9 ms·

Suicide, a Crime of Loneliness

98 points by samclemens 12y ago

pritambaral 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- hugozap 12y ago
  I have also conflicts about this. I realise that some of my frustrations have origin in the definition of "meaning" we have. I think is a mistake to associate "having a meaning" with "being permanent". Things/people/experiences do have a meaning, i know it, and feel it. But they won't last and that's what bothered me. Working on it.
swartkrans 12y ago
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_ 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- cryoshon 12y ago
  The "too much social interaction" suicides you describe are really not about social interaction, but rather a lack of resources (mental, financial, etc) to adequately cope with various social demands. I don't see how it's really social interaction at all, in the colloquial sense.
  - swartkrans 12y ago
    In my examples the lack of resources in themselves are not an issue, it's the lack of these in the face of social pressure/involvement (kids, parents, coworkers, etc).
- new_test 12y ago
  Where in your link does it talk about the "both sides" of the spectrum?
th3iedkid 12y ago
>> 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.
bambax 12y ago
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.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Suicide is often not a real choice made with full information. Suicide is usually a feature of illness. Suggesting that the completed suicide of an older person means less than that of a teenager is fucking abhorrant.
  - igravious 12y ago
    Tut, tut. They did not say it means less, they said that it was more understandable (and it is). The older person has more experience of life and gotten more from life because they (surprise, surprise) have lived longer than a younger person. And we all know those final years, quality-wise, can be pretty fucking awful whereas a young person has checked out before the complexities of middle age kick in. If you had the choice would you prefer your son or daughter to kill themselves at the age of 22 or 62 if it was inevitable they were going to take their own life? Or you think it doesn't matter?
SCHiM 12y ago
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.
dosh 12y ago
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.
- tearaways 12y ago
  I've been suicidal on two occasions, and you're perfectly describing my thought process in those moments. I'm sorry that your comment's being downvoted (probably because it's so direct); stepping back and thinking of the progress as biological programming helped me realize I could hack my way out of it to save my life.
- pond_lilly 12y ago
  How is it suicides are beneficial for our society, but population control through reducing birth rates and stopping glamorizing babies are seen like the biggest crime again humanity?
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  > 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.
lukasm 12y ago
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 12y ago
  A survey is one way. Not very accurate , but it's a start.
return0 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
bdataA 12y ago
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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mcguire 12y ago
  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.
- 12y ago
Zigurd 12y ago
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 12y ago
  So people with suicide thoughts should not be helped because it's all a genetic issue?
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    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.
mwenge 12y ago
"When I grew up in Brooklyn, nobody committed suicide; everyone was too unhappy." - Woody Allen

98 points by samclemens 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
hugozap 12y ago
I have also conflicts about this. I realise that some of my frustrations have origin in the definition of "meaning" we have. I think is a mistake to associate "having a meaning" with "being permanent". Things/people/experiences do have a meaning, i know it, and feel it. But they won't last and that's what bothered me. Working on it.

swartkrans 12y ago

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_ 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
cryoshon 12y ago
The "too much social interaction" suicides you describe are really not about social interaction, but rather a lack of resources (mental, financial, etc) to adequately cope with various social demands. I don't see how it's really social interaction at all, in the colloquial sense.
- swartkrans 12y ago
  In my examples the lack of resources in themselves are not an issue, it's the lack of these in the face of social pressure/involvement (kids, parents, coworkers, etc).
new_test 12y ago
Where in your link does it talk about the "both sides" of the spectrum?

th3iedkid 12y ago

>> 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.

bambax 12y ago

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.

DanBC 12y ago
Suicide is often not a real choice made with full information. Suicide is usually a feature of illness. Suggesting that the completed suicide of an older person means less than that of a teenager is fucking abhorrant.
- igravious 12y ago
  Tut, tut. They did not say it means less, they said that it was more understandable (and it is). The older person has more experience of life and gotten more from life because they (surprise, surprise) have lived longer than a younger person. And we all know those final years, quality-wise, can be pretty fucking awful whereas a young person has checked out before the complexities of middle age kick in. If you had the choice would you prefer your son or daughter to kill themselves at the age of 22 or 62 if it was inevitable they were going to take their own life? Or you think it doesn't matter?

SCHiM 12y ago

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.

dosh 12y ago

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.

tearaways 12y ago
I've been suicidal on two occasions, and you're perfectly describing my thought process in those moments. I'm sorry that your comment's being downvoted (probably because it's so direct); stepping back and thinking of the progress as biological programming helped me realize I could hack my way out of it to save my life.
pond_lilly 12y ago
How is it suicides are beneficial for our society, but population control through reducing birth rates and stopping glamorizing babies are seen like the biggest crime again humanity?
MarkPNeyer 12y ago
> 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.

lukasm 12y ago

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 12y ago
A survey is one way. Not very accurate , but it's a start.

return0 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

bdataA 12y ago

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.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mcguire 12y ago
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.
12y ago

Zigurd 12y ago

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 12y ago
So people with suicide thoughts should not be helped because it's all a genetic issue?
- Zigurd 12y ago
  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.

mwenge 12y ago

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