Skipping creative work made by people that committed suicide (and murderers)

(Given the topic, I’m sorry if this post feels harsh. And if you’re on the fence about reading it, skip it.)

I do not do this completely, but almost completely I do ignore creative work made by people that committed suicide.

Mostly it is subconscious and passive ignorance, partly because many of their works do contain dark feelings of one kind or another, which I don’t much seek out.

But I also find myself deliberately excluding those works, and I wonder if I should make the choice complete; no exceptions and no interactions.

Why? I feel that having the capacity to commit suicide is fundamentally different from not having that capacity. I don’t have that capacity. Thus I don’t feel that I could learn something, or experience something beneficial, from interacting with creative works made by people who did have that capacity.

It is possible that processing those works will make you think about how to be nicer to people. But I think it is possible to think about that without having to interact with those works.

For a similar reason I ignore works made by murderers; it is of course an act arising from a very different capacity to suicide, but it is a fundamentally distinct capacity too. And put simply, both of these acts are scary. I’m happy to understand them on an intellectual level and stop there.

And maybe this is more particular to me, but those creative works also become overshadowed by their creator’s act; it sits at the forefront while you’re trying to focus on the creative work at hand.

I think the right answer is to not make this black-and-white choice to ignore, and instead to continue thinking for now.