On Suicide as a transformative act, and on Suicide as a cowardly act:

Literature rarely represents suicide as an act of despair or defeat. While a character may feel despair and defeat before committing suicide, the narrative will often portray the act as one of meaninglessness or wastefulness, rather than a legitimate act. That said, death and especially suicide are always transformative events. Suicide in literature and art can be taken as symbol for self actualization, wherein self recognition and strength of will allow one to take a “great leap of faith,” as it were, achieving an unknown, ambiguous result.

Examples of creative media in which suicide is transformative: 

Donnie Darko, Persona 3, Fight Club, Cat’s Cradle

Sucide in creative media is a symbol of hope for a change of self or surroundings; an acknowledgement that the end of a life full of 'wrongness' is potentially the start of a new life. However, such themes belong in the realm of fiction. The symbol, metaphor, or allegory is simply demonstrative of a theme or moral. No real life is so wrong or backward that the transformative death used symbolically in literature and art is required. It is simply an extreme metaphor which encourages the death of a way of being that is not life, but living badly.

Hopelessness is a disease with one cure, and that is its opposite: hope. The transformative suicide is in effect the opposite of the cowardly suicide of this real life. It is not an escape from responsibility and hardship, but an embrace of the responsibility to escape the pull of societal norms through the death of bad living, and to effect changes through attitudinal shifts and revaluation.

Albert Camus depicted suicide as a rejection of freedom. The freedom afforded by this life is far more valuable than the escape afforded by real-life suicide. As Sartre said, those who have free will are burdened with the responsibility of it - but the ability to choose what one is responsible for (the consequences of our decisions) ought to make that responsibility a given, and hardly such an inconvenience as to warrant suicide.

Particularly in the faithless life, suicide squanders the chance that life provides. That said, suicide exemplifies a variety of wimpiness that borders on laziness. Plato described it as an act of sloth and unmanly cowardice.

Furthermore, the responsibility of free will correlates with the use of suicide as a symbol for self actualization. The metaphor represents suicide as a freely willed act of shedding mundane, worldly values, and one’s attachment to them. It shows a way beyond mass-illogic and ideology to an individualistic view; a relation between the creation and ascription of values and the responsibility to take part in that process, using free will.

A will that is bent or determined by a group or even just one other’s will is not free, and the acquiescence to such a force is a lazy, cowardly rejection of one’s own responsibility for self-determination.

On Lying:

The best way to avoid being caught in a lie is to have nothing to lie about. The best way to keep a secret is to have no secrets to keep – alternatively, never, ever tell anyone.

Lies are a dangerous sin to commit because they threaten and distort perceived reality. To tell a lie and be believed is to convince the believer that what is real is unreal, or that the unreal is real. While a lie may never be found out, any unreal event housed within the real necessarily calls attention to itself by having no referent.

Because of the natural chain of events that is cause and effect (that same chain which necessitates that all events be the same infinite event), any false or unreal event introduced into that chain is easily traced backward to its source – the liar. A thorough, deductive investigation of the chain of events which led to the unreal event, will inevitably uncover the liar because the unreal event seems to have an inappropriate cause or no cause at all. In order to conceal a lie well, one must then concoct further lies which support it, masking the flaws in the chain of events.
Naturally, the more lies one tells, the more unlikely that the chain of real events will cohere with the lie, and then it will be discovered. However, some will not delve as deeply into the chain as others, leaving the lie to persist.

As such, there are cases where a lie cannot be easily discovered by deductive reasoning, and the person who believes it will continue to live as though the lie were true. This is dangerous, because it introduces a false or unreal event into the chain of future real events, such that the unreal event becomes a factor in determining what will be real in the future.

This is all not to mention the emotional effects of a lie. For the liar - if the liar is not a sociopath - there will nearly always be pangs of guilt for having told the lie, which may or may not be bearable. There is guilt for having lied, and further guilt for having done or been involved with whatever thing caused the lie. Even in cases where no guilt is felt, it is highly likely that the liar will experience paranoia with regard to being found out. 

For the person lied to, there is more often than not suspicion, and in such cases suspicion is sufficient cause for feelings of betrayal, regardless of whether those suspicions have been validated. If the lie is discovered, the feelings of betrayal and suspicion are validated, turning to anger, disappointment, and depression. This is before whatever truth that the lie replaced is discovered, and in some cases, the discover of the truth will cause further anguish.

As it is rarely advantageous to be the receptor of negative emotions (least of all, one’s own), it is rarely advantageous to lie. As stated, the lie is almost inevitably discovered, making the negative response and effects of altering the chain of events just as inevitable. In this sense, lies are in almost every case as much a self-destructive behaviour as they are an outwardly destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, the act of lying in conjunction with the true event which seemed to require the lie has an additive effect, which results in more negative response than would originally have been encountered were the event alone discovered. To an extent, this relationship mirrors western karmic theory, because in lying, negativity is visited back on the liar two-fold.