What next, after all the striving and attaining? That place you’re in is what existential philosophers call “the existential vacuum”, where the old meanings have dried up, and the activities that once filled your life no longer sustain you.

I like that. Great term--existential vacuum.

I've experienced that a few times -- major goals which took years to reach, then achieved, then "now what?" Or, foundational beliefs play out and new foundational beliefs have to be found and set in place. James Russel Lowell (New England poet, Romantic era) said in a poem that "Time makes ancient good uncouth". But one doesn't want an existential vacuum of values--too much of that going around.

I stumbled when I encountered my first vacuum. I had finished a degree, worked in a peace-corps type program a couple of years, did some more school, then got a job at a college. After 3 or 4 years, the 10 year plan was over. Now what? It took me years to fill the vacuum but I did, several times over.

I've lived with chronic depression for decades (under control, thanks to medicine) but have never felt more than a twinge of suicidal thinking. We must be careful how we talk to ourselves: if a lot of our internal dialogue is about the pointless, meaninglessness of life, suicide as a solution, and so on -- we are -- at the very least -- sowing the seeds of more unhappiness, if not our death.

making a performative affirmation. — unenlightened

:lol:
Stay cool and in the groove, man :cool:

There is no reason to do it. Filling life with stuff to do only counts if you have to live and you don't. — Darkneos

You have yet yo explain why, make an argument instead of an assertion. Also, no reason for you doesnt mean no reason for anyone. Obviously plenty of people have found their own reasons reasons.

You didnt answer my other comment:

What kind of “greater reason” do you mean? Whats wrong with meaning people create for themselves? — DingoJones

You need to expand on these points youre trying to make if you're actually interested in discussion.

Great term--existential vacuum. — BC

Yes. From the Guardian article linked earlier, glad you enjoyed it.

The sharing of life experiences - such as you have done here - is so valuable. To hear the stories. Life wisdom passed on. Sometimes too late. If I knew then, what I know now. Yup.

Now what? It took me years to fill the vacuum but I did, several times over. — BC

You've had your share of challenges, and finding your way through them.
Great to have you here to tell the tale.

I never had a 10yr plan. It took me a bit of trial and error to eventually find something I had thought not for me. But hey...

I find it strange that I'm still in the process of discovering mysel. I've never contemplated suicide but have felt like I didn't want to go on. I imagine most people go through similar.

Chronic, clinical depression is a whole other ballgame. Glad to know yours is well controlled with medication.

I saved some of the comments from the article, including this. Note, it isn't about a vacuum but a change.

we all, at different stages and ages, reach the point of existential change, and rarely does it occur at a time when we are ready to embrace it. The trick is to allow it to happen and use it as the opportunity it really is, to become who we really are.,

To see the potential in an apparent problem. Not always easy.
To become who we really are. To find a hidden talent.
For some, it can take a lifetime...
Enjoy the ride! :flower:

And yes. This:

We must be careful how we talk to ourselves: if a lot of our internal dialogue is about the pointless, meaninglessness of life, suicide as a solution, and so on -- we are -- at the very least -- sowing the seeds of more unhappiness, if not our death. — BC

We are all going to die and be dead for eternity. The question is whether to speed it up or wait until death comes of it's own accord. The difference may come down to deliberation in destruction. So many aspects of life, especially diet and lifestyle may be important factors.

The idea of committing suicide is not simple. That is because some self-harm and survive, whereas others may make acts of self-harm and survive. It is about the juggling of risk in the tension between life and death existentially.

We are all going to die and be dead for eternity. — Jack Cummins

A good reason to stay alive while we can!

I will continue to read with interest. — Amity

Yes?

The way the suicide discussion is so often carried out in Western culture (what little there is of such discussion, that is) is that all the blame is conveniently placed on the person who killed themselves or seems to want to, along with calling them mentally ill, selfish, etc. While it is somehow considered bad taste to point out how others may have contributed to the suicide, or even caused it.

All that talk of love, empathy, compassion. And yet, it is somehow always other people who should be the first to practice love, empathy, compassion, and never those who preach them.

because everything is meaningless, and i am an idiot. — unenlightened

How vulgar.

One argument which I found important is James Hillman's idea that the idea of suicide is related to a wish for transformation. Having experienced suicidal ideas, I am inclined to the view that the frontier of suicide involves a wish for transformation. Suicide is final whereas so much experimentation in life offers up areas of potential, beyond the finitude of death as an absolute extinguisher of creative possibilities.

You are certainly NOT the first person to discover that life may be, can be, may seem to be... meaningless. Get used to it and move on. That's what people do. — BC

This is another vulgar attitude. No, it has not been my experience that people generally accept that life is meaningless. This is a perverse, vulgar sentiment that can be found primarily among the educated poor.

