Why Do People Take Their Own Lives?

Look, people don't take their own lives simply because problems come up. People take their own lives when their lives become unbearably hard, and here's the delicate part: they see it as their own fault. They can't separate the hardship they're feeling from their own sense of personal responsibility, and that's what drives an overwhelming sense of shame. So what's actually happening here?

See, when I say our society is individualistic, what I mean is that people believe they're fully in control of their own life story. They assume that whatever happens to them is directly tied to who they are and what they've done. But it hasn't always been this way. For long stretches of history, people didn't tie the outcomes of their lives to themselves nearly as tightly. You can see this through how we talk about finances. For example, in old English, a poor person was called "unfortunate." Let's break that word down: "unfortunate" contains the word "fortuna." Fortuna was the goddess of luck and fate for the Romans. Romans would bring offerings to Fortuna, essentially pleading, "This isn't me, this is outside forces." That might sound strange to us now.

In the most individualistic country of all — the United States — what do we call poor people? It's not a kind word. We call them "losers." "That guy's a loser." So over the span of about 400 years, we went from the word "unfortunate" to the word "loser." Somewhere along the way, our whole idea of who's responsible for a person's fate completely shifted.

So if I said to you right now: "Steven, things aren't going well for me. I got fired. My book didn't sell. But it's not my fault, I just had some bad luck" — even though you're a genuinely good person, because of how modern thinking works, your first reaction would be: "He must have done something wrong." You'd think that, because we don't actually believe people can just be unlucky. In the same way, if you told me: "My podcast is doing incredibly well, I've got eight thousand, a million, a trillion, a billion subscribers," and I asked, "How did that happen?" and you said, "Oh, I just got lucky" — I'd think, "Steven's being very humble here, but that's not really true. He must have done something to make that happen."

We believe that people act, and those actions lead to either success or failure. That's part of why people take their own lives — because in their hardest moments, they conclude: "Nothing except me can explain what's happening to me."

In reality, life is far more complicated than that. I'm not saying this belief is true — but it's how a lot of people end up seeing the world.