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The argument you give here (the "bum comparison principle") is the exact same one I've used. If you can commit suicide, then you should be able to walk away.
This worked for me from my mid-teens to some time around my late thirties. What I'm finding now is that depressive episodes much more ideation along the lines of "Nah, it's just too much work, I can't be bothered."
Mostly my response to this was to establish the "other people matter" principle, which implies that if I'm going to kill myself I ought to do so in a way that minimizes the amount of suffering I cause others, which I'm pretty sure means I should make it look like an accident or like natural causes, which takes a fair amount of work. By the time I feel like doing that work, I'm no longer in the mental state where it seems like a good idea.
It might be a mistake to say things like "if I commit suicide, I'll make it look like an accident" in public where your loved ones can hear it, because you could die in an actual accident (which is more likely than suicide) and they would suspect it to be suicide because of what you said.
True. That said, I'm fairly confident this is not such a forum.
I have a medical condition that makes the Bum Comparison Principle untenable (constant care required), but I have to say the Other People Matter Principle has worked pretty well for me so far. At this point, the idea of coming up with and implementing a foolproof minimal-impact suicide plan seems way more annoying and tiring than just going on with my life.
Though, while it worked pretty well in my case, I'm not sure I would recommend "if you kill yourself I'll never forgive myself" as an actual generalized strategy.
Nobody has ever pulled the "I'll never forgive myself" thing on me, but then I don't often have this conversation explicitly with people.
It's more a general sense that there are people who are engaged with my life, who value my presence, who consider what happens to me in some sense their (collective) responsibility, would be hurt by my absence, and doubly hurt if it were self-inflicted.
Admittedly, I had a stroke a few years ago that almost killed me, which made me very aware of how much people care that I'm still alive. I'm not sure if I'd be thinking about this the same way five years ago.
I find this a complete non-sequitur. If you stay alive and become a bum, you will consciously experience a (potentially large) loss of status. Whereas if you commit suicide, you won't.
Maybe being dead is low-status too, but at least you're not around to experience it.
I think the fact that "you're not around to experience it" is the tricky part of reasoning about the utility of suicide. Visualising walking away helps because it puts the more selfish aspects of suicide in stark contrast. If I walked away from my life I'd carry with me a lot of guilt and I'd have to live with the awareness of how my absence has affected others. If I kill myself, the primary advantage is that I don't have to experience that guilt and that, I think, makes suicide easier to contemplate than making a serious commitment to walking away. That's why I say if I'm not ready to walk away from my life (and face all the consequences of my actions), I'm not ready to commit suicide.
What to do when "bum comparison principle" argument stops working because the internal, emotional pain won't leave you alone no matter where you go and what you do, and you see no way to stop it, and you gradually, over the years, build an immunity to this argument?