I have a pretty great life relative to the vast majority of Americans, I’ve been wildly fortunate in some key ways, and even one year of the same bullshit wage-fixing tech economy that like 80% of hackers have had coupled to some bereavement and other stuff that lots of people deal with (and not with the benefit of an expensive shrink like I have), which is still lightyears better than most Americans deal with always has me crystal clear that if I wasn’t sure this was going to improve (and by virtue of some of those blessings it’s all but guaranteed to) I’d kill myself today, it would be the rational move. Navy SEALs don’t demonstrate in training the kind of mental toughness that poor (meaning most) Americans demonstrate year-in-year-out.

Yeah lot vet suicides? How about among veterinarians, people in communities with a lot of fentanyl running around, people in communities with a lot of firearms lying around, people in the military, pretty much fucking anyone with the means who isn’t both of crazy rich and top-decile socially integrated in the scraps of community that haven’t yet been buried by social desertification (whatever your thoughts on the necessity of lockdown, there’s little dispute that it hit the “public space” about as hard as anything can).

We do a pretty good job of making suicide extremely risky, extremely painful, or both to prevent people doing it, which is probably a good thing depending on one’s exact ethics, but people like veterinarians create a natural experiment in whether that’s a mechanism preventing some avoidable tragedies here and there or a dam holding back the deluge.

You can debate the exact numbers and playing games with the stats is a huge industry so footnoting is just begging to have a nerd dick ruler thread, but whether it’s “what subset of the top quartile will ever, ever be financially secure by any definition” or “what subset of the two bottom quartiles will ever have sex” or “MTBF on watching some prick fail upwards in every conceivable field such that it’s happening right next to you and getting called capitalism”, or how long it’s been since some politician (or their kid, or their kid’s spouse) smoothly pivoted from some broad-daylight felony to barking about UFOs on C-Span: truckloads of suicide and mass shootings (~4/day FYI) is exactly what you would expect. The offensive lie that cheap consumer electronics dragging the averages all over the place means anyone “has it better” is icing on the cake. Yeah, a computer used to cost more than an airplane and now costs nothing. Yay.

5 years ago online dating (which is already a piss-poor substitute and regrettable necessity) kicked out a good enough match that I was engaged for a few years. Today (and I know how to do the science on the creatives) anyone who has ever seen a take-no-prisoners conversion funnel takes one look and says “top of funnel for OnlyFans, OF-style social, or some escort ad, got it”.

And this is all eminently fixable: merely enforcing the laws we already have on the books against big corporate cartels, politicians, and the donor class would get you like 60% of the way there. You’d need to like, mandate benefits for part-time workers and it would be 75%.

Suicide prevention is a noble cause right up to the point where it has effectively become the walls around a forced-labor camp.