Suicide is a Luxury Good
In the present zeitgeist people think that a lack of suicide doors on your car would be a reason to commit suicide. In fact, the existence of suicide doors on your automobile is positively correlated with the chance of killing yourself.
People see white men as the most privileged demographic. If one consults any list of objective metrics this is hard to argue against. They are wealthier and more educated. They are far more likely to be corporate executives, law firm partners, and chief physicians.
They hold key government offices in far greater amounts than if those offices were randomly distributed among the population. 75% of US senators are currently men. 76.8% of present congress(men) are men. 100% of current presidents are men.
If you randomly assigned senate seats to people within the United States, assuming 50% male and 50% female population, the chance of getting 75 senators who are men is 1 in 5.2 million. If you randomly assigned people to the house of representatives, the chance of randomly assigning 325 seats to men is 1 in 3.002 x 10²⁵. The universe has an estimated 7.5 x 10¹⁸ grains of sand. The current sex breakdown of the house of representatives, assuming men and women are equally qualified and electable, is 1 million times less likely than correctly choosing on the first try one marked grain of sand from all the sand on earth.
Obviously men and women are not equivalent. We have different wants and desires. More men want to be elected to high office than women. More people want men as their leaders. For some this is potentially due to sexist motivations. Supply and demand dynamics have dictated this massive gender mismatch in government.
Many people believe this to be a tragedy. I think it is the result of free and rational people making choices based on what is right for them. Telling women from a young age that they are lesser beings if they don’t pursue some high-powered career just so you can feel better about the distribution of sexual organs in the senate chamber is not righteous.
If you assume that more money, more education, and more power are all objectively good things, then it is logical to assume white men are privileged. In reality, having all the money and power in the world is not a guarantee of happiness. Suicide is the second most likely cause of death, after automobile accidents, for the 15–34 age cohort in the Unites States. Men are 3.6 times more likely to die by suicide than women. White people are more than twice as likely to kill themselves as black people when adjusting for population size. If privilege means I, as a white man, am 7 times more likely to die at my own hand than a black woman, then I want no part of it.
Let’s get some global perspective. Below are suicides per 100,000 people in each country per year:
The number one spot seems pretty obvious. You can’t go through 70 years of the most soul-destroying communist tyranny and not have some lingering after-effects. The countries at the bottom of the list with the highest suicide rates are full of Caucasians or Asians who are on average better educated and wealthier than the rest of the world.
The countries near the top of this list with the lowest suicide rates have lower standards of living, lower social mobility, higher child mortality, and lower per capita GDP. As Trump so ineloquently summarized it, “They are shithole countries.” The people inhabiting them deserve far better.
Despite all of the objective truths listed above, these people are not killing themselves in droves. Why is that the case? I conjecture it is because suicide is a luxury good. People worried about where their next meal is going to come from do not have time to worry about the meaninglessness of existence. They do not have time to pontificate on the purpose of humankind. To kill yourself requires significant amounts of idle time to contemplate your place in the universe. You must internalize the insignificance of your life and decide that it isn’t worth living anymore.
I suspect religion is another factor that affects suicide rates. The Eastern European countries have some of the highest rates of atheism in the world and these countries are almost all in the upper decile for suicide rates. Generally, developed western nations have higher rates of atheism to go along with their higher rates of suicide.
The Christian religion explicitly damns to hell anyone who commits suicide. This acts as a powerful deterrent. The idea that there is a benevolent being looking down who has prepared a prosperous and eternal afterlife if you merely follow the core tenets of his religion is enough to uplift any depressive. If I have heaven waiting for me after death, why would I sacrifice that bounty with a bullet to the brain? Ironically, this actually delays my entrance into paradise.
Despite the epic burden of my plush white-collar engineering job at a fortune 500 company, where I am probably overcompensated and rarely work over 40 hours a week, I would not trade places with an impoverished day laborer in an African mine for a lower chance of killing myself. I don’t think ignorance is bliss. I like having plenty of unscheduled hours each day to contemplate things even if those things occasionally depress me. I like having time to just sit and wonder, to stop the noise of life and ponder the questions that have confounded history’s greatest. The Christians are correct, idle time is the devil’s playground. But I still choose to play on the monkey bars.
I could take some of the obvious steps to reduce my chances of suicide as a white male: get married, have kids, and work more hours. Taking these steps would leave less time for existential crises. But life is not worth living for the mere extension of life. I refuse to avoid the big questions of life because they make me uncomfortable. In this safe and sterile world that modernity has granted I still want to feel pain and discomfort. Suffering and struggle are needed to generate catharsis. I need to feel human despite my environment not treating me as such.
My favorite writer, David Foster Wallace, killed himself in September 2008. At first I was angry he could so selfishly snuff out such brilliance. But he wouldn’t have been as brilliant if he had been unable to think deeply about humanity’s heinous acts and the contradictions in human belief frameworks. Life is complicated. This can overload the minds of even the best of us. Brilliant thinkers are far more likely to kill themselves than the ignorant and unwashed masses of the working class. But I would not trade an ounce of insight for more contentedness. I am fine being at a higher risk of suicide if it means I get to live a more nuanced life.
Don’t assume that the patriarchy which inhabits our most revered positions in society is happy. Lurking behind those iron-gated communities and double front doors are mountains of discontent. These unpigmented males hide any indication of it outside the home. They are continually told by society that they have been given everything they need to succeed. Born at the right time, with the right sexual organs, with the correct melanin content in their skin, they can do anything they want. They have no excuse to be unhappy.
They are embarrassed by their discontent and hide away their suffering. They take anti-depressants and become alcoholics. Until one day someone on the outskirts of their property someone walking a dog hears a small pop. The sound is dampened by perfectly trimmed hedge rows so they think it’s some neighborhood kids launching fireworks. The body isn’t discovered until a week later.
