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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.

If you arrive at the conclusion that there is no point to any of it, why not end your life on your own terms?

Is it your own terms if your mind is clouded by sickness? I know people decline treatment of diseases for several reasons, but we are speaking philosophically here.

it seems to me more courageous to decide of the moment.

Is it courageous to leave behind others to pick up the pieces? I know this isn't always the case and I wouldn't call suicide "cowardly", but I might call it "selfish".

Actually, that aspect of selfishness is a part of the barrier keeping me from it. It's a terrible thing to inflict upon the people close to you. And yes, I've been pretty depressed sometimes.
This kind of philosophical thinking is interesting and all. But it is a mistake to dwell on it too deeply because it is so egocentric. So what if life is meaningless, why does that actually matter? Why does it matter if your actions are couragous or cowardly?

When I am around other people I am more likely to concentrate on the practicalities of being happy instead of the abstract study of personal worth. I understand that none of this probably has much to do with serious depression.

> So what if life is meaningless, why does that actually matter?

Well this is not very far from what Camus effectively landed on, the acceptance of the absurd. There's a lot that's simplified and removed from your statement, but I think you would find a lot more to agree with in Camus than you might expect. He was certainly not a nihilist or solipsist.

EDIT: To clarify, Camus thought the opposite of the grandparent comment, and was not on team suicide.

That is the truth that I unfortunately learned too late, at least, way after I spent way too much time ruminating about concepts of free will and determinism. Now, I have a very dispiriting view of humanity (the fact that we evolved from primates who'd fight a lot, rape a lot, etc.), it does much to take away 'meaning' from my life. I wish I'd never spent the time I did thinking so much about all of these things alone in the late night. If I'd been more outgoing, more social, I think I would not have this negative and sorrowful outlook in life.

I strongly suspect that others pondering the Camus question of suicide are similarly alone or asocial. I encourage everyone to get busy in social doings -- it does a lot to take this off your mind and let you live life normally.

"So what if life is meaningless, why does that actually matter?"

I salute you sir! This will be my new philosophy of life.

And indeed, life being meaningless, then that fact is also meaningless (along with every other fact). Any meaning we humans "find" in our life is an illusion at best. One may select and change one's meanings as one wishes, which in all honesty, appears to be exactly what humans do, with abandon. Unfortunately this leaves us precisely where we started: nothing has changed other than that we now permit ourselves to change meanings at whim.

I prefer an evo-devo view. E.g., concerning "courageous or cowardly": these are culture-specific indicators that may assist your reproductive efforts; they likely do matter in that respect.

"He who dies with the most toys wins."

I disagree with you. I read a story of a middle aged man that jumped off a bridge and survived. What I recall was that the moment he jumped, he regretted it as he knew he couldn't undo the jump, and realized that he could fix things in his life. He later did succeed in killing himself later. Suicide might be the "ultimate choice", but sometimes, it's the "ultimate irrational choice" because someone is suffering from an illness.
Do you know why he killed himself later if he felt such regret immediately after the first jump? That seems odd, unless the first jump caused enough problems physically for him going forward?
"We're not him, we'll never know how he felt anyway."

Therefore, don't pass judgment on him or anyone else, even the 24 year old. It is a tragedy for the living but that's all we know.

There is nothing dignified, rational, or courageous about being able or being unable to decide the manner of your death. You die. That's the fact. The manner of it doesn't change that. Thinking one death is better than another is an illusion that the living imparts on the event. There are certainly painful ways to die but we should withhold other adjectives like courageous, dignified, etc. A soldier getting blown to bits by a shell didn't die a better or worse death than his comrade who live to die of a sudden heart attack. Nor is a cancer patient who endures painful rounds of chemotherapy only to die in some horrifying way any less courageous than one who chooses to end it by suicide.

What we do have some small measure of control over is how we live and that's what really matters.

"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."

Consider what it means for that decision to be rational. Or rather, consider just one immediate corollary: Those of us who know we are not going to have "wonderful and very successful" lives, certainly not as successful as Williams, should immediately kill ourselves. Rationality has this weird nature of being prescriptive, right?

"Suicide in a way is an insult to the living..."

How could a reasonable, rational choice be an insult to anyone or anything?

The decision to commit suicide, or to not do so for that matter, is not especially rational. But then, most major questions aren't either.

I think bambax meant that the living often take the "suicide" of someone we know as an insult, that we perhaps weren't good enough friends or family or that we missed something. This is true sometimes, though often it isn't and there is nothing that could prevent the suicide from eventually occurring.
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.

The way you curse could be an indication to yourself that you are not approaching this in an even-tempered way.
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?

The loss of a loved one is a tragic painful thing, but I do think that teenage suicide is especially tragic for two reasons.

1) Teenagers lack the perspective and maturity to understand that decision.

2) Teenagers (in general) have much more of their lives ahead of them. I think it is tragic if someone losses the last decade of their life and more tragic if they lose the last 7 decades.

> Deciding whether or not life is worth living

This rankles. Why does life have to be "worth" living? What is the yardstick of value you're judging life against? Life simply is. Unless you're in extreme chronic pain, I can't see why oblivion would be preferable. You'll get there eventually anyway, no need to rush it. In the meantime there is more than enough here to explore for one lifetime.

> Why does life have to be "worth" living?

Why do you get to impose your values on someone else about a thing you literally can't know?

Murder is illegal because you're depriving someone else from their right to life. The person who does the killing is the criminal and the person being killed is the victim.

But I can't steal money from myself can I? So in that regard, neither can I murder myself. Every person has the moral right to end their own lives even if we don't like it and don't understand it.

Of course it's illegal to kill yourself, but not because the justice system has any ability to prosecute a corpse. It's so that people who try to kill themselves and fail badly at it can be temporarily restrained and given medical attention.

You can't see why oblivion would be preferable to anything other than, say, extreme chronic pain? I can't imagine that anyone could be so blind.

The yardstick is simple, does continuing to exist seem like something of higher net value than oblivion. The reality of daily existence barely meets that criteria for me, and I can only imagine I have far fewer troubles than most of the world's population.

I often wonder if the majority of people only continue to exist because of social obligations and cultural attitudes. Or maybe they just enjoy more things (such as the exploration you mention) :)

> Why does life have to be "worth" living?

Because life requires effort which some people might not like to spend.

> What is the yardstick of value you're judging life against?

Against not living.

If value/effort < 1 suicide seems like a pretty logical decision.

Camus quote has nothing to do with 'rationalizing suicide'. It's in fact about how to rationalize the opposite.
If you arrive at the conclusion that there is no point to any of it, why not end your life on your own terms?

Because... If you don't believe there is any point to life, what makes you believe there is any point in death? At least with life there is a possibility of change, and capacity to help others who don't share your outlook.

I think this question is a lot like asking if an obese person wants to eat themselves to death, should we let them?

You can debate whether or not it is morally justifiable to allow this to happen, but you can't really argue that it is healthy behavior.

I envision a day when your thinking prevails and suicide prevention hotlines become controversial - seen as a new kind of bigotry.
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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.
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

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.
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.
Where in your link does it talk about the "both sides" of the spectrum?
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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

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.

So people with suicide thoughts should not be helped because it's all a genetic issue?
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.
>> 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.

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.
A survey is one way. Not very accurate , but it's a start.
"When I grew up in Brooklyn, nobody committed suicide; everyone was too unhappy." - Woody Allen