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Comment by dokem | Hacker News Reader

Why can't suicide be noble? Why can't we respect a decision to not participate in this experience that none of us asked for in the first place? Why is the answer more pills or shrink sessions just to keep on to the next day? Please tell me one actual down side of suicide for suffering person. It's selfishness ultimately; we want them to stick around for us, not for them.

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I suppose I could respect it, but many survivors of suicide attempts decide not to repeat their attempts. IMO this suggests that some of them believe that they might be better off alive.

but many survivors of suicide attempts decide not to repeat their attempts

I survived a suicide attempt at age 17. I'm 53. I'm still frequently suicidal, in part because of an incurable medical condition, in part because the world is a shitty place, full of really shitty people.

I have not made a second attempt. There are myriad factors there. One is that if I'm stuck here, it's better to be stuck here without extra medical bills and people assuming me to be incompetent. My life is hard enough without those additional burdens.

To be fair, this is survivor bias in the purest sense. There is an elegance in respecting one's choice, but most suicidal people are instead in need of sincere help and understanding, the ideal policy is likely to assume it would be regretted in the scheme of possible futures.

I haven't repeated, and I am ... satisfied to happy now. But that doesn't mean that it was worth going through that part of my life that drove me to that point to get to where I am now.

Because people who fail at suicide mostly report regret immediately after reaching the point of no return.

That's a classic case of survivorship bias.

Only because the dead can't express measurable regret (i.e. even if there is an afterlife, they can't establish communication with the living to convey their regret)

That cuts both ways. They also can't tell you if they are thrilled, they feel they did the right thing and wish they had done it sooner.

Well then the supposed survivorship bias would cut both ways too then? Why should we assume people with failed suicide attempts should have regret at a higher rate than those with successful attempts?

I commented on this already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466273

It's probably not politically correct or socially acceptable for people to run around saying too much "I wish I had succeeded because my life still sucks." It's also basically counterproductive.

I often wish I had simply not been born or had died years ago when I was in the midst of a serious medical crisis or would just "wake up dead." Going to sleep and "waking up dead" has been a common fantasy of mine since at least my teens.

I just don't run around harping on that constantly. It would be nothing but trouble for me and is potentially a good way to inadvertently encourage others to finally off themselves. I consider that irresponsible, so I generally don't publicly say things like "I don't understand why more people with my medical condition don't kill themselves." Other people with my medical condition don't need to run across that opinion on the internet every time they turn around, so I mostly keep such thoughts to myself or share them only with my adult sons.

I have a Dread Disease. What it does to your life is horrible. There is no real hope of a cure. I am slowly getting better by pursuing "alternative" stuff (diet and lifestyle, mostly) and I get constantly attacked and dismissed for talking about that.

Being constantly attacked and dismissed instead of getting the support I need to succeed makes me suicidal. But the fact that I am slowly getting better means my life is vastly better than it is supposed to be and I know what it is supposed to look like and if I genuinely believed in my heart of hearts that what doctors told me was all I could expect -- that people like me don't get well and I can look forward to a long, slow and torturous decline ultimately resulting in death -- then I likely would have killed myself.

And other people with CF don't really need to run into my thoughts on that when it means essentially that I am left-handedly saying "Why don't you just go kill yourself already?" (or could be interpreted as such -- that's certainly not my actual intent)

It's not my business to decide how much they should be willing to endure. It's not my business to decide how much they should value life and try to survive in the face of that. I would consider it irresponsible behavior for me to constantly harp on that. So I don't.

But it doesn't mean that I don't think such things. So I can well imagine that a lot of people who wish they were dead just aren't sharing that information constantly because they aren't assholes.

Which is a very long way of saying "We don't actually know, so please stop trying to claim that we can infer X when we really can't."

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Glad to hear you are getting better.

One downside is it seldom seems much fun. Sure you can have noble suicide like the Kamikaze pilots but usually its a messy and upsetting business.

As an American I wouldn't call that a noble suicide. Waste of life all around for a misplaced sense of honor. Which apparently is still misplaced today. I'm not sure you can have much of a noble suicide in fact. I know it is sort of fetishized in some aspects of Japanese culture, like seppuku (harakiri), but I think it is a mistake calling it noble even then.

It's selfishness ultimately

Selfishness cuts both ways - what if they had kids? Or other responsibilities? Just like they didn't ask for the experience, their kids didn't ask for it too.

But yeah, I agree with your larger point

I would argue that suicide is itself extremely selfish.

Remember this point, when a person commits suicide they most deeply hurt the people that love them the most. Is that right? Is that fair? They don't hurt the people that don't care about them, they hurt the ones that love them. It's such a cruel, unjust thing to do.

Everyone dies eventually. Having a loved one kill themselves vs any other reason, you can never really get over it. It's just a punishment to the ones that love you that continues on. So we are left with two reasonable options. First that you do it out of spite and anger to intentionally hurt people that love you. Don't need to talk about that, that's just wrong. Second, you think no one loves you.

So that last case, if really no one does love you, it's still not noble. It is the ultimate quitting, the ultimate admission of defeat. And it is irreversible. You feel this way now, at this moment, but you give up the chance to feel another way ever, for any redemption.

A wise person once told me that arrogance/selfishness and depression were two sides of the same coin; an unnatural focus on self. Life is not worth living? Fine. Die to yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. Your life sucks, its going to suck, fine. Start thinking about other people. You are walking dead already, but you still have a brain and some abilities. Do something for someone else.

Another extremely wise teacher, who tried to convince people to love each other, said this: "If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me." meaning before you could be like him and live for others first you need to die to yourself. And then he said that those people would find true life.

Edit: I'm not just saying this and telling suicidal people to suck it up. I've been through this personally from all these angles. I'm sharing what I have experienced and what worked for me.

On the flip side of this is David Foster Wallace's essay.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/anthony-bourdain-...

If thinking about suicide as a form of giving up helped you our of your funk, then more power to you. I don't have any real experience on the matter, but I want to share this as not everyone relates to your experience and sees suicide as a form of giving up.

It's really funny. I teach a class of students who would never give the time of day to thinking deeply about things ("yee-yees", as they even call themselves), but it came out that a former teacher/assistant coach at our school had committed suicide. They went into a well-thought out discussion about whether suicide was selfish or not.

I think, in the end, they decided that it both was and was not selfish. It was selfish, in the regard that you're putting yourself ahead of others in terms of you being at peace while knowing others are going to hurt (and this person was found by their child-age daughters...), but they also said we can't really know it's truly selfishness because we have no clue what they're going through. We literally can't put ourselves in their shoes to see if there might have been another way out, etc. It was quite an insightful discussion, one I would've never expected from these kids.

There's a difference between sacrificing yourself to save people you love and killing yourself because you are deeply unhappy. The later is generally viewed as a mental disease that can be assuaged with therapy and allow the victim to be happy again.

Also, I know there are a lot of other reasons to kill yourself (onset of terminal disease, etc.) but I would wager the vast majority are rooted in unhappiness.

That means you believe you simply die and your pain is alleviated, which many people (who are not intellectually lazy) don't agree with, so they might want to genuinely help out. In any case suicide most often comes from a moment of spiked anxiety or panic, so why should we just let people who would otherwise care and like to be near us take their lives in a moment their rational brain isn't working with the calm generally afforded for important decisions (say, business decisions) that have big effects the person contemplating death otherwise cares about?

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