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Consider this, as a slight modification of your view of humanity:
A friend recently committed suicide. He was almost 50-years-old. He had two children, was recently divorced and had lost custody, and his parents were still living. He had hundreds of friends, dozens of close friends. He was reasonably well off, physically healthy, good looking, and his business had just collapsed; through no fault of his own. He was a musician, a salesman, a father, and a friend. He had just returned from a visit with an anthropologist friend, studying a very primitive African tribe, where he claimed he could have "lived the rest of my life." He shot himself only a few weeks after returning from living in a mud hut for a month.
At his funeral, a lot of his friends and relatives said the usual "how could he have done this to me?" His kids asked us to remember him as a friend and not as a suicide. His minister told us that he wasn't doing anything "to us," but that he had, obviously, lived a long time--not for himself--but only because we needed him.
I don't often quote ministers. Personally, I put them both in a category along with faith healers, used car salesmen, politicians, psychiatrists, and loan sharks. But this minister had, clearly, thought about my friend's life and a lot of other lives. He talked of how a person who commits suicide overrides almost every natural impulse an animal possesses. He said that looking into the barrel of a loaded gun is so far beyond swallowing a few pills, with the anticipation of a little belly ache and a lot of sympathy, that the two actions are in no way equal. Socially acceptable suicide methods--cigarettes, alcohol, over-eating, over-working, etc.--are so passive that they aren't even recognized in suicide statistics. Seriously planning to end one's life is an act of such overwhelming and unnatural will that it should amaze us that the suicide could possibly occur. Instead of asking how our loved one could have done this to us, we should wonder at how much pain he had to be in to have overcome those natural obstacles to ending life. We should wonder at how that person withstood that pain and misery so well that we didn't know it even existed. Or if we did, we should wonder that it wasn't more obvious.
When a person who we have loved and respected takes his own life, the pompous and self-interested attitude of the "mental health professionals" is not a comfort. While they pretend that their potions and examinations and theories and parlor tricks can "cure" depression, their track record speaks, poorly, for itself. In another decade or two, psychology may raise itself to the 1800's alchemist's scientific standards, but that will still be a too weak force against the complexity of the human mind. When men, like my friend, take their troubles to a common psychologist, they find analysis and "therapy" so simple-minded that it seems nothing more than an insult to their intelligence. Rather than being a comfort, the experience is additional evidence that they won't find hope anywhere. Rather than receiving good advice from a "paid friend who listens," he will be put on a time clock more rigid than the most menial burger-flipping job. The time spent in the psychologist's couch won't be any more rewarding than burning McHorsemeat, either. After spending a small fortune in this pointless exercise, he will be left with the life he dreaded and the same decision with which he began.
Most importantly, we should understand that this person tolerated all that pain for us. He had children, parents, lovers, friends who he knew would be hurt by his self-inflicted death and he suffered life as long as he could stand it. We should understand that this person had no personal reason to live; that he lived as long as he did for the benifit of others. Living, solely for the comfort and needs of others, has a boundry. A maximum useful limit. You can do it for a long while, if you are strong, but you can't do it forever.
To live a long, happy life a person needs a reason to do so. A personal reason. A person needs to have a joy of life that comes from what he receives from that life, not what he provides to others. No, that is not selfish. When someone thanks us for an act of kindness, we often say "It was my pleasure." It was, for most of us. We do our acts of kindness for the good feeling it gives us. We all have an account balance of the value of our lives. We stack up the good things in our lives against the bad things. For many, the good completely overwhelms the bad. Those people would no more consider their lives a waste than they would consider a small credit card debt evidence of financial bankruptcy. But some of us don't feel the rewards as strongly as we feel the punishments. We don't see life's beauty as clearly as we see the disorder. The comfort we receive doesn't cancel the pain. Suicide is the only relief from that kind of life.
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Contact the author, Tom Day