Ep. 205: Suicide with Dr. Drew (Durkheim et al) (Part Two)

0:00 Dr.: So if I could respond, Seth, really well put. And my heart goes out to you. And this anguish you're talking about lingers not just over the friends and family, but generations that follow, which we have to remind ourselves that intergenerational trauma is real. I suppose it's important to point out, I mean, we'd be sort of irresponsible if we didn't say if, you know, somebody who is contemplating suicide or talks about suicide or even, even in passing is mentioning any sort of ideation that way that's a medical emergency and should be treated as such.

Don't be ashamed to call the police. They're used to responding to these things. Get them to a hospital, a physician. Getting them in proper structured environment can dramatically reduce their risk in the short term. And then your other question, why not more research on this? I mean, man, it breaks my heart, but you're getting right at the core of sort of where Wes and I live, which is fundamentally stigmatized. Fundamentally, people think that, oh, you know those people, it's their choice, it's their business, it's whatever opiates and addiction underlie a lot of this and particularly the recent uptick in suicide.

And there's nobody to advocate for addicts. They are still highly judged and stigmatized. And just again, an opportunity for me to point out that addiction is a brain disorder. It's not about volition. I'm sorry to violate Seth's deterministic impulses, but even if it's determinism, it's determined within the context of a brain illness. And they do things that are outside of any normal self functioning, including suicide. So let's just kind of leave it at that. And it pains me to say it, but I'm with you, Seth.

1:34 Seth: Thank you. All right, Mark, we can move on to theoretical.

1:38 Mark: I don't know if this counts as theoretical. I mean, the readings that we started discussing, the Seneca and the Schopenhauer, were both addressing suicide from what Camus calls the point of view of the Individual decision maker. And it poses suicide as a philosophical question. You know, if you are contemplating suicide, is there any cases in which it could make sense to you? And of course, when people are extremely ill, maybe they're terminally ill. I know this is the kind of thing that's often discussed in philosophical conversation, you know, assisted suicide.

And I find that less interesting because obviously to me, if somebody is really terminally ill and in great pain, and as far as any reasonable expectation will continue to be in great pain, then, yeah, it seems like they could, of sound mind, make that choice. But once you admit that, then it becomes a question, who is to decide? Is it always just up to the individual to decide how bad the suffering has to be? At the time of Seneca, I think you had to go in front of a magistrate and argue that your life was crappy enough, that suicide was a viable option and they would actually give you the hemlock if they agreed, but at least did not completely leave it up to your own judgment.

But Seneca talks in these vague ways like, well, we're all going to die kind of soon anyway. People, you know, who just listened to our stoicism episode should be very familiar with this point of view, that we shouldn't be clinging to life in all circumstances. What matters is that kind of the story arc of your life makes sense, that you've accomplished what you want to accomplish and you can go out that way. And so, you know, you could see somebody who has gotten to the point where they are addicted to, where they are young and healthy, but they have continuous depression, mental pain, where they could decide on Seneca's grounds or even use Seneca as an excuse to say, you know what, this makes sense for me to check out here.

So I think that, yeah, you can respond to that by saying, well, no, these people are not in their right minds, that this is a symptom that what the kind of stuff we've been saying. You could also just try to answer them on philosophical grounds, which I think Schopenhauer, even though he has some kind of nice things to say about suicide in certain circumstances that sound like Seneca, ultimately thinks it is a mistake, that you're kind of exerting your will in a way that if you were really meeting Schopenhauer's definition of virtue, you wouldn't be that.

You can definitely see how Schopenhauer prefigures Freud in that there's sort of a mistake. You know, you think that you're trying to duck away from suffering, but actually you're exerting Your will in a kind of unwarranted way. And then Camus gives his own answer to that as well. So who wants to kick us off in this sort of meaning of life discussion? You know, is this a philosophical problem?

4:15 Dr.: Can I maybe ask this as a follow on, as a way of framing what you're asking? Did Socrates commit suicide? Was that a suicide?

4:23 Wes: Yes and no.

4:25 Dylan: Well, so here it's one of those funny things. It's the same way as Seneca, right, Is that they were executed by suicide. They were sentenced to take their own lives.

4:33 Wes: Socrates had the chance to escape and decided not to.

