In general, people assume that individuals who commit suicide do so as a result of a kind of weakness of character or a lack of commitment to life, when in fact the opposite may be true. It takes a lot of character and courage to see the cruelty and misery that occur daily and, despite seeing what they  see, keep living as though everything is fine. More commonly, people tend to look the other way, run away from the painful, and, like Cypher in The Matrix, they (we) opt for the blessings of ignorance, indifference, frivolity, and selfishness.

Is this not the case of many people who can not or do not want to see or be aware of the world’s many ills? In antiquity, these evils came from outside, in particular diseases and the danger that the forces of nature represented for human life. Today, the evils of the “human world” stem from uniquely human origins: wars, inequality, discrimination… Hence Sartre’s phrase: “Hell is other people.” As Yuval Noah Harari points out, nowadays people are more likely to commit suicide than to be killed. “In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder” (Harari, 2015, Homo Deus, p.26).

What we really have to ask ourselves is whether contemporary societies are able to create the conditions conducive to a life that is worth living. The high rates of suicide, mental illness and various addictions (whether to substances or to destructive behaviors such as consumerism) seem to cast doubt on our optimism and force us to break away from the reverie that all is well.

Is it really worth living? Great writers, musicians, singers, actors, have concluded that…no, it isn’t. I don’t think that their response is due to a matter of weakness, but rather to an excess of sensitivity and vulnerability. Hopefully their desperate cries of a refusal to fall into existential numbness will force us to wake up and become aware of the daily misery in which we live: frivolity, materialism, selfishness, injustice, violence, fear… All this seems to be an inherent aspect of our interactions as human beings.

But are we in time to change course and start thinking and living differently? Only time will tell. Today I want to dedicate these lines to those who simply could no longer tolerate this existential situation and preferred to leave it.

Bon voyage, Chester Bennington, and all those who preceded him: Chris Cornell, Jim Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Williams…

Originally at: https://infic.mx/who-commit-suicide/