âNothing in this world happens by chance.â â Paulo Coelho
Veronika is twenty-four years old. She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has a good job at a library, a loving family, friends. Sheâs intelligent, pretty, healthy. By all objective measures, her life is perfect.
And she feels absolutely nothing.
Not sadness exactly. Not depression in the clinical sense. Just emptiness. A profound, aching emptiness that no amount of normal life can fill. She wakes up, goes to work, sees friends, goes to bedâand none of it matters. None of it means anything.
Sheâs tried everything society suggests: therapy, relationships, hobbies, travel. But the emptiness persists. Itâs not that life is terribleâitâs that life is boring, predictable, meaningless. The same day repeated endlessly until death.
So Veronika makes a decision: if life is this empty, why continue? If every day is the same meaningless cycle, why live through thousands more?
Sheâs not impulsive about this. Sheâs thought it through carefully. Sheâs not mentally ill (or so she believes). Sheâs just rational. Life doesnât offer enough meaning to justify the effort of living it. Simple as that.
The decision brings relief. Finally, a choice that feels authentic. Finally, action instead of passivity. Sheâll end the emptiness by ending herself.
Veronika chooses a Tuesday. Cold, gray November morning in Ljubljana. Nothing special about the date. Thatâs partly the pointâevery day is the same, so this day is as good as any.
She takes sleeping pills. Lots of them. Enough to ensure death, not just a cry for help. Sheâs not seeking attention or hoping to be saved. She genuinely wants to die.
While waiting for the pills to take effect, she starts writing a suicide note to her parents. But partway through, she cancels it. Why? Because while waiting to die, she reads a magazine article.
A French magazine article demonstrates profound ignorance about Slovenia. The author confuses it with Slovakia. This small central European nationâVeronikaâs homelandâis invisible, unknown, irrelevant to the wider world.
This should be a minor annoyance. Instead, it enrages Veronika. Here she is, dying, and what provokes her final emotion is a stupid magazine article getting her country wrong? This is what matters in her last moments?
The absurdity strikes her. The sheer ridiculousness of caring about this, of feeling hatred for something so trivial, when sheâs deliberately ending her life.
But she does care. Intensely. For the first time in monthsâmaybe yearsâshe feels something real. Hatred. Pure, uncomplicated hatred for ignorant journalists and their careless mistakes.
The pills are taking effect. Veronika feels herself slipping away. Soon sheâll be unconscious, then dead. The emptiness will end. The meaningless cycle will stop.
As consciousness fades, she reflects: Is this really what she wants? Too late to matterâthe pills are in her system, doing their work.
She thinks about her parents. Theyâll be devastated. But theyâll recover. People do. Life goes on, meaningless or not, and eventually theyâll accept that their daughter chose death over their version of life.
She thinks about all the things sheâll never do. But this doesnât sadden herâthose things would have been just as empty as everything else. Travel to Paris? Meet someone? Have a career? All just more of the same meaningless cycle dressed in different clothes.
Veronikaâs last conscious thought before darkness takes her is this: Maybe the magazine article was a gift. Maybe feeling that hatredâreal, visceral emotionâwas lifeâs way of showing her what she was giving up.
But itâs too late for maybe. The pills have won. Darkness comes.
Veronika believes sheâs dying. Sheâs at peace with it. Better the certainty of death than the unbearable uncertainty of meaningless life.
Sheâs wrong, of course. Sheâs not dying. Not yet. Her story is just beginning.
But Veronika doesnât know this. She closes her eyes, feels her consciousness slip away, and believes sheâs done. Finally done with the emptiness, the boredom, the endless meaningless days.
Finally free.
Veronika has a perfect life but feels nothing: youth, beauty, job, familyâall the external markers of success, yet profound internal emptiness.
Her suicide is rational, not impulsive: sheâs thought it through carefully, seeing death as preferable to endless meaningless existence.
A magazine article sparks real emotion: while dying, ignorance about Slovenia provokes hatredâthe first genuine feeling sheâs had in months.
The absurdity strikes her: caring intensely about something trivial in her final moments reveals the contradiction in her choice.
She believes sheâs dying at peace: better the certainty of death than the uncertainty of meaningless lifeâor so she thinks as darkness comes.
This is just the beginning: what Veronika thinks is her end is actually the start of her real storyâlearning to truly live.