4:37 Dylan: And one supposes that he could have just refused to take the hemlock and then what would have happened afterwards, right? I don't know that they dribbled it down his throat or that they did some other kinds of external form of killing him. Seneca also was ordered by Nero to kill himself and did.

4:56 Mark: But yeah, Socrates was one of the models for the Stoics that they picked up on this aspect of. You know, Socrates, he had a very philosophical outlook on what the afterlife might be. And so he didn't fear death. He was pretty old. He felt like his story had ended. At least it could serve as an object lesson. People say the same thing about Jesus, right? Jesus could have escaped before he was crucified. He was offered the opportunity, but he let himself be crucified as an example for the larger social purpose of the event.

5:26 Dylan: You see, I just brought back to. It just feels like, if you want to call this like the meaning of life question, it feels categorically different. And if I pick someone like Camus, that the question of suicide is the question of philosophy, which is the question of whether life is worth living, period. In all these cases come down to, yes, it is Camus. It's like we're duty bound to fight against the absurdity. The only proper response to the absurdity of living is to live. Is that what it means to engage the theoretical question? Is that just trying to say, well, what kind of justification is there, absent there being a mental illness question? If inside mind and body, can I say, is there something worth living in life? Is that what the theoretical question is?

6:17 Wes: Well, I think the Camus is enlightening because it's a very similar causal explanation as Durkheim, which is that once we come face to face with the absurdity of life, which is a lot like what Durkheim describes as people becoming detached from the social. People's becoming detached from the social collective is their experience of meaninglessness. That's What Durkheim says, and Camus hints at this as well. He calls these sorts of things the illusions that get people through life, including religion, which Durkheim just identifies as a form of social cohesion.

Once all that is gone, if we believe that developments and Western civilization have inevitably robbed us of the kind of social cohesion that we can get from something like religion, we're face to face with the absurd. Life can no longer be explained in any satisfying way. When we think about our suffering, we can no longer explain it away as something that is for the sake of a greater whole, whether it's for society or for God or something like that. And then the question is, if life really is not worth living, then suicide is the proper response.

That's one way of looking at it. And then the other side of it is just that people do commit suicide ultimately because their suffering is a manifestation of the sense that life is meaningless, which, again, I think is related to the social detachment and lack of the sense of being seen by others or being seen in a way that's shaming and an internalization of all that. But anyway, so to go on, for Camus, ultimately, one just somehow, it's like de Beauvoir, where we accept our lack. Once we have become conscious of the meaninglessness of things and accept that, then we can get into this position where we.

What he calls it, the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks, where we can take joy simply in that whole process that we might have thought of as completely meaningless and futile, but only against the backdrop of this higher need that Camus seems to think that we can get rid of. So this sort of embraces the radical ego, you know, individuality that Durkheim sees as the problem leading to suicide.

8:33 Mark: I have a Durkheim quote on this about pessimism. This is page 173. So he's talking about, as you were saying, Wes, before, that the reason that we think we need a meaning of life is because of social influence, right? As biological man, we don't need that if we're animals. It's the society gives us religions. It gives us these thirsts for higher meaning. And you might think that when you break away from tradition, you become independent, you start actually thinking for yourself. You get enlightened that you are transcending that, the illusions of religion.

And maybe you then end up in a void where, like Camus says, there's no predetermined meaning anymore. You're not accepting religion anymore. But according to Durkheim, you actually still have not escaped the social zeitgeist that it's actually because your society itself is no longer under the grip of a particular religious tradition or a particular set of religious traditions and has fostered this individualism, you're actually channeling the society. So this quote says at the very moment that with excessive zeal he frees himself from the social environment, he still submits to its influence.

However individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining. The very depression and melancholy resulting from the same exaggerated individualism. He affects communion through sadness when he no longer has anything else with which to achieve it. So it's kind of a. It's an illusion that you're really by yourself asking this meaning of life question. You're always under a certain social ideology to even raise the question.

10:07 Dylan: I have this knee jerk reaction of wanting to ask if the meaning of life question is a modern question.

