Is Suicide Selfish?

 

I have been thinking about endings lately. The endings of relationships, of difficult periods in life, of the versions of ourselves we once imagined becoming. There is a peculiar violence in discovering that a future you had quietly come to expect has ceased to exist. The world continues, with its ordinary demands and small inconveniences, while something essential in your private life has come to an end.

There is something strange about the way we speak of suicide. We call it an act of selfishness, as though the person who dies has made a calculation, weighed the suffering of those around them against their own, and decided that the latter matters more. The accusation contains a particular understanding of suffering: that the person who wishes to escape it has a responsibility to endure it for the sake of everyone else.

I have never found the question easy to answer. I suspect this is partly because I have spent enough time in the vicinity of despair to distrust the confidence with which other people discuss it.

For a while, I found myself wondering what had happened to the life I thought I was building. I had a degree in philosophy, a job at the Museum of Natural History, creative ambitions, friends, a relationship, and the vague sense that I was approaching some version of adulthood. From the outside, there was enough here to suggest that things were going reasonably well. I had accomplished things I once wanted to accomplish. I was employed in a museum, surrounded by the remains of ancient life, among specimens that had outlasted entire species and the geological worlds that had sustained them.

Yet I found the work increasingly difficult to bear. The ordinary demands of the day began to acquire an oppressive weight. I would arrive early, anxious about traffic or weather, and spend the hours waiting for the moment I could leave. Small mistakes became occasions for disproportionate shame. Criticism could send me spiraling. I found myself worrying about my performance, my memory, my capacity to do things that had once seemed straightforward. The museum, which I had imagined as a place of intellectual and natural wonder, became associated with dread.

There is a particular humiliation in discovering that a life you have worked to obtain is making you miserable. You begin to suspect that the problem must lie in yourself. Other people manage their jobs. Other people withstand criticism. Other people seem capable of passing through the ordinary disappointments of existence without having their entire sense of self thrown into disarray.

I knew, intellectually, that this was an unreasonable comparison. Knowledge is an unreliable defense against suffering. One can understand the mechanisms of depression, recognize the distortions of one's own thinking, and still find oneself caught in them. Philosophy offers an abundance of ways to describe the human predicament. It offers rather less assistance when you are sitting at home, exhausted by the prospect of doing it all again tomorrow.

Then there is love, which can make the world feel newly inhabited and its loss feel like an eviction. When a relationship begins to fracture, the pain extends beyond the absence of another person. It reaches into the imagined future, the small arrangements and private rituals that had begun to give shape to one's days. You lose the person, but you also lose the version of yourself who existed in their company. The future becomes difficult to picture because so much of it had already been populated by someone else.

Depression has a way of gathering these separate disappointments into a single verdict. Work becomes evidence of inadequacy. Rejection becomes evidence of unlovability. Exhaustion becomes evidence that one is incapable of living properly. The mind constructs a case against the person experiencing it, and every new difficulty is admitted as corroborating evidence.

I have experienced periods when the prospect of continuing in this fashion seemed almost incomprehensible. I do not mean that I had arrived at some considered philosophical conclusion about the value of life. The experience was much less orderly than that. It was a narrowing of possibility, a sense that the conditions of existence had become intolerable and that I could see no satisfactory way to change them.

This distinction matters. We tend to speak of suicide as though it were always the expression of a settled desire for death. But despair can make the distinction between wanting to die and wanting one's life to become bearable exceedingly difficult to maintain. The wish to escape suffering can become entangled with the wish to escape existence itself.

Perhaps this is one reason I have become interested in the endings of stories, particularly those in which a character approaches death under circumstances that leave us uncertain about what we have witnessed.

I recently watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2002) again. The film concludes with Jen Yu standing on Wudan Mountain, preparing to leap into the clouds. Earlier, her lover, Lo, has told her a legend about a young man who jumped from the mountain to make a wish. The young man survived, floating away into the distance, and his wish came true.

Before Jen jumps, she asks Lo to make a wish of his own. He closes his eyes and wishes to return to the desert with her.

Then she leaps.

The ending is beautiful, and its beauty makes it difficult to settle upon a single interpretation. Is Jen choosing freedom? Is she abandoning the life that has been arranged for her? Does she believe the legend? Is she making a wish of her own, or granting Lo his? The film leaves us suspended between these possibilities, with the mountain receding into mist and Jen's fate beyond our view.

One interpretation treats the leap as an act of suicide. Another understands it as an expression of freedom, a final refusal to submit to the demands of family, society, and romantic attachment. I find both readings compelling, though I have become increasingly interested in the moral assumptions that accompany the first.

To call Jen's leap selfish would require us to know what she intends, what she believes, and what she expects to happen. The film withholds precisely this knowledge. We cannot enter her mind at the moment of the jump. We can only look at the circumstances that have brought her there and attempt to understand what they might mean.

