I’m not promoting it, nor should anyone. I know people who have taken their own lives, and I myself feel a bit depressed—thoughts about taking my life cross my mind almost daily. But when I look around the world, I wonder how people endure their struggles.
Take Japan, for example. They have long school days, six days a week, and after graduating, you’re competing with hundreds of others for the same office jobs. Sure, most people eventually get hired, but it often starts as an internship, which can be a miserable experience. You’re not there as a full employee with proper treatment; you’re just fighting for the chance to get promoted to a regular salary position.
Japan’s work culture makes it even worse: the government mandates an 8-hour workday, but everyone knows that if you only work the required 8 hours, you’ll never get that promotion. So people push themselves to work 14 hours a day, every day, just to keep up.
It’s not just Japan, either; countries like China are also known for their grueling work culture. However, in China, it’s usually possible to find a liveable job, even if it means working 10 exhausting hours a day with little chance for advancement or quality of life.
In contrast, Western countries have their own pressures. A degree is often required to get decent employment, and to stand out, you likely need a master’s degree or more. On top of that, you need to demonstrate experience, which means more years of unpaid work, internships, or low-paying jobs just for the chance to climb the ladder. After all that, you might still end up in a thankless job that could lay you off at any time.
Meanwhile, the cost of living is absurd—rent often consumes 40% or more of your monthly income, food prices are climbing, and wages aren’t keeping up. AI is advancing rapidly and could take over many jobs soon, leaving even fewer options. As humans, we’re social creatures by nature, but no one has time for building real communities anymore because everything is an endless competition. Between job pressure, media manipulation, and the suffocating expectations set by social media, the weight is unbearable for so many.
And yet, despite all this, the suicide rate—while tragic—is not as high as one might expect for the number of people suffering from depression. This is a good thing, of course, but it does beg the question: why isn’t it higher? With all these pressures and hardships, what keeps so many people going?
i heard everyone company complain about gen z, but can we even blame them?
Different people have a different diversity of ways they can express objection to their living conditions. Where I live, there’s a saying that goes something like “only the cornered deer will voluntarily jump off a cliff to not be captured by hunters”. Some people, the “deer”, often find a way to flee, to fight, to cope, to negotiate, to play social chess, etc. though this does not describe everyone. And even then, as it turns out, a large number of suicides are not like they appear on TV or even the educational health videos. Not all heroes wear capes, and not everyone actually ends up going out with a bang. Some end up fading away, dying of voluntary starvation or some kind of final attempt at risk-taking, totally losing themselves, or maybe overseeing SWAT called on themselves and staging a fight, just to use an example. Think of the distinction between “first degree murder”, “second degree murder”, “manslaughter”, “criminal negligence”, etc. and how one might apply that hierarchy to themselves. If someone so much as tries to hold off medical attention for a bad habit, you might say there is reason to worry.