I wanted to share this elegant Venn diagram from a pair of recent casual and technical articles:
The theory goes that people at the center attempt suicide because they feel like burdens, they’re lonely and somehow they have the capability to kill themselves.
Basic questions:
1.) Do you feel lonely?
2.) Do you feel like a burden to others?
3.) Do you feel like you are capable of killing yourself?
Other questions:
4.) Do you feel all three (dead center, high risk) all the time?
5.) Do you ever get “better” off-center and if so then how?
6.) What do you think about this theory?
Let me know if I should add a question here that you’d like too.
8 comments
Okay 6) I think this could be a fair theory for SOME people. Not all people.
1) No
2) In a way…but only because I refuse to go to school or get a job because I plan on dying and haven’t sold allmy stuff yet. Do I care that I might be percieved as a burden…no don’t give a fuck.
3)Yes
4)No
5)Not thinking about it…caring about people…a task or hobby that gets you in the flow…music…sometimes drugs.
Ultimately for me tho I look at what my life has been paying attention to the very best moments and I say to myself realistically how many moments like that can happen again. How much satisfaction is enough to outweigh the work of existing. I’m quite apathetic and very little reaches me. Its been this way my entire life. When sex and skydiving don’t even make you feel anything what’s the point of it?
Perhaps atypical from most…
Brief answers for me:
1.) Yes I feel lonely.
2.) Yes I feel like a burden to others.
3.) Yes I feel like I am capable of killing myself.
4.) Yes I feel all three (dead center, high risk) almost all of the time.
5.) No I don’t ever get “better†off-center.
6.) I like the theory and the Venn diagram. I’d like to get myself outside that center portion.
Feel free to copy, paste and modify for your own answers. I’d like to do some more detailed answers but I’ll be back after supper. 🙂
1) Yes.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
4) No.
5) Yes.
6) I like the theory, but I don’t feel that all people who commit suicide adhere to these criteria. Like some people wouldn’t feel dead-centre all the time, but they’d still feel bad enough to want to kill themselves, due to how bad those dark moments can get.
1.) Loneliness is a big problem for me. I’ve never seen any person that I’m blood related to. I was put into foster care at birth and then adopted at age 3. My adopted parents immediately told me that they had wanted a Vietnamese boy but some other couple got him first. So they got guilted into adopting me. For the first few years, whenever I screwed up I was told that I’d be “taken back to the adoption agency” if I didn’t straighten up. My first impression of my adopted parents was that they were a little crazy.
Somehow I avoided being returned like a defected toaster, my warranty period expired. We were stuck with each other and things went downhill from there. The upshot is that it was during foster care that I did not achieve secure attachment, and it was early in adoption that I began to isolate in hiding away from my parents (daily) when they seemed aggressive toward me.
So isolation is a problem. Not able to identify with the sense of belonging in any family, nor having seen a single blood relative is a problem. When I was 3 I looked sort of African American I was the “black kid” in my tiny farm town. That made me feel out of place but eventually it became obvious that I’m Native American instead as my features matured.
In grad school I looked over a friends shoulder she was watching a video about monkeys that were not securely attached. One monkey was cowering in the corner terrified. I didn’t know what she was watching but I knew that I felt like that monkey looked for most of my life. I’m blessed and respectful to others but I rarely get a sense that people like me.
More often a third person will tell me someone likes me, or that people like me. Probably because its obvious that I can’t tell. At 41 I’ve been divorced twice. Both my ex wives left me. My adopted family does not speak to me except for my mom she’s always apologizing and I’ve always accepted her apologies and learned her Dad treated my mom like shit too. Anyway no kids for me, while most people my age are starting families.
I think those are the main things. Yes I feel lonely. Very very lonely..
Maybe there’s a lonely 40 something woman nearby whose on some dating site that you would get on with well. As far as the foster care and attatchment and bonding when young…if you feel lonely no matter who your with than perhaps it is because of that.
2.) Yes I feel like a burden to others. Part of this is because of what I am. Another part is because of something unspoken that most people feel, but that is taboo to speak of.
What I am is a middle class American Army veteran, living in whats looks-to-be the all time peak of human consumption. As an American, I’m a sycophant orbiting and supporting our elite (the true Imperialists) by helping to uphold America’s
empireSuperpower status by pretending we’re saving the world while undeniably it’s the other way around.Mostly I’ve done this by fixing bugs in telecom software. That’s where I spent the longest portion of my career. I didn’t know what I was on my way to getting there. I identify with Neo in the Matrix and Peter in Office Space. I worked for a bunch of different clients developing software looking for the most complex systems on Earth and I think I found it while working R&D at telecoms in general but AT&T in particular.
Along the way I read “The Shadow Factory,” I accepted it immediately and began to look backward at what I’d done with my life. My 2-year 4-year and M.S. all came from the State University of New York. The state had paid 2/3rds of my tuition before someone had paid the rest. And that someone was Uncle Sam, a pat on my back in return for my time as a driver loader and gunner on an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank in Kuwait perhaps.
