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How Can Suicide Be So Attractive?
It does not take a genius to unearth the deep, dark secrets of happy people everywhere: get married (and invest in your spouse). Have children. Make G-d part of your life. Build healthy and productive relationships in your family, your marriage, your community and your faith. See your existence as part of something greater than just your own life. Try to see things positively.
But of course, people increasingly do not do these things. Relationships are shallow and selfish, with hedonism the order of the day. Marriage is on the wane. Investing in children?! Outside of Israel, no first-world country is even having children at a replacement rate. Judeo-Christianity is in such full-scale retreat that in some countries, a person who dares to quote the Bible risks prosecution for hate speech. People are not investing in themselves or, for that matter, anyone else. They wallow and revel in misery and quiet desperation, trumpeting euthanasia as the easiest way to end their suffering. At the cutting edge, people castrate themselves. Mind-boggling.
We are witnessing personal and societal self-immolation. This not only runs counter to the assertion that people seek happiness (they clearly do not), but it also seems to run counter to any understanding of seeking our rational self-interest.
If I did not know better, I would say that the world is suffering under a series of curses.
Which may be what is really happening. After all, the Torah is full of curses that will happen to those who turn their back on G-d. At the core of those curses is civilizational decline, and a profound loss of hope and optimism. I think we all may be witnessing those Biblical curses in real time.
The curses may (or may not) be clearly attributable to divine wrath, but the net result of people living against the basic principles of the Torah is that they, individually and collectively, end up, in the words of the prophet Hosea, reaping the whirlwind.
In the long run, societies and civilizations suffer from the curses, and benefit from the blessings. Societies that lose their purpose are doomed. And that is a biblical curse. If you fail to find meaning (whether as an individual, a family, a community, or a nation), then you become an ideological and genetic dead end.
G-d may or may not be the Prime Mover behind the slow-motion disaster all around us. But either way, I have no doubt that people are its executors. We are, in fact, doing the damage to ourselves, personally, societally and even internationally. We do it through an instinctive belief in validating our short-term feelings and intense narcissism. We do it by insisting that we are not responsible for anything: Mother Nature or karma, genetics or accidents of birth, white privilege or racism. Each renders us powerless victims.
But we, at least those who can see clearly, are G-d’s partners — his agents. The job of saving the world falls to us.
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I theorize that all people seek happiness… But, many seek it in the wrong way. They pursue the next hot commercial product (ie newest phone, car,etc) thinking they will be happy when they attain it, or the next promotion at work, or weight loss, or vacation, or sex or sex change, drugs, but all these things are superficial and whatever “joy” they may experience is fleeting and shallow. They become addicted to attaining the next hit or thing. This leads to perpetual frustration, disappointment and perhaps even depression.
Certainly the axiom of this is that those who find meaning and purpose in G-d, then they will feel fulfilled, happy, and at peace.
I am not sure we can save the world. I believe we might save ourselves, and maybe drag a fellow observer along with us.
Watch this three times and get back to me. lol
Without God, the question is not “what makes suicide so attractive” but rather “give me good reason not to kill myself.”
That was basically the leitmotif of Albert Camus’ writing.
https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/the-meaning-of-life-albert-camus-on-faith-suicide-and-absurdity/
That’s a toughie, considering all he had to look forward to was being Albert Camus.
When you say ‘make G-d part of your life,’ are you referring to a specific kind of G-d? You probably don’t mean Zalmoxis, who was worshipped by people of the lower Danube and mentioned by Herodotus. Will any of the g-ds that people have worshipped throughout history suffice? Of are you advocating that people find the one, true G-d? Can someone gain something by worshipping a false G-d?
Great post. Revival or bust.
I have a granddaughter who, when she was a teen-ager and prompted by some of her behaviors along the lines of what we see today with so much emphasis on visual delights, I asked her what she wanted to be when she was grown, she said “famous”. That, and a few dicey behavioral episodes made me a little anxious about her future.
But continued family closeness, help, and encouragement in a community with strong Christian values and today, she is a devoted mother of three with a husband devoted to her and their family.
Such surprises are a true joy in my life.
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.
Even with a functional relationship with G-d, if all of society around a person is saying in effect, “You contribute nothing worthwhile. In fact, your very existence is a drain on the world around you.” suicide looks increasing like a reasonable option for the person. So much is telling the person that the person’s absence would be a net benefit to the world.
The modern environmentalist movement that worships the physical earth constantly insists each human is a drain on the earth; that movement and others that emphasize the physical and financial costs of children over the potential benefits a new person can bring; and others that emphasize the negative aspects of humanity and de-emphasize or even denigrate the potential positives, can drain a person of a reason to continue to live.
This became much more apparent to me during the Covid lockdowns, when the overwhelming literal message to people was “your very existence is a mortal threat to every other person you might come into contact with” along with, for many, “and your potential contributions to others are so insignificant that the world is better off if you stay locked away from everyone else.” No wonder people decided the world be better off without them. To overcome the effect of a person’s relationship with G-d, society also cut off most meaningful connections with other people who also had a relationship with G-d, reducing the countering effects of having a relationship with G-d.
