The Desire For Suicide

Why would someone want to kill themselves?  Someone who has never struggled with whether or not they want to die or whether they want to specifically commit suicide might wonder about this without actually relating to the beliefs or emotions that might make suicide seem appealing.  Regardless of how much or little an individual person relates to this, the issue of why someone might desire suicide is of immense philosophical significance because it intersects with matters of ultimate truths, moral obligation, self-awareness, and one's willingness to live despite trials if there truly is something worth living for.  No one has to struggle with suicidal desires to know these truths.  There is also no one with such an overwhelming desire for suicide that they are incapable of realizing these things as well.

Not everyone will face the desire for suicide, and thankfully so.  However, everyone knowingly or unknowingly has to brush up against or more directly confront the very issues that can make suicide seem desirable, as everyone has to live with epistemological, existential, and personal truths or struggles that people could have differing subjective psychological reactions to.  The necessary truths of logic at the core of all things and the truth of which depends on nothing else are the same no matter what our varying experiences are.  The same philosophical issues beyond this having to do with what exists, how we should live, if there is such a thing, and what can be known are all present in even the lives of the greatest fools who would not recognize or understand this.

Either intellectual or emotional weakness in exploring such foundational truths and grand issues can bring a person to a sadness, terror, or confusion so immense that they would seriously consider killing themselves.  Something far less abstract than this, like a series of petty annoyances or simply a lack of positive life events, could do the same.  In many of these cases, if not all of them, where a person wrestles with whether they want to kill themselves or would ever act on such a desire, it is true that if they had a better life, it would be very probable that they would choose to live, and eagerly.  Would anyone truly prefer death or nonexistence to a certain kind of life that fills them with joy, even if the reason that life is so desired is nothing but emotionalistic subjectivity?

The desire for suicide would likely almost always lose to the desire to live if a person's life was going as they wished, or if they understood any objective reasons to persist in this life and had any emotionalistic reluctance removed.  Suicide is just not almost anyone's first choice of action.  The desire for suicide almost inevitably comes from vast personal despair, whether the kind that a rationalistic absurdist philosopher might be existentially familiar with or the kind that is more accessible to even the lowest intellectual insects of humanity, or else it comes from repeated or severe disappointments with how this life turns out to be.  Beneath or behind the desire for suicide, there often lurks the desire to live in better circumstances or even just more subjectively preferable ones, and when the latter kind of longing is not fulfilled, a willingness to be one's own end comes about.

Very few people, if anyone at all, would be likely to ever want to die, especially by killing themselves, if it was not for some great pain or disappointment that at least seems to outweigh the pleasure or resolve they have.  Suicide is perhaps no one's first resort; it is a last resort or an expression of brokenness in the face of the trials or lack of certain blessings in life.  Even if they only had meaningless subjective satisfaction to motivate them, there is probably something that would motivate every single person to continue living, if it did not fiercely compel them to.  Of course, this is absolutely without value in itself, as subjective longing for objective truths that are genuinely meaningful would be the only way to live that could have moral value.  It is still true that, again, suicide is likely nobody's desired first choice.