I have thought about suicide before in ways vaguely similar to what you describe. At the time, I thought that everything was okay and that playing around with the thought was something reasonable people did, 'cause hey, it's just a thought experiment, I think about all sorts of things, am I right? Looking back at that time I realized I definitely had depression or something similar. I didn't have thoughts of suicide before the hard times and I don't now, and when I fully realized this I became convinced ("in the gut", not just head knowledge) that thoughts of suicide, rolling it around the tongue as it were, are probably a good sign that the general you should seek help, just like all the literature and internets said the whole time.
Am I generalizing? Maybe you're different, but let me lay out the argument clearly:
It's intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don't get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.
1) Negotiation suicide
2) Apoptosis suicide
3) Malfunction suicide
Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or 'cry for help' suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn't get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you'd kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to 'risk' suicide for status at a rat...
It depends on the culture -- suicide is definitely not high-status among Catholics. (They're no longer like “if you kill yourself you'll go to hell no matter what” and they no longer refuse to celebrate funerals for people who committed suicide, so it used to be even worse.)
I sometimes have thoughts of suicide. That does not mean I would ever come within a mile of committing the act of suicide. But my brain does simulate it; though I do try to always reduce such thoughts.
But what I have noticed is that 'suicide' is triggered in my mind whenever I think of some embarrassing event, real or imagined. Or an event in which I'm obviously a low-status actor.
(With the qualification that I don't know you or how you think and that I am not a mental health professional) I think it's probably important to tell you that in the mental health world this is called "suicidal ideation" and is a glaring sign of clinical depression. The reason you think these thoughts more when you are embarrassed or feel low-status is more likely that those things make you feel particularly bad about yourself than that you brain is trying to give you a way to improve your status. Imagining loved ones saying nice things about you is probably self-comforting, but not especially accurate as a measure of status.
I really think you should go talk to someone about this.
Pointing out that something is a big symptom of depression is not the same as diagnosing someone with depression. And if there's a decent chance that Stabilizer is actually depressed and doesn't know it, pointing it out is useful. Jack seems to only be recommending that Stabilizer see a professional, and, internet or no, the decision of whether or not to see a professional is going to be made by non-professionals.
Artists who die untimely deaths tend to experience surges in popularity, but suicide is, in general, a particularly low status death.
In fact, children (and adults) will often just leave a game they're not very good at and disparage the rest of the players for playing
This behavior overwhelmingly tends to be viewed with derision. The actor might want their action to be interpreted that way, but overwhelmingly it will tend to be read as such a sloppy attempt at preventing status loss as to incur even more loss of status.
Further, after a person is dead, he/she is almost always celebrated (at least for a while) and all their faults are forgotten.
Suicide is usually sufficiently low status that it's one of the few situations in which people can openly criticize the recently deceased without serious risk of status loss.
I was surprised to see the initial spike of downvotes. Stabilizer suggested a model for a not-at-all-uncommon thinking pattern and asked for more information. Whether the model is good is debatable, but the post itself is certainly not below the average quality for Discussion.
Earlier today, I noticed this post published in main a score of -7. Later I noticed it was moved to discussion, and the score slowly increased from there.
Young males, often single, that is the demographic (though I believe that IQ is inversely correlated). Religion is a protective factor, and though singularitarian is not a recognized religion (though SIAI is tax exempt) its adherents hold beliefs that should have the same effect as those held by more orthodox believers.
I've been going through a bit of suicidal ideation as of late, and I think I can give my take on the issue.
I'd say that we tend to oversimplify the concept of "status" around here. We speak of it as though it were a conscious decision to conform to the, mostly, arbitrary ideas of society at large. I believe that a person can live in a culture that declares an action to be cowardly or otherwise sinful, and yet intuitively believe the action to be honorable under certain situations.
In my experience, the core motivation behind wanting to die (or li...
Hendrix wasn't a suicide. DFW got a surge of interest but arguably took a status hit as people wrote about what a terrible person he was.
On the other hand, there's some work that appears to show that suicide attempts not only seem to lead to income increases, but the increase correlates with the riskiness of the method. I don't have a cite handy but I can dig it up if desired.
