
Suicide, a Crime of Loneliness - samclemens
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/suicide-crime-loneliness
======
bambax
How is suicide "unreasonable"? Albert Camus wrote in "Le mythe de Sysiphe":

> _Il n 'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide.
> Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue, c'est répondre à
> la question fondamentale de la philosophie._

( _There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that 's
suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is answering the
fundamental question of all of philosophy._)

If you arrive at the conclusion that there is no point to any of it, why not
end your life on your own terms? We will all die eventually; it seems to me
more courageous to decide of the moment.

We regard suicide as the ultimate failure; but isn't it, rather, the ultimate
choice? And isn't that the problem?

Suicide in a way is an insult to the living, that's what makes us hate it so
much.

Of course, not all suicides are equal; teenage suicide is especially tragic,
for the exact reasons given in the article (I had a cousin who killed himself
at 24; for everybody who survived him, and esp. his brothers and sisters, and
his parents, it's an incredible ordeal, a wound that will probably never
heal).

But we should respect the decision of a middle-aged man who had a wonderful
and very successful career, and maybe came to the conclusion that he's done.
We're not him, we'll never know how he felt anyway.

~~~
imgabe
> Deciding whether or not life is worth living

This rankles. Why does life have to be "worth" living? What is the yardstick
of value you're judging life against? Life simply is. Unless you're in extreme
chronic pain, I can't see why oblivion would be preferable. You'll get there
eventually anyway, no need to rush it. In the meantime there is more than
enough here to explore for one lifetime.

~~~
msandford
> Why does life have to be "worth" living?

Why do you get to impose your values on someone else about a thing you
literally can't know?

Murder is illegal because you're depriving someone else from their right to
life. The person who does the killing is the criminal and the person being
killed is the victim.

But I can't steal money from myself can I? So in that regard, neither can I
murder myself. Every person has the moral right to end their own lives even if
we don't like it and don't understand it.

Of course it's illegal to kill yourself, but not because the justice system
has any ability to prosecute a corpse. It's so that people who try to kill
themselves and fail badly at it can be temporarily restrained and given
medical attention.

~~~
imgabe
In what way am I imposing my values on anyone? I'm simply asking a question.
Has this comment somehow deprived you of the ability to have your own opinion?

------
dosh
There's a biological phenomenon called "apoptosis," which may give us hints
into the cause and behavior of suicides.

Apoptosis, simply put, is a cell-level suicide (or programmed cell death),
which happens from multiple causes, but generally for the beneficial effects
to the entire body, which happens to be a tragic outcome for the cell itself.
This helps to increase the overall efficiency of the body or to prevent any
possible damages.

But, as you can presume, this 'suicide' sometimes happens to a perfectly
healthy, normal cell -- when it's isolated, lacking interactions with other
cells. Of course, as with most living things, this is not a binary state,
where a cell immediately performs the suicide on a trigger, but more of a
gradual, transient process, which when pushed beyond a threshold or when the
cell-death process wasn't halted for some reasons, may conclude in the death
itself.

This brings important insight into the behavior of human suicide as well. What
role does interactions play part in making a healthy (or a depressed) human
being to commit suicide, and what process can we learn from cells to prevent
this from happening? Life forms, no matter how complicated they seem, in
general are fractal in nature with some degree of complexity layered by
emergent behaviors, so there, we can learn something from our roots, or cells
in this case.

Even more disturbing thought might be: Are suicides sometimes beneficial to
the society? I'd hate to ponder on this idea, but if we can assume a
perspective of an alien scientist observing human colonies from far far away,
this might an interesting area to explore.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
> Are suicides sometimes beneficial to the society?

i attempted to commit suicide a number of times, and it never worked. someone
or something always came along at the last minute.

after a while of that, i started to get suspicious and suspected perhaps i'd
already died. i then later stumbled into believing in something i thought was
even more crazy - that death was impossible - but found out that there are
perfectly rational people who believe in quantum immortality.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality)

believing i could never die helped me stop thinking seriously about suicide -
i figured my life would just get worse as i'd lose any progress i'd made and
end up in the mental hopsital again. so i instead focused on trying to live
better, not because i felt like i wanted to live instead of dying, but because
i felt like i had no choice.

i still don't know whether this is possible, but i can imagine huge societal
benefit from an experiment confirming the many worlds hypothesis: a room full
of people build a device that has an infinitesimally small probability of
letting them all walk out alive. If they all walk out of the room, they'll all
know they survived against extreme numeric odds, which means the many worlds
hypothesis holds true.

If observers see them die in the room, it doesn't really tell us anything. I
can imagine a group of elderly scientists, convinced that the many worlds
hypothesis is true, willing to engage in this experiment - but you'd also need
a bunch of observers willing to watch them die.

