I honestly came here to say the same: It really isn’t any less selfish to require or demand someone to suffer and remain, just because you want them to.

However it’s still vastly more complex than that. From an utilitarian perspective there would usually be many individual povs like that one, where there are great many people wanting you to remain, while you alone want to cease being. And subsequently the harm caused by the act alone would often have wide impact on several individuals, whereas you remaining would be only one person suffering.

But this isn’t me saying suicide is selfish or shouldn’t be done. This is just me trying to make sense of it as someone who’s struggled with these weighings and dilemmas recurringly in my life when I’ve been at a point where I couldn’t continue, but was kind of forced to. Not by anything concrete, but these exact consequences and this entire struggle to try and work out a way to see it through with clean conscience.

I never could.

But I do know this: Both sides are selfish. And that’s only natural. I don’t think being selfish is necessarily a bad thing. Often it is not. It’s all just a balance in a chaotic, complex world, that can’t ever be estimated well enough to gain any amount of confidence in the things you do. It’s all just too chaotic, too dynamic, too multi-layered and tangled together, to make sense of. All you can know or estimate with any level of certainty, is your own self, and what others present of theirs at any given time. And the time is continuously changing, marching on, and the presentations remain as fluid as the life itself.

You can’t really not be selfish. That’s all you have, if you need to ground yourself in some certainty.