Begin transcript.  1:00pm, December 2nd 2020, Badger High School Auditorium.

Hi.  Good evening.

[audience applause]

Thank you, thank you.  My name is Max Osman and I'm, well, dead.

[audience applause]

I killed myself when I was...18 years old.  I'd tried before but, heh, never quite got the hang of it.

[audience laughter]

No, but yeah, I killed myself.  It wasn't anything dramatic, just a quick bullet to the head.  It's a really scary experience and all, but a bit anticlimactic if I may say.  I spent all that time prior to the shot sitting there talking to myself, trying to convince myself it was okay.  I'd done it before, but...for some reason there's something about having a gun to your head that's kinda nerve-wracking.

[audience laughter]

So yeah, all this build-up, you'd expect something incredible, right?  The worries set in, all the second thoughts, I'm shaking, blood running cold, my heart's pounding and nothing seems well in any sense of the word.  The world is about to end, I pull the trigger and...nothing.  I was kinda disappointed.

[audience laughter]

No fancy "life flashes before your eyes" moments for me.  [chuckles]  What a rip-off.

[audience laughter]

You only ever hear one side of the story to suicide.  It seems like you never hear a suicidee's point of view.  Why the hell is that, I wonder?

[audience laughter]

But taking a step away from comedy...any true, unbiased person would listen to both sides of a story before making a decision, right?  If your friend tells you "hey dude, if you inhale turtle farts you can totally read minds for a few minutes," you wouldn't listen to him and try it without Googling to see if it's true, right?  Actually, don't answer that.

[audience laughter]

Seriously though.  We hear so much about how horrible suicide is, how selfish people are when they kill themselves.  Have any of them ever thought about it from the dead person's point of view?  I didn't kill myself thinking "[evil laugh], THIS will get back all of you!  [more evil laughter]"

[audience laughter]

But no, I didn't.  I did it because I couldn't bear my problems anymore.  Because people...it's amazing how cruel people can be.  Now I'm an optimist, I believe people are generally good, but also that a lot of people are...not necessarily bad, but misguided.  Gays still have a rough time here, but back in 2010 when I killed myself, 10 years ago this day, actually, it was even worse.  People were killing them themselves.  Putting them down, treating them like they weren't human, driving them to do what I did.  It was horrible.

I never, though I had my times where I grew fed up with it, would have said the people hurting them were inherently "bad", however.  They were misguided.  They grew up taught that that was how things should be.  For the most part, to listen to what a 2,000-year old book written by desert-dwelling goat-herders.  And this isn't an insult to religion, that's--whether you believe in God or not--who wrote it.  Even if you do think there's a God out there, don't you think that there could have been some...slight mistranslation when he decided to get a bunch of poor-grammared peasants to write his book?

[audience laughter]

Honestly though, I don't mean to go off on religion here, but it can be kinda...silly sometimes.  Take all the starving kids in Africa.  All these people dying of AIDS, of cancer, of so many diseases, people in horrible lifestyles they don't deserve.  They pray to God every day for help and they don't get any...but then you get some middle-classed person who prays to God that a cut on his leg heals well and LO AND BEHOLD, THE LORD DELIVERS!

[audience laughter]

HAAALELUJAH!

[audience laughter]

I just can't imagine a God up there going "Cancer patient?  Naah, let 'em die.  AIDS?  Eh, leave him.  Going bankrupt?  Let them.  Wait, SHIRLEY SMITH HAS A CRAMP?!  HEAL HER, NOW NOW NOW!"

[audience laughter]

"...Kevin Jacobs is awaiting his STD test results?  ...[evil smile]  Let's give him gonnorhea."

[audience laughter]

[laughing]  But no, again, not to offend any religious people out there, but...some people can be a bit silly.  Does it not occur to them that maybe the cut healed fine because, well...cuts tend to do that?

[audience laughter]

And even for some bigger coincidences...there's always a rational explanation behind it, yet...people tend to ignore the fascinating science so that they can just say "God did it".  It's ridiculous.

Moving on...where was I?  Suicide.  Right.

