Suicide’s what happens when you can’t find reasons to keep living

By David McElroy · May 4, 2012

Whenever a person kills himself, the instant question that everyone seems to ask is, “Why did he do it?” I’m starting to suspect this is the wrong question.

When retired NFL star Junior Seau killed himself this week, the speculation immediately turned to the question of whether he might have been suffering from some kind of brain damage brought on by many years in a sport filled with violent collisions. Did that long-term trauma lead to his suicide?

I’m not an expert on brain injuries, but I don’t doubt that athletes in high-contact sports suffer injuries that affect them as they age. I wonder, though, if there’s a more basic reason why a retired athlete — who’s spent his life as a hero to many — takes his own life.

What if he simply can’t find any reason to keep on living?

I can’t find the reference now, but I remember reading something in a psychology book that made this argument. It said that we all have something like a built-in “self-destruct switch.” The switch constantly flips itself automatically to “self-destruct mode.” If we have a reason to keep living, we keep flipping it off. But if we quit finding a reason to do that, we passively leave the switch set to that mode — and then we destroy ourselves in one way or another.

Have you ever found yourself driving and realized how easy it would be to let yourself drift off the road — into other traffic or over a steep slope or something else almost guaranteed to bring death? Or have you found yourself at a very high point at the top of a building and had fleeting images of jumping?

I’ve talked with many people who’ve experienced some form of this odd sensation. I’m not talking about people who I think are suicidal. I’m talking about perfectly normal, healthy people who find themselves scared by the sensations, even though they consciously know that they’d never act on them.

The first time I ever thought about this was when a woman I was dating years ago explained something that troubled her. She wasn’t depressed or suicidal. She didn’t have any history of those things in her family and she certainly never thought she felt that way. But she said there was a certain place on her drive home from college where there was something like a cliff. Every time she drove by it, she felt something like an urge to just veer over the side of the road and go over the cliff, even though she knew it would kill her.

The thought scared her and she never considered doing it, but the fact that this odd sensation kept occurring to her disturbed her.

In very small ways, I’ve experienced sensations such as those in the years since then. They always make me shiver and turn away from whatever situation briefly presented itself to me. And I’ve talked to many other people who’ve told me they have experienced the same thing.

I suspect that sensation is built into all of us. As long as we have reasons to live, we keep shivering and turning away from those things, terrified that they would cross our minds. But people sometimes reach the point that they have nothing they’re really living for — and they reach the point that they don’t stop the impulse. They don’t stop themselves from driving off the road. They don’t stop themselves from drinking themselves into deadly stupors. They don’t stop themselves from pulling the trigger on a gun.

Some people have spent their early years as wealthy and beloved heroes. For them, life is downhill after that early success. Football stars such as Junior Seau are certainly among those. When they’re retired and have little purpose in life, could it be that life starts losing its meaning? Could it be that they simply can’t find a reason to keep living?

Other people never experience that kind of success, but their lives end up in places of quiet desperation. Either they’ve failed in life or they’ve made decisions that they can’t live with, putting them into places where life doesn’t seem worth living — and they can’t find the courage to change things. Many of those people eventually quit finding reasons to stay alive. Could it be that they simply allow that self-destructive urge to take effect — and they kill themselves?

I suspect that we all have reasons to die. I suspect that we all have it in us to give up on life and destroy ourselves. The vast majority of us unconsciously keep finding reasons to live, but I suspect the self-destruct mechanism is built into all of us, just waiting for the day when we can’t.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts