Aaron Swartz

I found myself pretty affected this weekend when I heard Aaron Swartz had hanged himself... I didn't realize it was the same person until just recently, but I'd encountered this series he put on his weblog (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve) before, and a lot of it resonated with me (while a lot of it also read like things he was trying to convince himself of, rather than things he actually believed... but then, that was probably part of the point of his exercise)... Reading it again, it strikes me that it's not that surprising that he took his own life: the whole series is about embracing your weaknesses in as many domains as possible as part of a program of self-improvement... And though he must have succeeded at a lot of his self-improvement efforts (he inspired a lot of people, and he did some amazing things with his life), he didn't write about any successes in that series.

There's other back-story to his suicide, without which I believe he wouldn't have done it... (A U.S. prosecutor was apparently threatening him with 50 years of jail time for downloading (on a massive scale) scholarly articles from JSTOR.) I feel a strong connection to what he wrote about, though, and I feel like he only would have needed a few more years to find wisdom...