10:13 Wes: I mean, I think it is. I think there are different ways of asking it because I think it translates into a certain set of. There's a psychodynamics to it, there's a way of explaining this. In other words, here's a way of putting it. The meaning of life question comes to the fore as soon as we are self conscious beings who are tied in this special way to the recognition of other self conscious beings and whose psychical integrity is basically tied via our fantasy to other people's or let's say tied to our fantasies of societies or other people's comportment towards us.

So Nietzsche is trying to answer a very similar question to the question of suicide. He was trying to say, well, why? How is it that people can be so self destructive? And his answer ends up being an ascetic and self sacrificial and the sorts of things that we see in religion. And the answer is that it confers a kind of meaning of life, even though it will turn out to be an inherently nihilistic way to say the meaning of life. It confers the meaning of life because it confers this sense of being seen ultimately being seen by God in one's suffering.

Or in other words, we can tolerate our suffering as long as it can happen within the context of recognition, within the context of, of social cohesion. And when that's gone, meaning goes away.

11:42 Dylan: So in that respect it's not a modern question because there have been ascetics forever, but that the act of being an ascetic, for instance, is in the context of a social fabric, a social dynamic, whatever you want to call it, that the ascetic can only be an ascetic insofar as they. Even if they're a hermit, insofar as they are part of a human society. And the self definition that. That act of being an ascetic, for instance, just as the example is their assertion of the meaning of life. And sort of staking out their claim in that by defining themselves. But is. You've been putting it, Wes. It's always with respect to. And in the context of how we're seen by other people. Because that's part of the way we see ourselves.

12:33 Wes: Yeah.

12:34 Mark: So it sounded like, Drew, you were saying before that you've just never run into anybody in therapy that actually takes this meaninglessness of life. Like, that's never the cause of suicide. Just somebody being like, oh, there's no point in living. Or am I wrong about that?

12:49 Wes: They're gonna express it in different ways. I'll let Drew, who has way more experience than me, speak to this. People do talk about that, but more often they're going to express that sentiment in different ways. Not in that language, but anyway. Drew, what's your.

13:04 Dr.: That we see people struggling with not only meaning, but hopelessness. And what I said was, is that they eventually get to the same place, which is some sort of intolerable psychic pain. So all roads lead to the same moment where people are unable to tolerate the state they're in. But meaninglessness of various sorts for sure figure into it. I found it interesting you characterize that as a modern concept. To me, finding meaning is one of man's most ancient quests. And usually most. At least most myths resolve it. And certainly other. Even religious texts and things resolve it as the meaning is in either other people or being service to other people or being part of the polis, as Aristotle says.

13:52 Wes: Right?

13:52 Mark: Yeah, Certainly. The idea of a meaning in what am I supposed to do like that is. That's a very old question. I guess the. It was just the particular terms in which it is discussed now, maybe that was the question. I thought that the new element was just the idea that the teleology of the world that dictates the meaning of our lives might be absent. That that was kind of the new thing historically, that it was just always assumed by all of the ancient religions and all of the old philosophers that, of course, there's some sort of divine plan and the meaning of our lives is our role in that.

And if you're Freud or Marx or something, you might say it's the particular society that was defining this. It's not just a Divine plan that exists in a vacuum that we as individuals connect to. That was a Protestant thing, but before that, it was really through the medium of society telling you what your meaning is. And one could question that, and there could be revolutions in pushing forward so that, you know, there's still a philosophical question, but that it maybe was at least not widespread until the early 20th century that people thought maybe there is no such meaning.

And in fact, asking for meaning doesn't even make sense. It assumes a teleology of the world that simply doesn't exist. As a widely asked question. It seems like that is at least a thing that even in Durkheim's time, like that's what he was reacting to and saying the rise in suicide is coming with this breakdown of traditional societies, the breakdown of traditional religions. And we read some Dostoevsky that pointed to the same thing.

15:21 Dylan: God is dead, definitely.

15:23 Mark: Exactly.

15:25 Seth: I heard a couple of things over the last few comments, but one is the social aspect, the notion of connectedness, and the other is the notion of meaning. And it's. I'm not sure that the two things are distinct. And in one of the survey articles, I think it was the Stanford Encyclopedia, they were talking about the romantic notions like dying for love in this wasting away and melancholy and all that. And then also this idea that many people who. There's a sense of despair and hopelessness, and it's oftentimes connected with this feeling, a notion of being alone or disconnected, not having.

