I recently find out about the tragic suicide of the lead singer of Soundgarden, Chris Cornell, one of my favorite band as a tenager.
Which got me thinking about what is really the cause of suicide, the determinant factor that pushes people over the edge to take their own lives.
I heard people talking about a lack of purpose, when you become very good at something and reach a certain level of fame and prosperity, you can simply buy everything you need so life becomes very unchallenging and easy. Which is not necessarily as good as it sounds because, happiness is an emotionally rewarding system for the effort you need in order to overcome scarcity.
This could definitely be a contributing factor, but I really don't think that ultimately this is the determining factor that will push someone over the edge to take his own life. A life that is too easy doesn't sound like a good enough reason to me to kill yourself.
As social animals we need each other to survive and be happy, without other human beings around your survival is going to become increasingly hard or impossible depending on your level of skills and abilities. We need each others not only for reproduction but also to provide services to each others, for a baby just living it alone for a few seconds in a room by itself it is a terrible nightmare, because this in a natural environment with predators could mean death.
Not only we develop reward system to motivate us to work but we also develop system to motivate us to maintain our relationships and bounds to each others. It is such a cliche for people that come out of a relationship to commit suicide or fell suicidal. Because losing that bond with that human being to some degree means death especially if you are not going to form another bond. So it make sense to kill yourself to spare your sufferance rather than allow yourself to die slowly in an agonizing way.
When you look at the life of someone like Chris Cornell, you would assume that with fame comes a great amount of love and deep relationships, after all he gets up on the stage and performs in front of hundreds of thousands of people that sings his lyrics and worship him like a demigod.
There is something missing out of that, that is intimacy which is the capacity to be yourself in the presence of other people. What Chriss and other artists does on the stage is a performance, it is not a real human interaction.
The word personality comes from the latin persona, which is the word the roman used for the masks they used in theater to pretend that they are someone else. A person is a life actor, a human being that is playing a role, to some degree being a personality is dehumanizing, it can lead to ignoring the needs of the human behind the mask.
The saddest thing is when you manage to get away with it, when you make other people like your mask instead of the human behind the mask, regardless the fact that you are surrounded by human beings there are in your close proximity and you have some interactions with them, you are not receiving what you need from them, there is an inability to assert your needs that leads to a deep feeling of isolation, so your emotions are going to let you know this often leads to depression or anxiety.
Human being don't commit suicide because they are poor, we commit suicide when we become alone!
