How do you justify your own existence?

"I can't commit suicide", my friend JH once would say, "because I am too pretty and smart to die." My life philosophy was contingent on helping my soulmate to achieve her dreams and ambitions. Though just as creating babies carries massive problems and usually is performed for dubious reasons my life will be marked by a disproportionate consumption of the world's resources and wealth, the possibility of easing pain and suffering through her work inspired me on to continue to challenge myself, even if she chose another I could still anonymously send her a million dollars set up in a foundation or save one of her family members from harm. Generations down the road I might bail out her great grand nephew from prison for hacking E. U. headquarters or being framed for counterfeiting digital currency!

While all of this would be fun should I have the means, actions of this sort tend to be mixed blessings in the end, since outside interference in the course of life events exerts unwanted pressures on the relationships and development of the subjects of assistance. People begin to act inadvisably when a figure in the shadows steps in to protect them when they make mistakes in many cases (show psych. studies, or more pointedly the girlfriends of superheroes in comic books), and likewise it is possible to rob people of significant achievement on their own by mothering them. Some happiness research suggests that even friends of friends have significant effects on disposition and attitude through behavioral transmission mechanisms, therefore a colossal variant of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" might be formed depending on how serious I wanted to be in making things good, and how closely does one watch to ensure that the needed aid arrives in time? Better perhaps to spend time cutting down those enemies of all humanity: poverty, war, death, or illness to deliver her and those she likes from farther perils more menacing then having to throw fund-raisers.

Secondly, life is really short. Why cut down what little time we have here on Earth when any pleasure not resulting in the harm or degradation of yourself or others is still possible? J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham wrote quite a bit on the subject of such things and research would seem to indicate when depressed people are unable to kill themselves because they are too lethargic, it is only when they begin coming out of depression that they usually end themselves, and while it's true that we all harm each other to a great degree we can also inspire, enlighten, entertain, and hippolate.

Then also for the cynics there is always the possibility that your attempt at killing yourself will fail, and instead you will live on severely damaged and in great pain for an extended period, decades even. There are some stories I know of human resilience or luck (like this one recently) where shooting, drowning, hanging, poison, train jumping, immolation, etc. end up creating a much worse situation for the actor. Suicide cocktails by lethal injection have been suggested to be incredibly painful for their receiver, and the brain shows in the average human 37 hours of electrical wave signal activity after the heart and organs cease to function.