Not only do I consume 70 times more stuff (the Earth can’t afford to give) as a typical person in Bangladesh, but I’d been quite an enabler as well. After I rode on a tank as the tip of our spear taking Kuwait back in 100 hours for Dubya’s daddy, the scorched earth we’d made of the battlefield at the edge on Baghdad seemed ripe for a sequel.
As a human I am part of an invasive species. As an American I am the most voracious type of human. Not only am I insatiable in the present, I’ve helped to charge trillions of dollars in debt to future Americans. As a technocratic Army veteran I’m one of the worst kinds of Americans. I have fought to preserve the status quo first on the front lines eventually at depth within our central nervous system. Working from one end to the other I think I’ve seen and served the greediest and most barbaric people, each dressing themselves as God’s gift for the public eye.
The unspoken taboo is this: we are living in a bubble that’s inside of a bubble. The human species goes back millions of years. The modern human subspecies (homo sapiens) goes back 300 thousand years. Most of that time there were about 500 million people alive. Totalitarian agriculture quickly created giant deserts in the formerly fertile crescent and biblical settings in Baghdad, but it doubled our numbers for the past 15,000 years; it’s bubble #1. Totalitarian agriculture doubled our numbers to almost 1 billion and we’re hoping for another 15,000 years before all arable land goes the way of our second Dust Bowl.
Doubling is pretty good. But use of fossil fuels is in the process of multiplying the 900 million we were, to 7.1 billion today, to almost 9 billion peak population circa 2035. Nine billion is an awful long way up. Ahh now THAT’s a bubble (#2) sure it’s mighty tall but it’s also quite slender: it’s been about 200 years and we have 100 left before our great grand kiddies will be running on fumes. It’s hard to mention (even on here) but there are free public simulators online just Google “World3” if you want to see for yourself what this century will bring. Suffice it to say that population will be half of whatever the peak population is, and avg human life expectancy will go from mid 80’s today to about 25 years old in the year 2100.
Enough about what should remain unspoken. Enough of what a burden I am.
3.) Yes I feel capable of killing myself.
This is coming from someone who has never attempted suicide before. So, it ought to be taken with a grain of salt. But I think my odds of success are 2/3rds, odds of failure about 1/3rd.
15 years ago I bought a shotgun to kill myself. But I never had the nerve to shoot myself in the face. I’ve shot tens of thousands out of handguns to .50 cal machine guns to 120mm tank rounds. But I never even loaded THAT shotgun. Then this exit bag came along. I read about it 5 or 6 years ago and thought to myself “I can do this.” Sweet Jesus do people complain on this SP site about the exit bag! After all the FUD and smear tactics I was beginning to wonder if anyone here got the exit bag to work. So I used the SP search tool and (sure enough) I found at least a dozen folks who.. Well let’s just say they don’t post anything nor comment here lately, like their last post is about their intent to use their exit bag years ago. Then no more.
I believe the Exit Bag will prove itself to be the single greatest invention of this century. Net deaths will peak in 2055 at least 25 million per year (2.5X the WW2 casualty rate) and it’s looking like a loss of 4 or 5 billion. There’s no doubt in my mind PartyCity will be selling a lot of BalloonTime helium tanks. I mean, most of those deaths will not be suicides. But burying 3 or 4 billion people in 4 decades is gonna push millions of our grand children far beyond their breaking points. That’s when they’ll visit PartyCity.
People on here write about the exit bag like it’s fucking rocket science. There’s maybe 8 hours of reading I’ve done. I’m sure I can set it up in under an hour. Put my hood on and breathe deeply; hot damn I cannot believe it seems so hard to folks. We’ll see how it goes I guess. People are often writing all this “what if my helium runs out?” bullshit. If my helium runs out I’ll be unconscious and partially asphyxiated, suffocation will take me the rest of the way.
Otherwise eventually I would have been a jumper. So if the exit bag somehow doesn’t work I’ll probably splat there’s lots of tall shit around here. I’d probably just start moping around my favorite spot each day for a few weeks. A dozen times I’ll look over the edge decide I’d prefer to live (maybe one hundred times) shrug my shoulders and go home. Eventually I’d probably jump though.
If jumping somehow does not work (and I can’t try the exit bag again) then I guess I’d probably go back to plan ‘A’ and shoot myself in the face.
Yes, the exit bag coupled with helium or ******** is actually quite simple – been there done that. My issue was I did not take into account the autonomic responses an if I *ha* I would have tossed back a number of relaxants with a nice gin-back … you know, to take the edge off. But overall on a scale from 1 to 10 for difficulty in preparing I would rate it as a 3 (could be higher outside of USA as helium, etc is much more costly).
As far as comfort, again on the 1 to 10 with 1 being the best and 10 being NO BUENO, I would give it a 1: I was out midway during the second breath. Now if I were to exit my choices would be 1: exit bag and 2: rock or bridge climbing an finally 3: gunshot.