The same difficulty attends our judgments of people who die by suicide. We know something of their circumstances, perhaps, but circumstances are not consciousness. We may understand the pressures under which someone lived while remaining unable to comprehend the world as it appeared to them. The distance between those two forms of knowledge is considerable.

I have sometimes wondered whether the accusation of selfishness arises from our discomfort with that distance. A person who dies leaves others to contend with an absence they cannot repair. Their grief is real. Their anger may be real, too. The death can feel like an abandonment, particularly when those left behind believe that they might have helped had they known how desperate things had become.

These feelings deserve recognition. But grief and moral judgment are different things. To experience someone's death as an abandonment is not necessarily to establish that they abandoned us. The language of selfishness can offer the bereaved a comprehensible explanation for an event that otherwise resists explanation. It gives the death a motive, and the motive gives the living something against which to direct their anger.

Yet the person who dies may have been living within a world that had become almost entirely occupied by suffering. Their perception of the consequences for others may have been distorted by depression, or overwhelmed by the immediate urgency of their own pain. This does not make the consequences for those left behind any less profound. It does, however, complicate the idea that suicide is a straightforward act of disregard.

There is a further difficulty. We often speak of the obligations we owe to others as though they were sufficient to sustain us through any imaginable degree of suffering. We tell people that their families need them, that their friends love them, that their deaths would devastate those around them. These things can be true, and reminders of connection can matter enormously. But they can also become another burden imposed upon someone who already feels unable to meet the demands of living.

When I was struggling at work, I sometimes felt ashamed of how difficult I found ordinary responsibilities. I knew that other people depended on me. I knew that I had things to be grateful for. I knew that my distress existed alongside the suffering of people whose circumstances were far worse than mine. None of this made the distress disappear. Sometimes it made me feel worse, because I could not understand why a person with so much to be grateful for could find life so difficult.

Gratitude is not an antidote to depression. Neither is love, nor professional achievement, nor the possession of interests and ambitions. These things can sustain a person, and they can provide reasons to continue. But they do not render someone immune to suffering. The presence of good things in a life does not invalidate the pain that inhabits it.

I have also learned that the circumstances of a life can change in ways that are difficult to imagine while one is suffering. Work that once seemed intolerable may become manageable, or one may find the courage to leave it. A relationship may end, and the grief may eventually loosen its hold. New attachments form. Old ambitions change. The self that seemed irreparably damaged discovers, sometimes reluctantly, that it remains capable of alteration.

This is not an argument that suffering always passes, or that every person can be expected to endure until circumstances improve. Such assurances would be dishonest. Some suffering persists for years. Some losses cannot be repaired. The future offers no guarantees, and the knowledge that life can change is of little comfort when one cannot imagine surviving long enough to experience that change.

Still, my own experience has made me wary of treating the conclusions reached during periods of despair as final judgments upon existence. There were times when I could scarcely imagine feeling differently. The fact that I eventually did feel differently has not made those periods unreal. It has made me aware of how thoroughly suffering can obscure the possibility of change.

Perhaps this is what I find moving about the ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Jen stands at the edge of the mountain, and the world offers her a legend. A wish may be granted. A person may leap and discover that the laws governing ordinary life have somehow loosened their hold. The leap might lead to death, or freedom, or a future that cannot be reached by any other means. The film allows these possibilities to coexist.

Real life offers no such assurance. There is no mountain from which we can leap and trust that the universe will interpret our intentions kindly. Death is irreversible, and the person who dies cannot discover whether the life they abandoned might have become bearable. This is part of what makes suicide so tragic. It forecloses the possibility of change at the very moment when suffering may have made change impossible to imagine.

But tragedy is not the same as selfishness.

I do not think we need to romanticize suicide to recognize the inadequacy of condemning it. We can acknowledge the devastation it causes while extending compassion to the person whose suffering preceded it. We can grieve the consequences of a death without pretending to know everything that brought it about. We can take seriously the obligations we have to one another while recognizing that no person should have to justify their continued existence through their usefulness to others.

I am still learning how to live with the ordinary difficulties of being alive. I am learning that a job can be changed, that a relationship can end, that failure can be survived, and that the self I experience during a period of depression is not necessarily the self I will experience forever. These are modest discoveries. They do not amount to a philosophy of life, and they do not resolve the suffering that prompted them.

But they have made me reluctant to judge the person who reaches the end of their endurance. I know how easily a life can contract around its difficulties. I know how convincing despair can become. I know that the distance between wanting one's circumstances to change and wanting to cease existing can grow frighteningly small.

Is suicide selfish? I think the question asks too much of a word and too little of our understanding. It takes an act arising from circumstances we may never fully comprehend and reduces it to a judgment about character. It asks us to decide whether a person who could no longer bear their suffering cared sufficiently about those who loved them.

I would rather ask what made their suffering so difficult to bear, what might have helped them endure it, and what we owe to people whose lives have become unbearable to them.

I do not know what Jen Yu wished for when she jumped from Wudan Mountain. I hope, in some sense, that she found what she was seeking.

For myself, I would like to keep looking.