I was showering for college a couple of days back. Water splattered on my face. Some of it definitely made contact with my eyes. I rubbed my eyes with my hand and opened my eyes. Suddenly a queer thought struck me. I splashed water on my face particularly targeting my eyes and tried opening my eyes without rubbing them or even using my hand. I couldn’t. You can’t. Its impossible. Its a way of the body to protect the eye from water or if you’re in dusty air from dust. This is an instinct. A built-in default feature that doesn’t have to be separately installed or learned. We just implement on it. It requires about zero thought. Pretty similar to how our arm jerks back when we touch a cup of hot coffee. A reflex action. The body is trying to protect itself from external harm.

It is then safe to assume or rather consider the fact that it is an involuntary action of the body to protect itself. An instinct. The question then is what is self harm? How did it originate? What was the reaction of the people who saw it for the first time? What compelled a person to it? What kind of a behaviour is it? How did it reach its present magnitude?

Let’s break this down one question at a time.

If you believe in evolution, which most people do (I am no longer sure if I do but since most of present Biology tends to rely on it, so we’ll also just use it as a foundation), then you’ll know that every major change in a species behaviour is driven by natural selection to adapt it for the challenges of the world so it can survive for a longer time. Cactii have smaller needle like leaves because they need to cut off on the transpiration which is loss of water from the leaf surface. So what if, self harm is nothing but a behaviour that evolved in the human brain aided by latent learning?

Imagine an ancient man, wounded fatally and crippled by an incurable disease (which at that time would be basically most diseases), the body’s instinctive behaviour would be to protect itself but the mind is no fools tool. It knows when the damage done is irreparable. So what happens next? He won’t die. Not yet. But the body has to be saved right now. From what?

From pain!

Yes, the man is alive and dying but not quite dead. The body is exposed to immense pain and the only way out seems to catalyse the death. So in the history of mankind the brain comes up with a unique solution. Rid the body of the pain permanently! Kill itself!

I know you might be disgusted at how I’m seemingly promoting self harm but trust me I’d be the last person to do that. Its a rotten thing to do. So before you decide to not read further and judge me….I ask you to read further and then judge me

Thus now we can safely assume that the first suicide case in the history of mankind must’ve been caused not by depression but by other circumstances. Quite similar to euthanasia. Now how did the people react to this apparently insane act? They must’ve been startled and amazed.

I’ve said it a billion times that the first person to see another person dying must’ve been weirdly fascinated. Morbid but true. It is the tendency of the human psychology to wow at anything new, even if it is ultimately decreed as scary or boring. The first witnesses or discoverers of a suicide case must’ve been awed at this unprecedented behaviour. That wasn’t the way they were wired! Maybe this fascination also explains how society’s response varied from leniency to strictness over suicide in earlier centuries. It was only when euthanasia was proposed that suicide was sort of mainstreamed again. Lets address the potential elephant in the room now. If suicide is considered an evolutionary adaptation and if such thoughts are prevalent in our society among people of all factions then is it actually good for us? Because we know that an adaptation is only taken up permanently by a species when it is vital for the survival in general. Does this mean that by the gradual passage of time the human mind realised that at some point it might’ve to go rogue on itself? That it had to develop a self-destruct mechanism? What possible circumstances could humanity have faced that pushed so many of the species to the brink and compelled natural selection to instil the kill switch in them? It is impossible that humanity could’ve faced fatal situations en masse. Or maybe they had? What if the ancient humans saw a mass extinction? A worldwide plague. Say something preceding the Black Death. Something so horrible that they all wished they were dead. So that they wouldn’t have to bear the agony but just be over with it. Maybe they saw the extinction of some other species? An ice age? That is all possible. It seems quite reasonable that such an event could cause a species to evolve. After all the recent hurricanes did kick in the evolutionary mechanisms in a certain species of chameleons in the South American forests or somewhere.

But then why does this kill switch still exists. There’ve been no gut-wrenching massacres or killings…none to wipe out complete species. Yes, I cannot refute the countless incidents of terrorism, gun violence, racism along with climate destructive activities that might’ve contributed to the retention of self harming thought process. However I can provide a better explanation. A covert one.

Let us again consider our good fellow. The first person to have evolved suicidal thoughts. You know what, he was not ill. He was not wounded. He was in perfect health and enjoying life. Perhaps more than anyone else. He was also gifted with a certain intellectual quotient maybe not parallel to anybody around him. This person wanted to understand life.

Centuries later, Adam Douglas would answer this question with the number 42.

This person wanted to see how much control he had on his own life. Was he a puppet whose strings were being pulled by a cosmic being? Was he an actor in the grander scheme of things? Was his life even his own after the Creator had given it to him? Was control over life an illusion? There was only one way to test this. Try to hurt himself. For if he could hurt himself it meant that life and this body were his completely and he could do whatever he wanted with them. To his astonishment he must’ve observed how he could harm himself and maybe even kill himself. Did that mean that he was not a mere pawn? That he was in control of everything? But surely there must’ve been some way life would’ve originated. But if it had been originated then it cannot just be terminated without the normal sequence of events. Or maybe the termination of his life by his own hands was what was supposed to happen…thus bringing fate into this mess….

Now I want you to set aside everything you’ve read and think about this ‘kill switch’ in another way. We can all kill ourselves. It’s pretty easy. But for that you have to believe that you’re not important enough to live, that your life eventually would be meaningless. I believe that nobody has a meaningless life. We’re all always contributing somehow. The fact that we know we can harm ourselves acts as a reign and an activator. It tells us that we have control over our lives and we shape our destiny, if things don’t turn out ideally you can always end the game. But here’s the catch and perhaps the whole point of this post. Things never turn out ideally. Shit happens. Every trough is succeeded by a crest. Hurting yourself because life sucks and just because you can and nature has allowed you doesn’t mean you have to. You can also travel kilometres by foot, nature has also allowed you that, do you do that? So why hurt yourself? At the core, if you seriously think that hurting yourself can make things better or it is an escape, it’s not. Get some help. Its a statement that you yielded arms and used the right tool for the wrong thing.

The evolved kill switch isn’t an invitation to death, it’s a constant reminder of our immense potential. That we can do whatever we want and achieve whatever we wish for as long as we respect the sanctity of this body. Corrupting or inflicting damage to it just shows that you can’t keep your end of the bargain. And what good will it do to you? None.

The purpose of this post was to shun self harm but not in a way that people have turned this into. Today issues like racism and suicide are not openly talked about in case it depresses someone. That’s not the way things should work. Talking about them helps. Suicide happens. Self harming thoughts exist. You can’t deny them. There’s only one way to see this. To explain them and that is what I’ve precisely tried to do.