If you're feeling like you have unbearable psychic pain, for example, it's unbearable because you can't see a way to resolve or get around it. And that might be because you don't feel like you're strong enough or you have the ability to do it yourself, but it also might be that you don't feel. There's nobody there offering to help you or that you feel can. Can help you. Maybe you feel abandoned. And I wonder if there isn't. You know, when we think about when we did our episode on enlightenment, this notion of modernity being defined by the scientific categorization of the world and people and the prioritization and the fetishization of reason and the individual and the power of the individual to be and to determine and to create and to overcome, have we somehow lost the notion of connectedness and community that would.

Well, that it would help or that. Is there something in that. If you're talking about sort of a broader existential state of the world that might be contributing to an increase in this phenomena versus, say, the 19th century or the 18th century?

17:09 Wes: Well, suicide rates over a 50 year period, I think where we are, where we were actually in 1950s, where suicide rates go, they dipped dramatically in the. At least. I'm talking about the United States. They dipped dramatically in the 80s. Right. And then came back up. We can't point to any trend that says. Because I was wondering. I mean, we can, I guess, point to a trend since 2000 or so, which we might relate. I know, Drew, you mentioned the opioid epidemic, but there's also just the fact that our society has been dramatically transformed with the Internet and smartphones and things like that. But I don't know if we can make any relations between that.

17:49 Dr.: But the people were pointing at a number of risk factors. But I do think Seth is onto something for sure, this extreme individualism. And Durkheim would predict that that would not be a good thing for suicide.

18:01 Seth: Right.

18:02 Dr.: And now we have these pseudo intimacies with our social media that are exacerbating things. So real connectivity is about human bodies in space. And what we're doing now is further disconnecting through electronic connection.

18:16 Mark: Although I do think that gets a bad rap. Like, I feel like getting together and talking with you guys on a regular basis is social.

18:26 Dr.: I don't know. I'm looking for a place to hurt myself. I don't know.

18:30 Wes: Yeah, but people don't even talk on the phone anymore. Really? That seems like such a quaint, you know, that seems like yesterday, big time.

18:40 Dr.: I have a crazy question. I was noticing in. I think it was Plato's construct about suicide. He gave sort of four circumstances were suicide. I think he was calling it justified, but he was saying that otherwise it was cowardice. Which I thought was an interesting statement in that a lot of people that are around someone who commits suicide react

19:01 Seth: to it that way.

19:02 Dr.: It was a cowardly act and they harmed us. And some of that otherness that comes out in the psychoanalytic thought, I think is felt by people that they feel somehow specifically the object of the suicide. To me, cowardice does not occur to me as a thought, but I thought it was interesting. And rather than thinking about it as some sort of abnormal emotional state, it's cowardice. Is that philosophically an interesting space for us or is that just a weird observation?

19:29 Wes: Now you're just reminding me of this Onion article from way back. Man dies after cowardly battle with cancer or something like that. Because usually it's called courageous. And it's all about him whining and complaining about having cancer. I mean, It's a loaded term, right, because it's a morally pejorative term. You know, we could be in the moral mode of speaking about things, but then we might be. If one wants to be a psychologist about it and think about causes, it's probably not helpful to talk about cowardice. Dylan, I know you wanted to chime in. Is there an element of cowardice?

19:57 Dylan: It's pointing to the idea that there's a failure involved. And one way in which it makes me think of it. I don't know if philosophical is the right word, but is even in the case of the mental illness, that it's a feeling that's going to pass. My interaction with it is that that notion of failure is palpably real for people who have suicidal thoughts or are attempting suicide. That that pain has to do with failure and their own self understanding of failure. And that's not, I don't think, exactly what Plato would have meant by an act of cowardice.

20:32 Wes: Well, Seneca provides an interesting counterpoint there, right. With all his praising how courageous he was to shove that spear down his own throat. How courageously he would have fought the lions if he had chosen to do that. Instead he chose to. To fight himself.

20:46 Dylan: But this is where I just feel like the category of suicide then ends up enveloping a whole bunch of different kinds of acts. And that we've sort of been struggling with this, right? That there's the act of self consciously and of sound mind ending your life in the face of untenable circumstances that we would recognize in that way where you factor out the mental illness portion out of it. And then it makes it much more like the same way you end up in a category where you're choosing to partake in an activity that is inherently risky, which would be a joint to this. If you're going to partake in something really, really risky, that there's a high likelihood that you would die. Are you suicidal because of that?