~~~
Fargren
I'm not sure why that experiment is better than watching a light that has an
infinitesimal chance of changing color.

------
bdataA
This is story of my friend, he calls himself "Dood" as he doodles "My Mid life
crises hit me hard. I was always loner by nature. Never had many friends, few
family members, mediocre career. Not much money in the bank. In a year, I lost
few of my elderly family members. It came as a shock. I realized, after 20
years of career, I haven't achieved much. There are not many people in the
world, who know about me, about my existence. Whatever I was doing at my job,
was not going to make any difference to the world or to anybody. If I die
nothing matters. I lost interest in doing things. It was dead end for me.
Nothing made sense. I started getting suicidal thoughts

Whatever I did, my brain told me, " why bother?" Many people tried to advise
me. But this is the first time, it didn't matter. In my life, first time I
didn't care about others opinions.

One day I doodled something on paper. I realized. I like to doodle. So I
doodled more. I felt happy. I did my 9 to 5 job, but whenever I got time, I
doodled. After few days, I put them for sell on different platforms. I wasn't
expecting anybody to buy it. In fact, it was like I was craving for rejection,
just so that I can feel that “I don't care" feeling. I started wearing
whatever I like. I started doing things which I liked. I realized I am the
most important person in my life. It lifted lot of weight from my mind. I felt
free

Almost after one year, somebody bought one of my doodles as a company logo.
Not much money, but I felt good. I gave it to charity. So, mostly things
aren’t changed much in my life. But my attitude is changed. My biggest
achievement in my life is, change of outlook from negative to positive. I
started meeting many unfortunate people through my charity work. People, who
don't have roof on their head, people with terminal illness. I realized how
blessed I am, to have this kind of life. Now I stopped taking things for
granted. There is lot of life out there, more than promotion, bad boss, and
dirty office politics.

~~~
mcguire
Speaking as someone who is somewhere in the middle of that story (I don't know
what "doodling" is for me, but "I realized I am the most important person in
my life. It lifted lot of weight from my mind. I felt free." is probably the
most important thing I may read this month), thank you very much for posting
it.

------
swartkrans
Suicides prevail at both ends of the spectrum of social interaction: too much
or too little [1]. It's not just at the too little end. Examples of too much
social interaction leading to suicides: prison suicides, overworked stressed
out students, suicides due to too much debt or career failure, individuals,
usually women, left alone to take care of too many children alone without
support, and altruistic suicides such as when elderly go into the wilderness
to free up resources, or soldiers jumping on grenades. It's not just
loneliness that kills. You have to plan ahead and manage your interaction such
that you don't leave yourself without anyone, and have a support network and
realistic expectations in life.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)#Types_of_suicide](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_\(book\)#Types_of_suicide)

~~~
corin_
All of your examples _could_ include "too much social interaction" as their
primary cause, but seem unlikely to, to me. Just because a suicide isn't
caused by lack of social interaction, doesn't mean it automatically was caused
by the opposite.

~~~
malka
Basically, either you kill yourself, because you see yourself as unfig with
society, either because you are too fit for society, at a point you are ready
to die for it. The kamikazes are a good example of that.

------
pritambaral
The article somewhat related to me.

Whenever I felt the urge, it was both instinctive and driven by the
realization of utter pointlessness of any endeavor, ultimately of life itself.
There were triggers, sure, which is where my instinct to give it all up came
in, but the triggers themselves never drove it all the way. It was the chain
of thought of how anything I do -- I used to do things primarily for my own
satisfaction (read: happiness) -- is ultimately futile.

I hated the fact that I am beholden to others -- my parents, my closest
friends -- and thus cannot take my own life, but this thought was only a minor
hurdle in the steep dive to suicide. Only a minor hurdle because I saw them as
just other people in this web of life, perhaps more closely tied to me, but my
life is my own after all, and I am the only one in here.

