Trying to make sense of so many suicides among young adults like me
Cheslie Kryst, Miss USA 2019, dead at 30. Katie Mayer, Stanford soccer captain, dead at 22. And last week, former Toddlers and Tiaras’ star, Kailia Posey, dead at 16. All too young. All by suicide.
These are just a few examples of the heart-wrenching losses we see in the news, what now seems like a daily death toll. Collectively, we grieve: “Why are young, successful women taking their own lives?” And then a broader question: “Why are those with the most to look forward to, the youth of this nation, finding obsoletion better than existence?
Shockingly, in 2020, young adults (ages 24-35) tied with the elderly population (age 74-85) for the highest rate of suicide. It’s baffling how a group with such vitality and promise is as despondent as a demographic nearing death — no offense.
Along with its increased prevalence, the despair of our current young adults is darker than that of our forebears. Yesterday’s sadness was self-afflicting, though still conscious. It bemoaned, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas.” Today’s meaninglessness simply whimpers, “I should have never been.”
It’s not that life has grown harder (existence has always been a tragedy of suffering — every major religion admits as much), we have just grown hopeless. The new cinematic buzz, “Everything Everywhere Always All at Once,” captures this ethos by impeccably symbolizing millennial-nihilism as a bagel-shaped black hole — an enticing void.
The materialism of the West, with its ever-increasing luxury and innovation, did not usher in an epoch of bliss as promised. And even if it did, at the root of the root, we don’t want an easy life, we want a meaningful one. And we’re just not getting that.
Culture, as it has come to be, has stripped millennials of purpose. Eroded by comparison to counterfeit, online lives; chiseled down by the endless fear mongering of network news; battered by a ceaseless barrage of pressure to not just be successful, but to be uniquely successful — all combines into an impossible perversion of the American Dream. An American nightmare.
The final straw seemed to be COVID-19’s isolation that forced many to confront the dark cloud they had been outrunning for years.
Over-loaded, tired, whelmed — take your pick, humanity has reached it! Like the mythical Atlas, our young adults are crushed by the weight of the world. Atlas, however, had gods to plead to in his misery. We do not.
“God is dead,” reverberates louder as each year passes from Nietzsche’s divine funeral announcement. And with every new scientific publication, we are reminded that all our soul measures up to is the happenstance of a cosmic accident.
As observed by the polarizing professor Jordan Peterson, post-modernity was so focused on “rights,” that we forgot responsibilities. Now, purpose seems to be the only plausible anecdote to our cultural emptiness.
We must “spend ourselves in a worthy endeavor,” as Theodore Roosevelt once exhorted. And might I add, in a focused way, aiming at a few targets instead of many. “Do less; be more,” is a self-made motto I’ve been repeating.
An exploration of traditional spiritual practices might also do us some good. Whether we can know with ultimate certainty that they aim toward metaphysical truth or not, an encouragement that God created you in His image and has special plans for your life is one way to “hold on when there is nothing in you/Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’”
You are worthy of love. To anyone out there contemplating suicide: I beg you to hold on.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 9:30 AM.