It is suddenly very loud as my brother is cutting something with an electric saw outside. I hope this doesn't prevent me from thinking.
I recently decided that I think that Sherine doesn't want me to die. If you don't know who Sherine is, I'm sorry. This conclusion was based on, among other things, remembering that when I checked certain bookmarked statuses of hers that could have suggested that she wanted me to die, they had been deleted. If people using the idea meant that I wouldn't die, and people not using the idea meant that I would die, this would have been a useful conclusion. However, I can't say that I think people using the idea means I won't die.
At one point, I posted the things I said to Sherine. This missed some early things I said, I believe. One thing I said to her early on was "Tell people [about the idea] so everyone can laugh at you and I can disappear". Maybe I said 'so I can pretend to be dead', which should have the same meaning. In any case, what I said implied that I would cease communicating with her.
I'm trying to describe what would happen, which depends on other outcomes. One layer of complexity was removed last year when I learned that the person I refer to as E. has apparently gotten married.
First, we look at the possible outcomes if Sherine had told supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev about the idea in 2013 and tried to get them to share it. She may have done the first, but she definitely did not do the second. I think it's most likely that people would not have shared it, but I'm wrong about lots of things like this. I think that people won't share or talk about something that they do talk about, or I think they will support and talk about something that they don't. This may be a misjudgement of the situation that existed then, but the question I ask is "would Autumn have shared it?"
So, what if hundreds, or even thousands of supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had shared the idea? He gained 50~100k followers on social media, and it's conceivable that this number of people could have shared the idea if they believed, as I do, that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother knew of it. It's also possible that almost no one would have shared it.
If 50k supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had shared the idea, and this had led to broader society discussing and using it, the results would have been similar to people using it through any other way. But we also look at what if people didn't share it.
It is implied that I tried to make Sherine think that if she shared it, even if no one else did, then I would be 'hers' and would be able to stop caring about the idea or other people who might have been interested in me in the past. Although my 'reputational capital' was low, I was still someone with typical to above-average health and intellectual capacity in the top 1%, and I should have been able to have a normal life.
However, it was also the case that I was not sure if I could convince myself to do this. I am still not confident I shouldn't have ended my life in mid-2009 by shooting myself on the stomach with the bullets I saved when turning in all other ammunition at the end of a deployment to Iraq.
If people did use the idea, either in 2013 or at some point in the future, I think the most critical possibilities regarding what happens to me involve the person I refer to simply as 'Person B'. I think I would just wait to see if she would email me, and if she didn't, I would die. I don't know how long I would wait, but people using the idea would start the timer, so to speak, as it would be a global phenomenon that everyone who uses the Internet would know about.
One might ask here, why I wouldn't email her in this case before killing myself (or starving to death, etc.)? The answer, basically, is that I've done it before (unless my thoughts are getting confused, because I just thought of that question before answering it), and the reason I think she wouldn't email me is also that this has basically happened before.
Let's forget about the question of what I would do, though, and focus on what I expect other people to do: why I don't think 'Person B' would email me if people discussed and used the idea and realized how to solve most other problems.
First, I discuss how several times I tried to get the person I refer to as 'Person A', as well as the person I refer to as 'Person B', to meet me in the city where I lived and which I believed they were living close to as well. It may seem unusual that I acted like meeting 'Person B' would be important, given that I lived on the same floor as her for over a year. I was basically copying from the plot of the drama 'Hana Yori Dango'.
These attempts to meet failed, and after the last or one of the last ones, or possibly before that, I said that it didn't seem reasonable to expect a meeting to happen if someone didn't reply to me first — which neither of them were doing. It may seem incredible to characterize a message sent over seven years later as a "reply", but in any case, I was suggesting that I could not continue to act like it was normal for someone to avoid communicating with me.
This brings us to the period from around August 2007 to May 2008, when I was emailing 'Person A' with no reply. She did eventually send me an email, but I believe it was in response to an email I sent her, and if I hadn't sent that specific email, she would not have emailed me.
If I had ceased emailing her before she replied to me, I don't think she would have ever contacted me again. That describes the current situation with 'Person B': I was emailing her; she didn't reply; and then I stopped emailing her, seven years ago, or seven and a half if you don't count emails about the idea that were sent to everyone on my contact list.
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