An Ode to "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die"

“I Hate Myself and Want to Die” is the name of a Nirvana song, first released (funnily enough) on the big Beavis and Butthead compilation album. It was also intended as the B-side to the single version of “Pennyroyal Tea,” but after Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, these plans were understandably scrapped. The song is, as the kids say, mid in the context of the Nirvana discography. If you Google the phrase - and, for the record, for aesthetic reasons I much prefer adding the second I, that is, “I hate myself and I want to die” - that’s what you mostly get, that song. And yet I know that as a 10 or 11 or 12-year-old, before the song was released, I used to mutter the phrase under my breath, and I know other people who did too. I think kids in “Gen Alpha” who have never heard of Nirvana walk around, ready to say it, looking for a reason to say it, wanting to say it. I think, in fact, that “I hate myself and I want to die” bubbles up from the adolescent subconsciousness and follows us around after that. It’s part of the endowment our younger selves leave to us, this concentrated blast of self-loathing, this sincere-but-not-serious-but-yes-serious desire for self-destruction. I think these feelings are common. I think these feelings are normal. I think these feelings are healthy. I think it would be a better world if more people said to themselves, sometimes, “I hate myself and I want to die.”

I’m talking about a type of self-pity that the self recognizes as self-pity which just provokes more self-loathing and from that more self-pity. “I hate myself and I want to die” is, simultaneously, a whiny complaint and a statement of majestic stoicism. It’s a theatrical response to the ordinary indignities of life, except for when it’s a sincere reaction to genuine tragedy. It’s the bellow of a heart that is hurting enough that it has no room to worry about how it appears to others. It’s a quintessentially adolescent feeling that everyone carries around with them for the rest of their life, rubbed smooth like a stone absently fingered in a pocket for decades. It’s a profoundly efficient statement of the only rational response to the basics of human existence - that we live for no reason, we want and don’t get, we inevitably die, and we never come back again. It’s an extreme statement that’s remarkably safe, a silly mantra that’s loaded with danger, a brazenly shameless invocation of self-destruction, wielded irresponsibly, that nevertheless always feels appropriate. It’s existentially the province of unhappy teenage boys, but particularly stinging when wielded by someone outside of that demographic. It is the best and worst of grunge, of “Seattle,” of a mostly-forgotten rainy corner of our popular culture. It’s a prayer, a motto, an advertising gimmick, it’s an 9-syllable poem, a secular Hail Mary, words muttered by a 12-year-old forced to go see grandma and a woman pouring the bath in which she will slit her wrists. It’s mawkish and chickenshit, it attends solipsism and selfishness, and it’s a gorgeous, perfect, lovely thing, something to adore, to engrave on a tombstone.

You have known that little eight-word manifesto, felt it in your guts, when all of the world seemed like one great instrument designed not to hurt you physically, but to conspire to reject all your values, to deny all your clumsy grasps for dignity, to make the pain unbearable but also stupid and venal and pointless and petty, so that you couldn’t even suffer nobly. (None of us can suffer nobly.) It is not an announcement of depression but a reflection on the epiphenomena of depression - not the dull grind of hopelessness, but the behaviors hopelessness engenders; not the knife you use to self-harm, but the song you play while you do it. This is all, of course, rather dark (in a mysteriously sunny way), somewhat sordid (in a comical way), and perhaps insensitive (in an achingly empathetic way). The experience of depression, whether medical or romantic, is only ever experienced alone; you can sit in a support group full of other seriously depressed people and see nothing but the end of your own tunnel vision, where the white light is just the cold glare of more despair. “I hate myself and I want to die” is that which is expressible within depression, what we all understand in a set of feelings that are notoriously inexpressible. It’s what we share in desolation.

I’ve always been annoyed by people who are ostentatiously disdainful of their own past musical tastes. You know what I mean - “oh, god, I was thinking about how much I used to love Norah Jones/Pantera/Maroon5/Arrested Development/The Chemical Brothers, and I felt so embarrassed.” For one thing, I think we should be sympathetic towards our younger selves, if ruefully so. Your younger self is an idiot, but an endearing one. For another, I think this type of attitude misunderstands the nature of personal development. You like one thing or one set of things and it leads you to other things and in time your tastes develop and you move on from what you liked. You may or may not return to the stuff you used to like, from time to time; I cannot stand to listen to a second of the Get Up Kids album Something to Write Home About now, as I find the glossy production terribly grating and the songwriting inferior, but I still listen to Four Minute Mile once a year or so and enjoy it a great deal. But even if you don’t ever go back to what you used to listen to (or watch or play or even eat and drink, I suppose), I think there’s something very unbecoming of laughing at what used to move you and, by extension, at your younger self. I think a lot of people do this in pursuit of what seems to motivate everyone, these days, the fear of appearing to be a certain type of person and the desire to look down on others for being that type of person. I owned the Staind record. Your Fight Club poster was an expression of sincere feelings. Honor them even as you move on. Be proud of who you once were.

