I’ve been going through a bit of suicidal ideation as of late, and I think I can give my take on the issue.
I’d say that we tend to oversimplify the concept of “status” around here. We speak of it as though it were a conscious decision to conform to the, mostly, arbitrary ideas of society at large. I believe that a person can live in a culture that declares an action to be cowardly or otherwise sinful, and yet intuitively believe the action to be honorable under certain situations.
In my experience, the core motivation behind wanting to die (or live) is emotional, not logical. The issues that bother you in depression only seem relevant because of your mood. Happiness in such a situation comes, not from solving those problems, but from deciding they’re not that important, which is something that is almost impossible when in the grip of depression. The reason I want to die when I’m depressed one instant is usually not the reason I want to die when I’m depressed the next.
That said, the motivation usually boils down to one of these things: self loathing, shame, insecurity, fear,discomfort, disappointment, a general feeling of wrongness, weariness, a sense of obligation, or existential angst.
Occasionally there won’t even be an attempt to justify the incentive at all. I’ll just think to myself “Oh, I notice that I want to die and any of the reasons I can think of for wanting that seem kind of arbitrary. On the other hand, the reasons I have for wanting to be alive seem just as arbitrary, so I may as well go with what I feel right now. In any case I’ll be more consistent with my arbitrary preferences if I’m dead.”
So, as you can see, there’s no one impulse driving your thought process towards self destruction. That said, I can definitely say that something akin to status-seeking is often at work when I feel like offing myself. It’s internalized to the point that neither I nor society can touch it. It’s an ingrained sense of honor that can overrule logic, compassion, and conscious duty. It’s not a Machiavellian attempt to manipulate what others think about you, but an inner drive pushing you to salvage what you can of the perceived justification people can have for saying things. It’s not what they say that counts, but what they can say.
Earlier today, in fact, I got the distinct feeling that I was not “worthy” of trying to live like other people (total nonsense from a logical standpoint, but that didn’t seem to bother me at the time), and that the right thing to do would be to die to make up for my audacity. The fact that I had no consequential reason to care about “worthiness” or the fact that I would only hurt all the people who actually gave enough of a damn to judge the way I live my life made absolutely NO difference to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t think of these consequences, because I did, but I judged them to be NONIMPORTANT!
The only thing that mattered to me was that people could plausibly reach certain conclusions upon learning of my actions and the expression of these conclusions would be socially permissible. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like internalizing concern over status to me.
I’ve been going through a bit of suicidal ideation as of late, and I think I can give my take on the issue.
I’d say that we tend to oversimplify the concept of “status” around here. We speak of it as though it were a conscious decision to conform to the, mostly, arbitrary ideas of society at large. I believe that a person can live in a culture that declares an action to be cowardly or otherwise sinful, and yet intuitively believe the action to be honorable under certain situations.
In my experience, the core motivation behind wanting to die (or live) is emotional, not logical. The issues that bother you in depression only seem relevant because of your mood. Happiness in such a situation comes, not from solving those problems, but from deciding they’re not that important, which is something that is almost impossible when in the grip of depression. The reason I want to die when I’m depressed one instant is usually not the reason I want to die when I’m depressed the next.
That said, the motivation usually boils down to one of these things: self loathing, shame, insecurity, fear,discomfort, disappointment, a general feeling of wrongness, weariness, a sense of obligation, or existential angst.
Occasionally there won’t even be an attempt to justify the incentive at all. I’ll just think to myself “Oh, I notice that I want to die and any of the reasons I can think of for wanting that seem kind of arbitrary. On the other hand, the reasons I have for wanting to be alive seem just as arbitrary, so I may as well go with what I feel right now. In any case I’ll be more consistent with my arbitrary preferences if I’m dead.”
So, as you can see, there’s no one impulse driving your thought process towards self destruction. That said, I can definitely say that something akin to status-seeking is often at work when I feel like offing myself. It’s internalized to the point that neither I nor society can touch it. It’s an ingrained sense of honor that can overrule logic, compassion, and conscious duty. It’s not a Machiavellian attempt to manipulate what others think about you, but an inner drive pushing you to salvage what you can of the perceived justification people can have for saying things. It’s not what they say that counts, but what they can say.
Earlier today, in fact, I got the distinct feeling that I was not “worthy” of trying to live like other people (total nonsense from a logical standpoint, but that didn’t seem to bother me at the time), and that the right thing to do would be to die to make up for my audacity. The fact that I had no consequential reason to care about “worthiness” or the fact that I would only hurt all the people who actually gave enough of a damn to judge the way I live my life made absolutely NO difference to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t think of these consequences, because I did, but I judged them to be NONIMPORTANT!
The only thing that mattered to me was that people could plausibly reach certain conclusions upon learning of my actions and the expression of these conclusions would be socially permissible. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like internalizing concern over status to me.