~~~
hereonbusiness
I came to the conclusion that since all is pointless anyway I might just as
well try to be as ignorant as possible about that fact.

Making up goals/challenges for oneself, hobbies, all what we do not for sheer
survival really, just ways of dealing with nihilism.

------
return0
Is it a crime of loneliness, or is it a crime of being made to feel miserable
for being alone? In mass culture people are made to feel a failure if they are
alone. I guess it also differs by culture, besides, suicide statistics show
great variation by country.

~~~
cryoshon
People are also exhaustively made to feel inadequate in the mass culture, no
matter how successful they really are.

Every advertisement is an implication that you don't have something that you
need, or that you're not living life to the fullest if you aren't
participating in the consumerism of buying the product.

This shapes the human mind in a detrimental fashion which may lead to suicide
in many cases.

------
Zigurd
Both the article and all the comments here, so far, assume decisions about
suicide are in the mind. In fact, the decision not to commit suicide is driven
by the fact we contain information that wants to propagate, and that drive is
not extinguished when the odds of us causing that information to propagate
decline. That's why we are still here.

Whether the drive to continue living exists in what you think of as "your"
mind, whether it exists in mental processes inaccessible to introspection that
have predetermined what you think are thoughts within your control, whether
the physical substrate of those inaccessible mental processes predisposes them
to a drive to live, and so on down the hierarchy of your physical being, what
you think you "think" doesn't matter. It's what the genetic information in you
wants.

One commenter here remarked on how much more tragic the suicide of a young
person and that we should mind our own business about suicides of people who
have lived a fuller life. Even that rationalization is a product of our
physical beings. We just "think" that is a rational argument. It "feels"
right-ish. Or rational-ish. Give up. Your genes have you by the balls.

~~~
hugozap
So people with suicide thoughts should not be helped because it's all a
genetic issue?

~~~
Zigurd
I'm saying humans value the will to live because humans are built to do so, at
a very fundamental level, far below the level of rational (such as it is)
thought. That drive has little to do with compassion, morality, love, etc. Or
conversely, parts of those constructs are built around rationalizing the drive
to live long enough to propagate our genes to ourselves and others.

Tl;dr: It's very hard to think rationally about the will to live.

------
SCHiM
I recognised parts of this article. I'm bipolar myself and there are weeks on
end when my life seems perfect, no matter what happens I feel happy and fine.
And then there are times when everything seems so bleak and meaningless. As if
everything I could ever do is futile. Sometimes it gets really bad, and I
can't even feel any emotion regarding my family or friends, even they feel
bleak and distant then.

------
th3iedkid
>> Highly successful people tend to be perfectionistic, constantly striving to
meet impossible standards.

Its more with a powerful train of thoughts that cant be stopped easily!For
e.g. if you were easily prone to obsession with solving tech/math/science
problems ...if you were to get a problem late in the evening, it depends on
how easily you can detach sleep and rest from the unsolved problem and sleep
peacefully or be stuck in the train of thoughts even in bed as to why it
didn't work !The more one learns to rationally reason out of these train of
thoughts (for e.g. better to take rest now and move onto problem tomorrow
morning ...etc..) and take a day at a time , better prepared is one against
such thoughts.

Though this doesn't seem like OCD but constant barrage of thoughts seem to be
the common divisor.

I guess it very important (especially towards successful people ) that
success/perfection doesn't become an obsession but rather a process towards a
greater goal.

------
lukasm
Ask HN: Is there a way to get the number of hugs people get per day? I'd like
to correlate it with suicide, age, location etc.

~~~
pinkyand
A survey is one way. Not very accurate , but it's a start.

------
mwenge
"When I grew up in Brooklyn, nobody committed suicide; everyone was too
unhappy." \- Woody Allen