I say this in service to either a tortured analogy or a very simple extension of the point, I can’t decide which: you should accept that your adolescent self was once you, and feel comfortable with the emotions that you once had, and every once in awhile pull them out and give them a spin. Remember what you felt before the internet installed a permanent self-surveillance system in your brain that subjected all those feelings to cross-examination. Allow yourself to experience a particular kind of morose overly-dramatic engagement with your own feelings. I am really not a fan of our culture’s recent celebration of refusing to grow up - “teehee I’m a 28-year-old teenager,” never challenge yourself with the art you consume, resist responsibility, act like you’ll be cute forever. (This tends to dry up when you perceive that you’re now too old to even be ironically young.) But I would resent it all a little bit less if this ever allowed for adolescent darkness as well as adolescent pop sensibilities and addiction to the unfettered pursuit of fun. Why does the culture of perpetual adolescence seem to disdain the most adolescent of feelings?

For complex reasons that I’ll get in trouble if I enumerate, the dominance of pop music in contemporary culture is also a dominance of low stakes, don’t-harsh-the-vibe sunniness. (There just aren’t a lot of songs like this in the pop canon, and even fewer in present-day pop music.) And this speaks to a strange paradox in contemporary youth culture: we have never had more relentless focus on trauma, adolescent mental illness, and various forms of medicalized dysfunction than we have now, and we have never more nakedly celebrated pop music as the center of our cultural collective consciousness, and yet these two realities seem to refuse to speak to each other. The overtly depressive themes of Nirvana and Alice in Chains and the whole Seattle thing came at a time when there was a discourse of teenage suicide but not of teenage clinical depression, to say nothing of PTSD; sources of youth self-harm were always presumed to be the work of some malignant exterior force, like heavy metal. Now, we have an obsessive conversation about teen depression as a medical issue, with all of the weird disability-as-identity cruft that has accrued to any such condition, and we have a pop world that seems to house an almost political resistance to the kind of explicit unhappiness that briefly became the center of music industry commerce 30 years ago. Not even “almost” political, really - all of those depressive anthems that once moved units were song by White Men with Guitars, a class of person now to be ironized, dismissed, and forbidden. Of course, all kinds of people make angry and depressed and sad music, and all kinds of people like that music, but this reality is inconvenient for our lazy, aphoristic progressive politics.

To make things tediously literal, I think I’m suggesting that a certain kind of darkness, an almost aspirational darkness, is a natural and healthy aspect of a complex and variegated human soul. And I’m also suggesting that our manic dedication to pathologizing every negative feeling and impulse leaves young people, and the rest of us, with nowhere to put feelings that neither can be nor should be cleared up with therapy or a prescription pad. I am, as you know, a great partisan for modern psychiatric medicine, as flawed as it is. I think people should pursue medical solutions to medical problems. I also think that the ratchet of over-medicalization only turns in one direction, and that we insist on a false and disingenuous binary when we pretend that there is some certain place where clinical depression ends and the existential kind begins. Kurt Cobain was a violently depressed heroin addict with a dark fascination with guns who had talked about killing himself since he was 11 years old. (But please, let’s concoct an elaborate conspiracy theory about his death out of collective boredom, sounds good.) I wish he had gotten better and more effective treatment for his addiction and for his depression. But it would be foolish for us to think that this would not have left a certain darkness inside, and I will never understand why we’ve decided as a society that mental illness is deadly serious business but that youth culture and music should stick to TikTok dance videos. Life is about more than that.

The beauty of “I hate myself and I want to die,” for me, is that it lives in a permanent emotional superposition between serious and not. When I say it to myself under my breath (say, after an awkward moment I caused by inadvertently saying something weird), I am feeling sorry for myself, but doing so inside that indispensable emotional space in which no other people reside, and in which I can simply feel what I feel. That, in turn, enables the kind of recovery from which I can remember that other people exist too and that I need to get past my own maudlin discomforts to treat them better. The sadness and meaninglessness of life are very real and frequently too hard to bear, and the enforced jokiness and triviality of our culture can leave someone with the feeling that they have nowhere to maneuver. As mocked as it is now, all of that sadboy music hit so big because a lot of people are sad and are looking for a place to put those feelings. I know my desire for self-destruction shows a lack of perspective and a reversion to an earlier developmental state when I wandered around thinking only about how pointless everything seemed. I’m glad I grew and moved on. I’m also glad I can crawl back into those feelings when I want to. And I will never understand why our culture grew so obsessed with mental illness and depression and so contemptuous towards people who wanted to put those things into art, to give everyone a way to feel them. I will never understand it.

As for me, don’t worry. I would never commit suicide. There was a time when this was a legitimate risk for me, but not anymore. This is, primarily, because there are many people who love me, and I wouldn’t do that to them. Besides, I’m medicated in such a way that makes those impulses very rare and never intense. I have also, in my worst moments, often had that depressive’s instinct that I don’t deserve the release of suicide. At present though I am content and lucky, never been better. I’m happy to be alive. I am in love; we’re working on a family; I most certainly don’t want to die, if for no other reason than that it would hurt too many people I care about. I just want to keep going and live my life with my girlfriend and see what’s next for us. In my usual way, I’m tacking towards peace and happiness - never directly, never without cutting back and forth in opposite directions, but seeming gradually to get there, drawing strength from the forever-distant but endlessly-approach horizon. But do I know what it’s like to prefer nonexistence? My God, who doesn’t? Things are good and I am grateful. But also, I hate myself and I want to die. And I bet you do, too.