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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

>seriously, why are these startup founders killing themselves?

If I may be a politicizing dick, severe inequality means that seemingly small failures or successes can have massive, oversized influence on the course of someone's life, and also means that we socialize people, from youth, to take each possible failure or success that much more seriously, as that much more determining of their overall life course and meaning in the world.

It runs directly contrary to imbuing resilience in people, and in society.

Anxiety disorders and suicides are the price of having a society and a world in which increasingly many people have everything on the line, at every step, all the time.

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You're making a fair point--and feeling like you have everything on the line at every step is most likely going to ramp up someone's level of anxiety and stress with all the negative impacts that entails. However, I also think there is a counterbalancing point that framing life as an all-encompassing economic gamble actually reinforces that anxiety and stress by making it seem like economics is the whole of existence--and for folks who are feeling overwhelmed by feeling like their failure or success hangs in the balance it is likely to drown out a more healthy counter-narrative which is that you're probably not "ruined" if you fail. It'll suck (believe me I'm still paying shitloads of student loans for a career I quit almost a decade ago), but you can still have friends and community and value things in life that aren't work or career. People who are at the point of attempting suicide have drowned out all those positives with a tunnel vision on the pressure of success/failure that is blinding them to other possibilities (see comments above about people who survived jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge).

So yeah, the economics of operating without the feeling of a safety net sucks, but people who are starting to crumble under that safety net need to hear that the safety net isn't just their runway, it's also all the family and friends and life that they have or can build. Unfortunately in this particular case it sounds like she was in a transition and didn't quite have those solidly in place yet.

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