You yourself have noted more than once how your degree in the humanities and your socioeconomic background were in conflict, and how you could never really be part of the academia or the intellectual class, given your socioeconomic background. It's this conflict that is the breeding ground of existential anguish.

It is my hypothesis that people who are poor but whose ambitions in life are realistic aren't likely to get depressed. In contrast, policies like the "no child left behind", all that striving for equity, equal opportunity, this is what is creating depressed people.

It's when one is trying to be something one is not that one gets sucked into an abyss of existential problems.

The way the suicide discussion is so often carried out in Western culture (what little there is of such discussion, that is) is that all the blame is conveniently placed on the person who killed themselves or seems to want to, along with calling them mentally ill, selfish, etc. While it is somehow considered bad taste to point out how others may have contributed to the suicide, or even caused it. — baker

Thank you for sharing your experience of 'the suicide discussion'.

I don't see any blame or name-calling being attached to anyone here. It's been instructive, even if responses have been repeatedly dismissed.
Most have been patient but there is a limit.

All that talk of love, empathy, compassion. And yet, it is somehow always other people who should be the first to practice love, empathy, compassion, and never those who preach them. — baker

'All that talk' - 'those who preach them'.
I talked about a lot more than that. There was no preaching. It concerned the lack of empathy and its effects on a person and their relationships.

Like others, I took time, listened, asked questions, provided other perspectives which were ignored.

I will leave this thread for the time being. Another TPF Activity beckons. :sparkle:

Idiocy might be more comfortable with some extra cash...

I’ve never much understood why permanent solutions to temporary problems ought to be shunned. It’s only temporary problems that have solutions, not the permanent ones. And does one not want one’s solutions to problems to last and thereby be permanent? How then is this supposed to assuage those who are suicidal and have no doubts regarding there not being an afterlife?

Unfortunately for your theories, the reality is the majority of unsuccessful suiciders regret their decision to attempt suicide. In fact among unsuccessful suiciders, greater than 90% will never die of suicide (23% will have another unsuccessful attempt, but a whopping 70% will never attempt it again).

Unfortunately for your theories, the reality is the majority of unsuccessful suiciders regret their decision to attempt suicide. In fact among unsuccessful suiciders, greater than 90% will never die of suicide (23% will have another unsuccessful attempt, but a whopping 70% will never attempt it again). — LuckyR

I'm no stranger to being wrong, but I so far don't find a connection between what I've said and what you've said. Can you embellish?

To make a case against it you'd have to engage with why living would be preferable when it's not a requirement to be alive. — Darkneos

I honestly don't understand what you're after, though. "Preferable"? So I consider suicide: (a) Do I prefer to continue living, or (b) do I prefer to die? That's a choice. "Requirement"? Someone or something requires me to live. Who? What? How does that impact the choice I'm about to make (as soon as I stop dithering)? Or would you like some convincing philosophical position that makes the choice moot?

The two poles aren't equal, here. It's not a choice between to equally attainable options, where you can also just walk away. Vanilla or chocolate ice cream? Meh, I want strawberry. Maybe next time. If one wonders whether one wants to die or not, one is necessarily alive. You don't need to make a decision to go on living: that's the default state. When I was suicidal, I was constantly dithering until I was no longer suicidal. I never made a choice, so I still live. If I'd made the choice to go on living, that would, presumably, have changed the way I went on with my life.

In real life situations, rather than being between life and death, the choice is usually between taking different sorts of action: there are quite a few ways to go out, and there are quite a few ways to go on. A lot of the time, people may have decided to kill themselves, but they don't go through with it because they can't find a good method (success-rate too low, too painful, leaves too much of a mess for others to clean up...). Some people might kill themselves because there's an easy method available (e.g. the gun in Daddy's locker), and because the way forward has no visible path. People don't pick between life and death in a cosmological slot machine. They decide act: one way or another. (Or, as in my case, make no choice at all.) It's a rare philosophical suicide who chooses between life and death on some underlying requirement.

That doesn't mean that there's no discussion here; it just means that, because over the course of my life, I've read a lot about suicide for personal reasons, I tend to have my head filled with the practicals. So what could a requirement for life even be in principle? The way I see it living things live and eventually die. Any choice occurs during that stretch of time. "To live" is thus not a choice. The child that wasn't born doesn't get to choose life. The child that does get born, doesn't get a say either. So the requirement must somehow be ex post facto: it's a requirement for the living to continue living. And they do anyway: until they die. So it's not so much a requirement to continue living (which is automatic), but a proscription: don't take actions that shorten your life. But then we're not quite with suicide yet. See, that can apply to any risk taking behaviour, too: don't smoke, don't be a fire fighter etc. So maybe it's "Don't set death as your goal?"