21:27 Wes: But I think the other part here is what Seneca is focusing on is the fact that normally if we're cowardly, we're going to avoid physical pain and avoid death at all costs.

21:36 Dylan: That's exactly right.

21:37 Wes: And then that points us to the fact that we're really divided into more than one psychic agency at the point where we are committing suicide, right? We are being acted upon and we are acting. And for psychoanalysts, we could be inhabiting completely two different roles at once. We could be in the position of a triumphant, sadistic person, grandiose, who's doing something Great by exterminating the bad parts of himself or the failure part and not thinking about the realities that that extermination means. Also the extermination of the grandiose part. And then likewise, you know, we're in that other position of being the victim. So we could play all these roles at once. It's possible we could be cowardly and courageous at once if we wanted to talk in those terms.

22:24 Dr.: I think to me it cycles back a little bit to meaning of life stuff because although Seth's position is everything is determined, so how can you possibly be cowardly if it's already predetermined? Number one. But number two, that finding meaning is hard. It's a quest, it's a painful challenge that should you pull away from, should you sort of disengage from that you're doing something of questionable morality. I think that's what Plato's bringing up, which is that we have an obligation to others and finding meaning in others and being of service to others. And if we pull from that, there's some sort of a violation of our purpose.

23:03 Seth: I think I can see it from two different perspectives. So when you mentioned people talking about cowardly, I think a lot of times it's situational. You wouldn't say of a 16 year old, you know, essentially a teenager who committed suicide, that they were cowardly, but you might say that of their 32 year old father who maybe with some mounting bills and for whatever reason wasn't able to find a way to reconcile or address challenges in the life, but had obligations and responsibilities to others as a parent. Right. A common judgment, there would be, you know, they took the cowardly way out instead of manning up.

Right. And addressing these things. But there's also, I think in the Platonic framework where you have a tripartite soul and the sense in which if you somehow aren't able to use reason to master the appetitive, or you're overwhelmed in some sense by the appetitive part of your soul, and presumably, you know, you're a citizen, the appropriate type of male figure that he saw as a citizen or potential philosopher or member of the city, then it would be cowardly for you to commit suicide as opposed to mastering these things and participating in society in the way that you should.

But I feel like, I don't think that's a meaning of life question that feels more like a social obligation or a familial obligation or, you know, somehow a responsibility to others as opposed to a meaning of life thing.

24:32 Mark: I found myself Thinking in terms of the cowardice, the case of someone who has just killed somebody else and then kills themselves. Now, I know if we look at Freud, it would make a lot of sense that if you think suicide is driven by basically a homicidal impulse that's turned inward, there might be some leftover actual homicide there. But putting aside that kind of case, like in the book and film catch 22, this guy's kind of goofing around with a plane and he kills somebody with his propeller trying to get close to him and kind of buzz him and ends up chopping him and he immediately flies his plane into the side of the mountain.

And I feel like I sympathize a lot, even though that's sort of the definition of in some ways, cowardice that, like, something terrible has happened that I'm responsible for. I could either deal with that and, like, go through all the bullshit that that entails, or I could just end it now. On the other hand, it also feels like, especially if it was an intentional homicide, not just like that, that you kind of. You almost feel like justice has been done.

25:30 Wes: Like the.

25:30 Mark: The murderer just did our job for us. So I don't know. I have very mixed feelings about that. You know, if any place cowardice seems like it would apply there. Although I also sort of sympathize with.

25:41 Dylan: Doesn't seem that especially the case that you gave from catch 22, that's so different from the shame aspect. Right. And how it's our ties to society that's driving him to that.

25:53 Seth: Right.

25:55 Mark: Yeah. Maybe that is altruistic suicide in Durkheim's sense. Just like if you lose the battle, you bring shame on yourself and you're a samurai, then you commit seppuku. Well, there's not that established social thing, but there's still. I could see it's a related case.

