a tenuous thread
I’ve either worked or volunteered on suicide hotlines for more than a decade. In that time, I am not sure I have learned anything beyond this: the desire to die, to erase yourself from the record, is one of the most common and reasonable tracks a human mind can take.
Thomas Ligotti, horror writer, anti-natalist, and fellow Thomas, describes life as “malignantly useless,” meaning that it is a state that starts bad and gets worse as you go along. This is not a difficult conclusion to arrive at, as it is obvious to anyone paying attention that to exist is to do violence to something or someone.
This is, even more, the case for those on the top of the heap in the imperial core, consuming enormous amounts of resources in a single day. The coffee I drink as I write this, the silicon of the laptop I write it on, the phone that buzzes and buzzes for attention—these are all “innovations” that are delivered to us covered in blood. That delivery and that blood are in the passive voice, of course, which is what helps us ignore the journey these little pleasures took to us.
We are able to stomach and ignore much of the suffering and screaming of the abattoir around us because we fear the alternative–oblivion. We fear the suffering unto death, and we fear death even more. Nobody wants to feel bad, and nobody wants to be around people who are feeling bad or sad. There are exceptions to this, of course, as there are exceptions to everything.
I do not believe that death is the most frightening thing for most–it’s the anxiety leading to it–see impending climate catastrophe and the anxiety it generates.
There are thousands upon thousands of things that can make the prospect of nonexistence far more enticing than the fear of eternal oblivion. At least in oblivion, there is no more pain.
The first step to helping anyone with anything is recognizing that they have a reason and purpose for thinking and believing the things that they do. To help a suicidal person—a person who views death as preferable to life—requires you to understand that this person has reasons for wanting to die, and those reasons are legitimate and beyond your judgement.
The second step is discovering ambivalence.
Young people, a category with which I am familiar yet rapidly leaving, often struggle with the volume of life still left for them to face. For people who experience privation, emotional upset, material turmoil, and immiseration, the prospect of facing down decades more of the same is often far too much for them to square up with.
The key, very often here, is identifying reasons to live—unfinished projects, loved ones, pleasures. Often, in states of distress, we forget the things that keep us feeling grounded and whole. You’re a human being, goddammit, after all. This push-pull dynamic between life and death is ambivalence, which people often confuse with a hidden or surpressed desire to live. Uncertainty is the key.
Uncertainty about future prospects, about where things might be going, about the possibilities of love, lust, connection, bonds—these are the foundations upon which a meaningful life can be built, and part of what makes them meaningful is that they are uncertain. Nobody is ever completely certain that they want to live, nor are they completely certain they want to die.
The elderly and middle-aged are often more difficult to reach, because they have the weight of experience and perspective behind them. They know, or at least have a fuller perspective on the score of their life. Many turn a certain age and have the horrifying realization that their lives have been a net negative, both for themselves and the people around them. The prospect of zeroing out the scale, at least in subjective terms, has flown the coop. The world has moved on, and often for these folks, they too are ready to move on.
Luckily for a crisis worker, many of these people have found religion of a kind, which often has dictates and structures that condemn suicide, but even then, who hasn’t rebelled against an authority they ultimately did not fear or respect? It’s baked into our religious texts! Institutional structures can only go so far.
In all cases, however, the task of the helper is to identify ambivalence and direct that into reasons to live. There are procedural steps that help too. Taking a walk can often make the difference between life and death. Those pesky reasons to live sometimes come to us with a breath of fresh air.
The reason to exist is, as I’ve mentioned a little already, difficult to grasp. The thing about reasons is that they are not dogmas, they are supported by arguments, and arguments can be diffused, pulled apart, and destroyed—often in seconds.
“Things will get better,” a common enough reason, is easily dispelled as it is patently obvious to anyone with a brain that things are getting worse. Our world has fallen into political discord and despair, our planet is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and social isolation is more and more becoming the norm.
Your loved ones will miss you, but what if you hate them, or they have shown you nothing but contempt? The pleasures of the world will be denied you; but what if they have already become ash in your mouth?
The unsatifying reality is that what makes people stick around, what presents us with that desire to live, to love, to seek out new experience is the very thing that is rapidly disappearing: the possibility of human connection. This was the case before a global pandemic, and it will be the case after. Reasons, they can be destroyed, but the human thread, the ties that bind, in spite of everything, is difficult to sever.
Often, simply talking with people, hearing what their troubles are, validating their reasons for seeking death—that’s more than enough.
Because, at the end of the day, curiosity about other people and our continual failure to be able to see the truth of the world is our saving grace. The quest for novelty and any kind of future is a powerful thing to sustain us. As each day presents each of us with a new class of people to fear and be alienated from, remember that whittling away human connection has never saved a single life, at least in any way that matters.