Suicide Culture

There's been a lot written about what's wrong with our culture in the wake of the recent suicides of celebrities Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and, earlier, Robin Williams. Some attribute it to mental illness and no doubt that plays a role, but that answer only pushes the question back a step. What's at the root of so much mental illness?

I wonder if the underlying malady isn't, at least in part, the same for many suicide victims as it is for many mass killers. Perhaps the fundamental problem is that modern society has failed to imbue people with a sense that our lives are meaningful, that they amount to anything. We often hear instead that we're just blobs of protoplasm, products of impersonal forces, that we exist for a moment and then are gone forever, like the light of a firefly.

We're just dust in the wind, we're told, and neither we nor anything else really has any significance or purpose. We're bereft of any reason to hope that there is or could be anything more to our being here. The sole purpose of human existence is, to quote biologist Theodore Dobzhansky, "to live, to leave more life" and then get out of the way. That's the unhappy legacy of modern secularism.

I'm not saying this is the only reason, and certainly not a conscious reason, behind every suicide or mass murderer, but I do think that a culture which has stripped away any sense of genuine transcendence leaves people with a profound emptiness. It promises them that that emptiness can be satisfied with consumer goods, sex, success, music, drugs, whatever, but these turn out in the end to be false gods and false hopes. Many of the people who are choosing to end their lives have all of these things in abundance, yet they're still empty inside.

Human beings yearn for transcendence, our psyches need it like our body needs solid food, but modern culture throws us a stick of cotton candy and promises us that it's as nourishing as it is sweet. It's a lie.

Writer Caroline D'Agati says:

Every human being must at some time confront the same disease that claimed Anthony, Kate, Robin, and every other person who takes his or her life: meaninglessness. Why are we here and is this life worth living? It’s a sobering thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche—another struggler—said that anyone with a “why” to live could endure almost any how. These wealthy, accomplished people had some of the most marvelous “hows” anyone could imagine. Yet none of it could make up for the lack of “why.”

Those with everything are often no different. The highest highs show us that, no matter what we achieve or acquire, the hopelessness doesn’t go away. Both the king and the pauper stare life in the face and see that it’s merely “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

D'Agati goes on to write,

As Kate, Anthony, Robin, and so many other entertainers show, even giving joy to others, in the end, is not enough. So in the end, why bother? How can we not be defeated when we set our eyes on the brokenness of this world? The answer: to fix our eyes on another world. The writer C.S. Lewis famously said that, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” If we believe this life is all there is, the darkness will blind us to the majesty and beauty of life.

Suicide is the tragic, but reasonable response to being confronted by life’s reality with no salve of deeper meaning to bandage the wound. This is why a life without God, no matter how grand, will always leave our hearts unfulfilled.

Augustine, writing almost two thousand years ago, recognized the problem. In his autobiographical Confessions he exclaims to God, "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

As our contemporary moderns are discovering to their pain, nothing else is working very well.