But if it's about goal setting, what do I make of this line from your OP:

Desire for pleasures only applies if you are alive, if you die there is no need for any of that. Same with love, friendship, food, money, etc. — Darkneos

Pleasure and Death are alternative goals you can set. As you say, they're mutually exclusive. What you're saying sounds to me like "Given that I'm dead, why should I set as a goal any of those things that can no longer matter to me?" But this makes no sort of sense to me: first, you can't set any goals once you're dead. Second, once you're dead that-which-matters-to-you is n/a. You're gone. It's a category error. It's not that things no longer matter to you; it's that mattering has ceased.

This is a long and maybe pointless post, but I'm having trouble pinning down a perspective from which it makes sense to tackle your question. I hope you understand my troubles otherwise we're bound to talk past each other.

(Besides this, there's a secondary question I have: what if there's a requirement for life, but I don't like that requirement and kill myself anyway? But that's a different post.)

To make a case against it you'd have to engage with why living would be preferable when it's not a requirement to be alive. — Darkneos

Why would ice cream be preferable if youre not required to eat it? Why is it preferable to drive your car when you don’t have to drive your car?
These questions don’t need to be engaged with because they are incoherent, and so is your comment above. Once you bring requirement into it you are no longer talking about preferences at all. Incoherent.

You need to expand on these points youre trying to make if you're actually interested in discussion. — DingoJones

I made that point already, such things matter only if you have to live and there is no have to when it comes to living.

Why would ice cream be preferable if youre not required to eat it? Why is it preferable to drive your car when you don’t have to drive your car?
These questions don’t need to be engaged with because they are incoherent, and so is your comment above. Once you bring requirement into it you are no longer talking about preferences at all. Incoherent. — DingoJones

They’re not, you’re just not able to engage with them. It’s easier to just dismiss such things rather than wonder why we even bother with them.

It’s true, why eat ice cream if you don’t have to. Why do things that make life enjoyable when you can just die and not need to do such things anymore? Filling life with good things only makes sense when one is prevented from dying and thus must make life enjoyable. But since there is no such restriction then we don’t have to do all that.

Pleasure and Death are alternative goals you can set. As you say, they're mutually exclusive. What you're saying sounds to me like "Given that I'm dead, why should I set as a goal any of those things that can no longer matter to me?" But this makes no sort of sense to me: first, you can't set any goals once you're dead. Second, once you're dead that-which-matters-to-you is n/a. You're gone. It's a category error. It's not that things — Dawnstorm

It’s more like why prefer life to death, which is the end of the pursuit.

Every day you don’t off yourself is a choice to live. It’s not really the default.

Every day you don’t off yourself is a choice to live. It’s not really the default. — Darkneos

But that ignores your life. Whatever is keeping you alive does not care a whit about your logic.

I made that point already, such things matter only if you have to live and there is no have to when it comes to living. — Darkneos

I didnt ask you to make the point, I asked you to expand on the points and specifically:

“What kind of “greater reason” do you mean? Whats wrong with meaning people create for themselves?”

They’re not, you’re just not able to engage with them. It’s easier to just dismiss such things rather than wonder why we even bother with them. — Darkneos

You cannot engage with something incoherent, correct. However it is not true that I am being dismissive, I do wonder why people bother. Observe I have not made flowery appeals to lifes beauty etc.
That is because I don’t think those things are inherently good and people are free to place no value on any of that stuff (inner peace, self love, loving others, being part of a community…any of that pro life jibber jab)
Just answer my two questions above if nothing else.

But that ignores your life. Whatever is keeping you alive does not care a whit about your logic. — Paine

You are keeping you alive when you eat and all that stuff.

“What kind of “greater reason” do you mean? Whats wrong with meaning people create for themselves?” — DingoJones

I already covered that at the start, you’re just not paying attention.

You cannot engage with something incoherent, correct — DingoJones

No it’s not incoherent you just aren’t able to engage with it. If you read the posts you’d see why your questions aren’t relevant.

I think we’re lucky to exist. Sure life is unfair and a struggle at times but we’re lucky enough to experience the good that comes from it. You don’t have to be rich to enjoy it, it’s just a ride and getting off it before it finishes hurts (suicide) so just let life play itself out, don’t put too much pressure on yourself, we’re blessed that we get to exist because when we cease to exist that will be forever and it’s a once only event.

I think it's often the case that people find that there are fewer reasons for living than there are reasons for dying. Sometimes those people choose suicide. It's a common enough phenomenon and there might be many reasons for it. It's been interesting to read people's responses to your OP. What are the least helpful answers here?

You are keeping you alive when you eat and all that stuff. — Darkneos

And I suppose that applies to all the other desires I have.

There are different kinds of desires and pursuing their consummation is an engagement with one's life. That is why apathy and depression factor into some considerations of suicide. On the other hand, the rush of risk taking also leads to a lot of death. I find both extremes unnecessary for myself.