Before the Covid lockdowns I could not imagine why a person might choose suicide. The experience of those lockdowns (including my own absorption of the constant social and government messaging) gave me much more appreciation for some of the reasons people might choose death over life.
Society and the constitution cannot hold together unless people fear God. If you don’t fear God, it’s OK to kill people and steal stuff from them. There are only two religions that aren’t ultimately ridiculous in this sense.
We’ve got 3 Abrahamic religions and 2 out of the 3 ain’t bad.
I’ve listened to Dennis Prager and Robert Spencer extensively on this topic, and this is my conclusion. Our ridiculous inflationist – big government system is bad enough as it is.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™
foRCInG uS tO uSE goVErNmENt moNEY mAKes ouR lIvEs betTEr
I mean any deity who stands for the principles which I have distilled here. This specifically excludes paganism and all the baggage that comes with it.
Thanks. When I first read your post, I didn’t know if you were referring to specific theological conception of G-d or in something more Dwight David Eisenhower-like, “America makes no sense, without a deeply held faith in G-D, and I don’t care what it is.” I’ve always found Eisenhower’s phrasing a bit humorous, but I think I know what he was getting at.
Whatever you do, don’t make Cthulhu a part of your life.
From what I can tell suicide is mostly a white, especially a white male issue. The country and its society mostly can care less for that group and mostly can care less on its issues. Seems to me that suicide is not a bug but a feature for most.
This is going to keep happening until we realize that…
The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™
Isn’t worshipping Chthulu is an essential part of one’s diversified theological portfolio, sort of like how owning stocks in the technology sector is an essential part of one’s diversified financial portfolio? If one of the g-ds one worships turns out to be false, you’ve got a backup plan. Seems sensible, right?
That’s the crazy thing about worship. It tends to be a self-fulfilling deal. No data convinces a religionist that their deity is false, any more than data can get mask-wearers to cut it out. Or those who believe that sugar/meat/Micro/gluten/etc are poison.
Which is why saving civilization is going to be so very hard: being right (by itself) does not get the job done.
The second sentence of your post says, “Have children.” One friend of mine mentioned to me that she and her husband have a sense of peace about not having children. They are both over 65 years old. She said that although they tried hard to have children, she now thinks G-d just didn’t want them to have children and that is why they are childless. Whether G-d actually did want these friends of mine to be childless or not, I can see how this would make her feel better about being childless than shaking her fist saying, “It’s not fair that we had infertility problems! I’m mad at the world!”
I have parents-in-law who are in their late 80s. If it was not for my wife, they would have no one. I can tell you, it is no picnic getting old and being in that position.
Infertility or even some other inability that may prevent someone from producing progeny perfectly illustrates why we must care for one another as family.
But people have different views on this and we see it in the world we live in. Some people view humans as just another species of animal whose propagation should be controlled just as we might choose to control cattle, whales, or chickens. Some think the earth is of greater value itself than humanity.
There are some differences where compromise cannot be reached.
EDIT: That last is too harsh.
An effective compromise is an approach similar to what the Founders of the United States provided us where each individual is at liberty to live in the way they choose. When governments are formed there may be limits agreed upon within that society to maintain civil order and promote common interests.
Social Security, Medicare, and debt-based inflationism require that you procreate FICA / wage slaves. Any politician that says anything about this won’t be reelected, because government is how we steal from each other.
We have created this so it can be eliminated.
Well, that’s pretty tricky politically. You can’t fix Medicare with inflation, only death panels.
Changing the system to get people to procreate at gunpoint or change it so you don’t have to have that is pretty radical.
The 16th Amendment allowing the Congress to spend without limit is what enabled the process that has resulted in this ruinous conclusion. There have been a number of collateral events but the spending authority is the killer.
I have a limit to how much I can understand about this stuff. Having said that, the two issues are being able to spend for war, and whatever it takes (I have no idea how to explain this) for us to be geopolitically dominant with the currency. We obviously are too stupid and corrupt for any socialist projects.
Phrasing?
Wordplay.
How can suicide seem so attractive? Speaking from personal experience: Family breakdown. The day my father left us, after betraying my mother to sleep with a woman who had been the wife of a family friend who had been like an older brother to me (the woman was 25 years dad’s junior) the world I had grown up in was essentially destroyed and I lived in an often sickening, always tense, twisted, deficient version of what it had been for the rest of my teenage and early college years. It was a life I no longer wanted, at times, and there were moments when I came awfully close to acting on that impulse.
That impulse also came back to haunt me at times in my later adult life when I felt I had betrayed or failed my wife, family, church, or God in particularly awful ways. Only in the last 10-12 years have I been really free of it.
I hope that provides you with some insight.