I see suicide as often a reaction to the pain of a decrease in status, particularly when the status decrease is believe to be permanent.
I'd suggest, however, that much of the pain of the status change is temporary. I've had my own setbacks. The new lower status state is not so fearsome and horrible that it can't be faced. It's refusing to face the change that prolongs the pain. Suicide is a strategy to evade the pain of the evasion of the truth.
If people are interested in this, I would really recommending taking a gander at Emile Durkheim's 'Suicide'. He was one of the first sociologists, and attempted to apply his methodology to what one might think the most private decision: suicide. After noticing that the annual rate of suicide was fairly stable, and varied from group to group, he tried to come up with a sociological explanation for this.
He has three categories of suicide:
Egoistic: this occurs when people are poorly socially integrated - they feel isolated or lack social roots, This is simi
Do you think this theory has some weight?
I think it does, but it would be fair to also consider a possible alternative explanation, given at a website intended for people who are feeling suicidal: [Suicide] happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. (emphasis mine)
I happen to think that reasons for desiring to commit suicide probably differ between different individuals, and thus each of these theses have some explanatory power.
It seems to me that there are several precisifications of this question.
One, might status-seeking be a motivation of suicide or suicidal ideation? I highly doubt it. Of course, many a suicide (quite possibly the vast majority) is motivated by a desire to escape the painful experience of being low-status, but I don't think the prospect of being posthumously post-status plays any role.
Two, is suicide status-threatening for the bereaved? I'm pretty sure it is perceived that way. It does, after all, signal that the suicide didn't care enough about them, didn't...
What I am saying is that suicide has been associated with high-status.
At the moment I'm not exactly sure about the nature of your claim. What specific predictions would be true if your claim is true? What predictions would be false?
Although I consider suicide courageous, I would consider my own suicide as admitting to low status and failure and thereby lowering my status even further. In order to avoid the further drop in status by committing such an act, I would probably choose to "disappear"... which may be one of the reasons so many people do indeed disappear without a trace.
Likewise, for some, seeking help exacerbates their sense of failure and low status. If status is at the root of suicidal ideation, this could create a barrier for many people to seek help.
This insigh...
Status-hits are some of the most painful events in your life. Thoughts of suicide often emerge when you're feeling down since suicide is a possible escape and will reduce the pain.
But I agree that status also plays a role in the decision to kill yourself. If you really blow your brains out you can credibly signal that you were feeling really low and gain some sympathy and compassion.
Thoughts of suicide are almost certainly not triggered as a way of regaining status unless they're thought of by a person whose culture encourages that course of action, or for some other reason already thought of suicide that way before an actual embarrassment happened. Your subsequent thoughts may be about the status of suicide, and those subsequent thoughts may reinforce the initial thought, but the initial thought being first triggered as a status mechanism seems far-fetched.
Do you feel a sense of pressure, not necessarily of anxiety, when an embarrassment happens?
People get suicidal in response to very bad things, status loss is and tends to accompany very bad things. What else is there to explain?
"What else is there to explain?"
After about 0.5 seconds of thought, I might become interested whether suicide after status-loss has a different frequency in different cultures, and if yes, whether this difference can be explained in the respective way of handling the death of the person. The simple emotional question behind that is whether in all cultures suicides after a status-hit are more strongly motivated by the pain of the status-loss itself, or also by the expected development after death. I might even be interested in whether this question makes sense at all. Still, it remains something to be explained.
Also, "What else is there to explain?" sounds suspiciously like "Are you so stupid to not see that?".
What else is there to explain?
The fact that the suicidal person frequently seems to be posthumously awarded status.
Do you think this theory has some weight?
Yes.
I sometimes have thoughts of suicide. That does not mean I would ever come within a mile of committing the act of suicide. But my brain does simulate it; though I do try to always reduce such thoughts.
But what I have noticed is that 'suicide' is triggered in my mind whenever I think of some embarrassing event, real or imagined. Or an event in which I'm obviously a low-status actor. This leads me to think that suicide might be a high-status move, in the sense that its goal is to recover status after some event which caused a big drop in status. Consider the following instances when suicide is often considered: