Oh my; what a strange day it's been.

The fear and loathing continues at my office and I've opted to be the reed - and bend with the wind - rather than the pillar. But this led me into a bit of a mistake.

I spent my day with dead people.

Here is the webpage I mentioned earlier, Stephen's on-line suicide note. Only a few members of the family and close friends have seen this, and I'm pretty sure Stephen would have been happy to be called an e-suicide.

Imagine leaving an electronic suicide note on an email, a blog, by voicemail or (ye gods) via SMS. Talk about ephemeral; writing your last words with light and leaving no real trace, not even pencil on paper. Strange nest pa?

I read it again today, looking for hints and clues. Why did this guy kill himself? What did people miss? Were there tiny, mysterious clues or huge, flashing neon signs to suggest that someone ought to have paid attention.

I went back to his other websites and found pages and pages of text, pictures, weirdery and ramble. Turns out that there are warning signs everywhere, but I can see how they would be easy to miss.

Young Stephen was typical of his generation - a well-off, middle class suburban 20-something. He had money, toys and talent aplenty. He expressed himself well and clearly and made mock of things in that world-weary way that well-bred people do. He had lots of friends - well, acquaintances anyway - hobbies, passions and time to spare.

What he didn't seem to have was any self-esteem, any confidence in his own talents, or any worthwhile work to do. He tried to find work (how hard he tried, I don't know), failed, and then rationalised away the failure by talking about the irrelevance of money.

He also had a sad obsession with a girl called Gingko. He mentions her in his suicide FAQ and chose his date of death to coincide with the number of days she had lived before she shot herself. Here's her site, still online six years after her death. There's a rather sad "last entry" by a friend named Mark telling the story of her last days. His email address is on the post so I felt compelled to drop him a line asking if he was OK. I haven't heard anything back.

Gingko was also a talented, well-read, well-rounded young person who seems rather dreamy and detached from reality, but was pretty sharp nonetheless. I don't know why she killed herself. I don't know why Stephen killed himself. But they are tied together in a dance-of-death which plays on without them.

God love 'em both, they could have made lives for themselves. They certainly had the talent, the support and the resources to do it. But they both found life too hard, too unfulfilling, too "so what?"

Do you remember that great Peggy Lee standard "Is that all there is?" It does something like:
"Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends
Then let's keep dancing,
Let’s break out the booze,
And have a ball, if that's all
There is"

I guess Stephen and Gingko died of ennui. They stood at the front of the avant-garde - early adopters of every technology and means of communicating. They got their news hot off the web-casts; they made friends in all corners of the planet; they shared their most immediate and heart-felt thoughts with anyone and everyone who happened to drop by...and it just wasn't warm enough, near enough, real enough to make a difference.

I get that odd "Is that all there is?" feeling too sometimes. It's that moment when you realise that you're doing something (like CSS, or FURLing or VOIP, just for example) which no one else has ever done in history. You get the hang of it, even find it easy, and you think, "Is that all there is too this? But there must be something more - some big secret mystery..."

And you know there isn't...this is the first of the first, the Alpha activity, the new thing. It's eerie and sometimes it rattles me, shakes my faith in the world and its eternal verities.
It's lonely and it's new and there's no one to tell me whether this is a good new thing or a bad new thing and whether I'm doing it right.

The only good answer I've found is to dig my heals into the soil a bit, look up at the sky a bit, and realise that this is ME, doing this, and so it MUST be OK. It takes self-confidence and daring just to be alive sometimes.

But look at the alternative...