frankl. Améry was an intellectual in the old sense of the word. As in, he treated the world logically. He believed he had nothing in common with Jewish people. And, more to the point, he didn't theorise or philosophise his way out of the concentration camp like Frankl did. That is, Améry preferred to see the real, raw, tangible truth of how many Nazis treated them.

To quote a blog post about Améry, which I recommend (http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/p/jean-amery-biographical-introd...), that quotes him:

'"[W]hoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself," Améry says. "He is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz.'

This, of course, Améry was not. Before publishing On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, he tried to take his own life but failed. After the book's publication, he tried once again and was successful. In this book, he talks about an internal, "other" logic that is only attained when one is suicidal. Yes, he is in favour of suicide once it has been thought about 'objectively' (even though he admits subjective occurrences are what drives the suicide). I highly recommend reading him.

But I must say, I've read some posts/submissions on suicide here and have never commented, because my opinions are unintentionally controversial and probably not systematic enough on the matter. I believe if given the option, one should always choose life, but I could never fault those for wanting to end theirs, because given the current state of many Western, developed countries, societies are unfortunately too cruel for some individuals. I remember when I wrote an essay in favour of suicide, my professor accused me of being hypersensitive. That may be true, but this is just one way how society has suppressed any real helpful way to have a discourse on voluntary death--by marginalising and labeling the "minor" numbers that end their lives; that is, "we" have to fix "them"; surely, nothing can be wrong with "us".

All this is just an excuse to recommend Améry. Reading him was, despite my young age, just like Kafka wrote:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.