CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SELF-HARM
DO NOT READ IF THIS IS A SENSITIVE SUBJECT
There’s a clip that’s been making the rounds on Twitter wherein Dr. K, apparently a psychiatrist and streamer, says that an underestimated cause of suicide is that people’s lives are genuinely not worth living. The video appears to have been largely well received on the interwebs — just look at the comments and quote tweets — but the sentiment would probably come across as offensive in polite company. If most people hear such a statement offline, they’ll probably find it mean, uncompassionate, and callous. I’m not sure why this is though. When we hear news stories about captive orcas going berserk and banging their heads against their tank until they die or suffocating themselves by not surfacing for air, we find it to be perfectly expected for an animal whose environmental and social needs are unfulfilled. The list of non-human animals with recorded instances of intentionally ending their own lives is brief, but it happens. Suddenly, when it comes to members of our own species, suicide is irrational. It’s dismissed as necessarily a product of underlying mental illness, not a rational consideration for someone who has evaluated that continuing his life is just a case of sunken costs. If society were seriously interested in preventing self-termination, we’d acknowledge the rational aspect and aim to ensure people’s needs are met.
The only cases where most people might countenance suicide as a rational option is in instances of severe medical problems that inhibit quality of life. Even in these extreme circumstances, society is cautious in permitting a premature and voluntary end to life. Physician-assisted suicide is only available in a minority of states, and active euthanasia isn’t authorized in any. The press has responded to Canada’s MAID program with what its proponents would perceive as hysteria. Regardless of its legal status, the limited availability of legal methods for people to choose when to terminate their biological existence, including in cases of severe and irreversible ailment, reveals society’s sensitivity around the intersecting issues of life, death, and individual autonomy. Society, through its legal prohibitions on suicide, implicitly purports to care about its members and acknowledges a level of intrinsic value or dignity in them.
While this might be an admirable aspirtional sentiment, it’s one that doesn’t correspond to the realities of how we live. In Coming Apart Charles Murray noted the spike in suicides among the “new lower class” compared to the “new upper class” and wrote extensively on the geographic insulation of the latter group in superzips and their adjecent counties. His book documented the solitude and low workforce participation of the new lower class. According to the text, meaning in life can be found in work, family, community, or religion — with the evidence suggesting that the first two are paramount and the last two are added benefits — and large swaths of people are missing out on all four at relatively high rates. So far as I can tell, not much is being done at either a societal or individual level to assuage the challenge. The explosion in the number of NEETs as well as the proliferation of equivalent terms in other languages indicates that the crisis of meaninglessness is something being accomodated rather than addressed. In a country with more guns than people (i.e. the USA) we can only expect the result to be more people, primarily men, concluding that their own lives are no longer worth living and taking measures to swiftly deal with the situation once and for all.
Life for a lot of us is equivalent to the life of a captive dolphin; we carry on in isolation in an ecology unsuited to our own needs. In such circumstances, it becomes natural to ask, “Why live?” If you have no prospects for a decent career, nobody who is so closely connected with you as to detect and care about your troubles, no transcendent source of inspiration, and no place, group or institution that inspires a sense of belonging, it doesn’t seem all that irrational to have lost any motivation to wake up and go about your life. The only occasion I can recall of this being recognized is in Squid Game when Ji-yeong chooses to die and let Sae-byeok win the marble game because she couldn’t imagine any reason to live no matter how hard she put her mind to it. Humans and most of our great ape relatives (with the exception of male orangutans) aren’t solitary creatures. Therefore, it would appear perfectly in line with our nature to feel burned under the fire of our own isolation when attempting to survive without a troop and to thereafter search for tools to extinguish the flames, or perhaps more literally to eradicate our flammable selves once the burns become too much for us to tolerate.
