This weekend, I finally managed to watch a series I had been putting off for quite a while. I actually started it sometime last year, but at the time all the episodes had not been released and after a while, I moved on and forgot about it. However, I found out over the weekend that the rest of the episodes had been released, and remembering just how addictive the first four episodes had been for me, I decided to watch them as well.
It was just four episodes, and each episode was somewhere around 40 minutes or thereabout. So, I was able to watch it all in about two hours or so, which is all the time I allocate to movies in a day. And by the time I was done with the series, I was left with just how deep a message it passed. And that’s what I want to write about today.
The series is the Korean drama, Death Game which tells the story of an unemployed young man who nothing seems to be going well for. Without a job, he’s kicked out of his house due to his inability to pay rent, he has a sick mother in the hospital and he just broke up with his girlfriend, so nothing about him was working out. So, he decided to kill himself because “Death was only a means to end the pain he was in.”
He succeeds in doing that, but Death (an entity) doesn’t like the fact that he only sees her as a means to escape pain like she is some sort of pain relief. She saw it as an insult and decided to punish him. He would come back to life in the bodies of twelve people who were doomed to die, and it was his job to save them, no matter what. He also could not kill anyone or commit suicide as that would send him straight to hell. Death needed him to learn that the pain he felt that made him take his life was not enough to warrant such an extreme act.
A screenshot of the title plate.
And boy did he learn. The drama is action-packed, but it also pulls at the emotions. The entire story is a reminder that the majority of the decisions we make are not just for us alone. We think that we’re suffering the most, but that’s because we don’t fully know what our parents are going through, our siblings, or our partners. We think we know, but these guys keep things from us just because they don’t want us to worry. And then, we end up thinking that everything is fine and dandy with them and they would be better off without us. Which is just wrong.
The protagonist was forced to see how his singular decision affected the life of everyone around him, he realized that truly his life wasn’t the worst and he only ended up making things worse for those he left behind because all they did was blame themselves for his selfishness.
While it touches on suicide, it’s not a sad or depressing drama. Like I said, it has a load of action, it also has comedic scenes and anyone who is a fan of fast-paced movies would enjoy it. I don’t wanna give away spoilers so I’m keeping what I’m saying to the minimum. I only want to talk about the lessons I got from the drama.
And that is the fact that you’re not alone. You’re never alone, even though it feels like it. You might think you’re the worst person in the world, or you’re in the worst state and you don’t see how things would get better. But you’re wrong. Things can always get better as long as you’ve got breath in your lungs and you keep trying.
We need to consider others when making such decisions, how they will feel, how devastated it will make them feel, and how it’ll probably ruin the rest of their lives. We have all the reasons to live because as far as no one knows tomorrow, anything at all can happen. It can be the day that things change for the better, who knows?
So, my takeaway from this is that things are never as bad as we think. It sure as hell is not enough to consider taking our lives. We should learn to speak up, speak to trusted friends, and speak to trusted family members who will really help us out. This phase of life is usually tough, so we need people we can rely on to help us through it.
Suicide should never ever be an option.