euthanasia

I find it particularly curious the manner in which the Jainist culture approaches death when compared to the way in which most of the people I have known in "western" society approach it. I have been taught to consistently try and accumulate the largest amount of wealth possible over the course of my lifetime, so that my children will have greater opportunities that I do, and their children better opportunities than them. I've been told that it is the struggle of achievement and the benefits acquired from that achievement, whether they be material or not, that make this life worth living. The entire time, I will attempt to get myself as comfortable, fit, and far away from death as possible, whether I have to take the most from my environment or not. But what does it all mean? It means that I try and get as far away from death as possible, in spite of the inevitability that I will be captured by it in the end.
And the problem with euthanasia is that we don't know the threshold at which we become so demented or unconscious of our surroundings, of all the things we've spent our lives accumulating, that it becomes logical to pull the plug on it all, and allow our physicality to be relinquished.
Meanwhile, the Jainists, at least the renouncers, spend their days straddling the threshold between life and death. They actually try and take the smallest effect that they can on the world, attempting to pull the least amount possible from their surroundings while barely remaining healthy enough to continuing doing so. So, when they do in fact die, they look back at how little they rose above that threshold between life and death. And, in fasting, they are slowly giving what little they have left, rather than using all the electricity and resources necessary to be hooked up to machines for X number of weeks. The "life worth living" is not in what has been achieved, but in how little you have taken from the world, and how little you have effected the living things that surround you.