While being charred in the process of directionless and lonesome combustion, some bystanders might stumble across the person being consumed by the fire of meaninglessness and feel some level of sympathy. This sympathy might motivate the bystanders to try to pour some water over the fire, but ultimately doing so won’t eliminate the source of combustion. The ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius (or Mengzi if you want to sound cultured I guess) wrote of a hypothetical scenario wherein a child is on the edge of a well and looks to be on the point of falling in. According to Mencius, most people would react, at least internally, with terror and concern. Mencius suggests that this is because human nature is good; we have a sprout of compassion for others that just needs to be cultivated. The reason that such universal sympathy can’t alleviate meaninglessness is that universal care is the shallowest kind that exists. Aristotle argued against the abolition of private property on the grounds that people will tend to land that belongs to them more artfully than commonly held land because they have a personal stake in it. Similarly, you understand that someone cares about you qua you if that person is an active part of your life, deciphers your state, and exhibits concern even about everyday frivolities. By contrast, a bystander noticing when you’re on fire and reacting as anyone would upon seeing someone burn in front of him doesn’t resolve the problem because it just reinforces the fact of not mattering since the only one seeing you burn and putting it out is a random good Samaritan. The whole situation’s a catch-22: you need a trusted coterie to permanently smother the fire, but you’re on fire precisely because you lack one. The principle also explains why if someone simply abandons you, it stings more painfully than if a stranger slights you. You were under the impression that person cared about you but then realize said person never did since that person feels fine casually chewing you up, spitting you out, and stepping on you with indifference like bubble gum. Aristotle once said, “A friend to all is a friend to none.” If there’s nobody in particular for whom person X actually matters, it’s unclear why person X should feel any reason to continue to exist.
For the same reason therapy proves useless for a lot of people. Within Gen Z it seems to be the default to see a therapist or other psychiatric specialist even for people without underlying conditions. Young adults and adolescents talk a big game of emotional openness and awareness about psychological conditions, but they simultaneously disengage from clear communication about such matters with each other because they aren’t each others’ therapists. While it’s healthy not to become a clinical depression patient or whatever around your comrades, it’s probably necessary to provide each other with some level of openness and understanding especially in the not-so-good-times. If more people had such relationships with others, the suicide rate would probably be lower.
Regardless, the point is a therapist instructs you how to respond internally to your environment so that you can cope effectively with it, but in environments like a captive dolphin’s this is useless. There are more mental health experts now than at any prior time, yet the suicide rate has skyrocketed, and the youth are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses. I’d be shocked if this weren’t partly attributable to the tendency of young people to rely on licensed strangers to address the meaninglessness resulting from their isolation and directionlessness rather than finding people to spend time with, enjoying their company, and having superiors who care to help you advance. Seeing a professional and being prescribed medication are probably advisable if you have an ingrained problem with your psyche. If you’re just hopeless due to lack of community or future prospects, I can personally assure you that won’t solve your problem. Likewise, suicide prevention resources on the internet fall into the same trap, which is they give platitudes applicable to everyone anywhere as to why their life allegedly matters.
It be might possible for people to carve out an existence while burning in solitude, but this is probably only possible for people who have satisfying careers, religious conviction, or overriding responsibilities such as raising children. Considering that the people fatally afflicted by the loneliness epidemic are also unlikely to have any of these, the alternative avenues to finding the will to live often aren’t feasible. Those of us without people skills encounter difficulties in landing jobs with some semblance of purpose or fulfillment. Even one who manages to do so face the daunting task of lucking out and meeting a mentor with whom he can build rapport and who actually takes an interest in him qua him.
I’m not sure whether I’ll keep this up since it might be too dark. On the other hand, nobody reads this, so I can write whatever I want. I’ll close by making explicit what has been implicit thus far: barring a theological proposition or a responsibility to progeny, there’s no intrinsic reason for us to choose to continue our lives despite society claiming through legislation that it’s wrong for us to choose when to go lights out. The only reasons our lives are meaningful are extrinsic. We either have people in our lives who care about us in more than a vague universal way or we don’t. We either have a future worth enduring present circumstances for or we don’t. Ergo, while it may be wrong for us to end ourselves prematurely, it’s not irrational in every situation. If we acknowledge this, we can encourage people to create for themselves lives worth living. Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people” which is widely misinterpreted as a statement of misanthropy. He actually was saying that once we die, we only live in the eternal judgment of others. The flip side of this statement is that “Heaven is each other.” While there’s no intrinsic reason to live, some people have the luxury of extrinsic reasons that lie in the future or that have been constructed by those around them.