Why Stay Alive? (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781918518160)

Some questions cannot be avoided forever.

Not the comfortable ones - how do I cope, how do I improve, how do I endure. But the one underneath all of those. The one that surfaces when nothing else is working.

Why stay alive?

This book does not flinch from that question. It does not rush to answer it. Instead, it does something rarer: it investigates honestly - examining everything human beings reach for when life implodes.

• Pleasure. Achievement. Relationships. Identity.
• Control. Escape. Meaning. Clinical stabilisation.
• Ancient wisdom. The defiance of remaining.

Each is examined seriously. Each is found - at the point of maximum pressure - insufficient.

And then something else is found.

Drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, history, and literature - from Viktor Frankl and Albert Camus to C.S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal, and Leo Tolstoy - this investigation follows the question wherever it leads, without deciding in advance where it ends.

The author is not writing from the other side of this question. He has carried it himself - not theoretically, but across thirty years of a life that has tested every anchor described in these pages. He's a senior cybersecurity consultant who has worked for Fortune 20 companies and serves as a Justice of the Peace for England and Wales. He writes as someone who has not resolved the question - and who refuses to pretend otherwise.

What this book is:

• A rigorous investigation, not a self-help programme
• Honest about what does not hold - and what does
• Written for readers inside the question and those who love them
• Accessible across philosophical, psychological, and faith traditions

The finding is not what you might expect. It is more honest than that.

If you have felt the weight of the question - or if you love someone who has - this investigation was written for you. Turn to page one. The search begins there.