What I had in mind about one preserving life is the way one jumps out of the way of the truck or jumps to save a colleague. These actions are not on a drop-down menu. The person who does them is just as alive as the other agents of choice.

I have worked in a dangerous industry for most of my life. The epistemology of learning what is stupid has joined forces with this person who is always alert for the bad things. It is a beautiful partnership that I am grateful for.

Differences irreconcilable. Would we all agree? How unfestive.

(PM me personally if you feel such matters need to be discussed further)

I think we’re lucky to exist. Sure life is unfair and a struggle at times but we’re lucky enough to experience the good that comes from it. You don’t have to be rich to enjoy it, it’s just a ride and getting off it before it finishes hurts (suicide) so just let life play itself out, don’t put too much pressure on yourself, we’re blessed that we get to exist because when we cease to exist that will be forever and it’s a once only event. — kindred

Not even a reply because it's speaking massively of privilege and doesn't grasp the whole scope of life. Outside of modern society life is pretty brutal, and even in society you have to be born lucky to experience the good stuff. Honestly man...have some perspective.

I think it's often the case that people find that there are fewer reasons for living than there are reasons for dying. Sometimes those people choose suicide. It's a common enough phenomenon and there might be many reasons for it. It's been interesting to read people's responses to your OP. What are the least helpful answers here? — Tom Storm

I think the least helpful answers are the ones that insist life has good points or that one is lucky to be alive. That smacks of hindsight bias. I'm not an anti-natalist myself but I find it hard to argue against their claims and reasoning. People who think life is worth living are lucky and shouldn't speak on it's value.

Thanks. That makes sense.

I think it's often the case that people find that there are fewer reasons for living than there are reasons for dying. Sometimes those people choose suicide. It's a common enough phenomenon and there might be many reasons for it. It's been interesting to read people's responses to your OP. What are the least helpful answers here?

Huh? Only a small minority of the population attempt suicide. And even among those who attempt it and fail, only about 7% will reattempt and succeed, that is 93% won't die by suicide.

:up: Bad syntax on my part - I meant often amongst those who contemplate suicide. Of course we'll never know how many alleged 'accidental' deaths - crashes, accidents, overdoses, etc, are attributable to suicide, or how many people have suicidal thoughts at points in life without taking action. 13.2 million Americans are thought to have suicidal thoughts in a given year and it is the leading cause of death amongst young people aged 15 to 29, so it is not uncommon.

I think it's often the case that people find that there are fewer reasons for living than there are reasons for dying. Sometimes those people choose suicide. It's a common enough phenomenon and there might be many reasons for it. It's been interesting to read people's responses to your OP. What are the least helpful answers here?
— Tom Storm

I think the least helpful answers are the ones that insist life has good points or that one is lucky to be alive. That smacks of hindsight bias. I'm not an anti-natalist myself but I find it hard to argue against their claims and reasoning. People who think life is worth living are lucky and shouldn't speak on it's value. — Darkneos

@Tom Storm - that was a good question to ask, after all the different responses are gathered in.
And found wanting.

Most interesting to read @Darkneos reply.

That makes sense. — Tom Storm

And now what?

I agree it makes sense but not sure it is hindsight bias. I think some work hard, every day, to counter life's negativities and real life problems. We don't know what posters have been through, might still be going through. Some have worked out their own best coping mechanisms, others might have had professional help.

I seem to remember you have expertise in this area, or similar.

Do you agree with Darkneos that people who think life is worth living shouldn't speak to its value? Or try to persuade someone. It could be counter-productive, no?

Perhaps, if they are rubbing their good fortune in, like salt to an open wound, I can see it's not helpful.
I can't remember all the responses but I can't recall anyone doing that. Perhaps, its all in the perception.

And not everyone is 'lucky'. Life is what we make it. It's hard work. Where there is a will, there is a way.
Someone once said. But what if there is no will? What then?

You said you were interested to read people's responses. And waited until now to ask a most pertinent question. So, what now? What advice would you give people who only want to help?
Is it even possible to make a satisfactory logical argument in this kind of situation?

What are the main causes of suicide in young people?
And how can they be addressed?

What does it mean to say, "Life is worth living"? or "Lucky to be alive"?
It doesn't always seem like it is, or we are, does it? Even for those perceived as 'lucky'.

It depends on so many circumstances that we have no control over.
Which philosophy or psychology coping strategy is the most helpful, in your opinion?

In the Northern hemisphere this is the shortest day, longest night. The hours of daylight will start to increase. Some celebrate this: "Happy Winter Solstice!".

But the days are still dark and dreich. Lack of sunlight can bring mood right down.
People making merry, when you are feeling low, can make you feel worse.
Loneliness is felt. Not only by the young.

Is this when most suicides are committed?

What changes would make someone's life more bearable?