First, let's talk about death.  I don't mean to make religion a continuous theme to this, it just happens to fit here, but...okay, people don't like the idea of nothing after death.  But why?  Why is it scary?  "Because it's nothing," some will say.  "Just eternity of nothing?  I would hate that, it's terrifying."  But no.  No, it isn't.  And I'm sure some will argue that it is, but...by its very definition, it can't be.  "Nothing" means the absence of anything.  Including emotions.  There would be no feelings, no thoughts, no perception.  You can't feel nothing.  You wouldn't even realize there would be nothing, because there's no you.  This is one reason religion came into being.  People fear what they don't know.  It's not that there's anything scary about the thought of nothing after death, it's that people can't comprehend or understand it.

If we look at it, though, that's a recurring theme in people's fear for things.  People disliked homosexuals because it was odd, something they couldn't understand because they couldn't feel it themselves.  Before that was black people.  Whites found these sudden dark-skinned people they'd been controlling for so long to be a strange, scary addition to society.

Before that was...religion.  In the beginning, people didn't understand...anything.  Romans used gods to explain the weather, the planet, the universe, their food, everything.  Even in the time of Christianity, it's been used to explain the sun, the rotation of the earth, gravity, so many things.  Above all, though...death.  None of us understand death.  Well, okay, I do 'cause I'm kinda, you know...dead.

[audience laughter]

Yeaah, not so funny now, huh?  "Max, why are you getting all dark and serious suddenly.  I just wanna laugh!"

[audience laughter]

See?  You guys'll laugh at anything now.  "Haha, he's making fun of us!"  [imitates the audience applauding and laughing]

[audience laughter]

But okay, back to that.  People don't understand death, and can't comprehend it, so it's inherently scary to them.  So they made up an afterlife to explain it away.

But let me tell you now, as an unbiased observer who has experienced both life and death:

Death is great.  I do not regret killing myself, not at all.  I can't...even begin to explain the constant pain I felt while I was alive.  Either I was depressed and hating myself, or I was jealous of something-or-other about my girlfriend, or I was worried because I couldn't get a job or earn her father's respect.  Maybe I was annoyed and sad about how my family and friends and her family pressured me about not having a job--which I was trying to get.  I might have someone angry at me, or be insulted by somebody and take it deeply to heart.  Maybe it was something else, whatever.  There were so many problems, and it was all of them at once.  I never, ever felt appreciated...ever.

So finally I broke down, got my stepdad's gun, and killed myself.

Since then...there hasn't been a moment of sadness.  Not a moment of anger, fear, self-hatred nor jealousy.  I haven't had to worry about a single one of these things, because I haven't been.

Now, I know what you're thinking.  And no, that isn't because I sniffed some turtle farts before this speech.

[audience laughter]

But you're thinking "but Max, you can't feel happiness either!"  It's true.  It's true, you can't feel happiness if you're dead.  But that doesn't matter, because you can't feel.  You won't miss happiness, because you can't miss anything.  I know it seems redundant, but trust me.

Now I'm not promoting suicide.  If you're happy, you don't want to kill yourself, then don't.  But for people like me?  People out there...who want all their misery to end?  The ones who suffer and are told "no, no, it'll get better", and stick around in the vain hope that it will get better?  You know what?  Sometimes it doesn't get better.  People don't tell you it gets better because they believe it, but because they don't know what you're going through and, honestly, don't care as much as they say.

And there are people like me, these people, that want to kill themselves, yet find themselves pressured not to, pressured to believe that they're being terrible and selfish for having so many problems, pressured into being afraid of doing it by society.  You know what I say to these people?

Go ahead and do it.  And I don't say that to be mean.  I say it because I've done it...and it's a decision I don't regret.  If you have nothing to live for?  You feel like nothing will ever improve?  You've lost that last thread you were holding on to, and you can't bear it any longer?  Kill yourself.  Death is a luxury in the face of the way people will treat you in life.  It's not horrible, it's not selfish, don't listen to them because they don't have your best interest in mind, they have theirs.  Suicide isn't selfish--it's them who are being selfish for making you fear the one escape route you have.  So don't be afraid.  Don't cave in to them.  Just do it.  No more worries, no more fears, no more sadness.  Don't be afraid, because it will all be over.

[audience applause]

Besides, we've got great raspberry punch that is just to die for.  [continues through audience laughter]  Thank you!  I'll be at the exit for autographs and pictures!  Goodnight!

[audience laughter and applause as Max leaves the stage]

End transcript.