According to The Associated Press, nearly 50,000 people committed suicide last year, an absolute record in terms of raw numbers and the highest rate in nearly a century. Though, as one scholar noted, there’s always the chance that the numbers are up on account of better reporting, that doesn’t explain the consistent increase in these numbers over the last two decades. Something is broken in the United States, and it’s us.
Why, in the most prosperous time to be alive in human history, do so many think that they would be better off dead? Nor do these numbers about suicide tell the complete story. Along with the dramatic increase in substance-abuse-related deaths, particularly opioids, deaths related to alcohol abuse and other addictions, and the suicide-by-slaughter of mass shootings, we face an outbreak of what is being called “deaths of despair.”
Some of this could be the result of an increasingly vitriolic cultural environment. After all, it is hard to be hopeful when everyone is yelling at everyone else. Students in particular are victims of the ubiquity of smartphones and their amoral algorithms. And although the economy has, over the same period, seen incredible expansion overall, places like the Rust Belt now mirror the frustrations of inner cities as industries disappear along with opportunities for meaningful labor.
In addition to these structural concerns, we’re also living downstream from particularly destructive ideas. For decades, American society has been steadily stripped of those meaning-making stories that made it, specifically the religious framing that placed our lives as part of something bigger. For even longer, we’ve been telling ourselves that transcendent things like truth, beauty and goodness are imaginary and that we are nothing more than matter in motion on a “pale blue dot” adrift in the heavens.
The more recent orthodoxies of critical theory preach self-loathing as the only means of salvation, while at the tail end of the sexual revolution, our identities have been uprooted, tethered only to what we feel and are willing to self-determine. In the process, we’ve created a culture of victimhood, much of it fabricated, and have positioned it as the goal of life.