26:09 Seth: I don't know. I need to think about Drew's comment about the overlap between obligations to others and the meaning of life. You'll not be surprised to hear this, Drew. That I also think that we create our own meaning and that there is no external or metaphysical meaning generation machine that gives us our purpose. But the idea that you might assign to yourself a teleology that or an end that involves a commitment to others certainly makes sense, but it's not, you know, necessarily the case. I might feel that I have obligations to my child and my wife, but not think that those things constitute.

Well, I guess they are meaning creation activities in my life as opposed to contrasting that with the possibility of them being the meaning of my life, maybe that's the issue here, is they are meaning generating activities for sure. And in that sense they contribute. Yeah, now that I've talked myself through it, I get it.

27:01 Dr.: Yeah.

27:02 Wes: I mean, the question becomes, yeah, we could grant that we are the only meaning generators and still ask the question of whether we have to do that in some way in terms of social connections and obligations to others, all the sorts of things that Durkheim talks about. Or if we could just be radically individual in the way that Durkheim thinks is problematic, and yet create meaning for ourselves that way, which Camus doesn't directly say, but he does give hints about. He does say that we have to be able to move beyond religion, for instance, and those sorts of illusions.

We can't just fill our lives up with these illusory hopes, and which is one way of pejoratively casting most of our meaning generating activity. And so for someone like Camus, it could be that our meaning or whatever ties us to life comes only from the casting off of any desire for meaning whatsoever. Unless one thinks that sort of that existentialist stance. So, for instance, at the very end, he's talking about crushing truths perish by being acknowledged. The crushing truth is that there is no meaning. Life is absurd. Discovering the absurd makes happiness possible.

Once again, absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all his idols. There's this idea that the things that we've been speaking about as meaning making, the things that might keep us here on earth, are what he's calling idols. And then he says, if there is no personal fate, there's no longer a higher destiny. Which I think is a way of saying the highest destiny is only our personal fate. It's not the fate of our people or some higher social entity with which we identify. That's another one of our potential meaning making activities is to tie ourselves to this higher destiny of a collective.

And then he talks in the end about a higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. Which is the higher fidelity, I think, is simply to the struggle itself, to this thing that we might otherwise think is absurd and not worth the trouble. All this suffering, in some sense, that's the only meaning conferring activity. Once we have stopped eluding ourselves with the idea that it's all for the sake of some abstraction or another, or some collective or another, it is just our personal fate at work, our personal struggle, and that's it.

29:26 Dr.: I would just pile on and say if that were exclusively and strictly logically True. He shouldn't have written this down because that's for the rest of us. You know what I'm saying? He's doing that for the rest of us. So if the rest of us don't matter, he should not have written it down.

29:40 Wes: That characterization may not have been entirely fair. We'd have to go back and listen to our original Myth of Sisyphus episode.

29:49 Mark: So that is the way that people who hate existentialism interpret existentialism. You know, the MacIntyre episode that we read, he was very down at existentialism. I like to fill in the gaps of Camus here by just taking from our Simone de Beauvoir ethics of ambiguity episode. So it's not that we should just eschew the causes and things that people generally take up that give us meaning, but that we have to attain the appropriate balanced relationship with them, that we fully engage in them, so that we're not mere adventurers just flipping from cause to cause.

There's something fundamentally unstable. It makes me again think of the Wittgenstein private language argument that you can't maintain a standard of any sort by yourself. Like you need something social underlying that. So if you just kind of decide based on your whim from day to day which cause you're going to throw into, then that's not really going to be a successful way of generating meaning for yourself. And if, like MacIntyre, channeling Wittgenstein thinks that, that that's all the existentialist can do, then yeah, the existentialist is not going to find meaning and probably is not going to be successful in generating happiness out of abandoning the search for meaning the way Camus describes that maybe like what Beauvoir describes is, you know, you should engage causes, you should find meaning in the normal meaning generating activities.

But just don't fool yourself into thinking that they control you, that they are prior to you, that they are outside of your choice. You are the one who is making that choice and throwing yourself into them, lest you become the serious man who thinks that meaning comes predetermined.

31:24 Wes: Well, also, she's warning us against, and I think Camus, I didn't mean to suggest that they aren't similar in the sense that. Because what corresponds to Camus, idols and higher destiny and all that stuff is her idea that we might think that we're filling in, that we can complete ourselves, right? That we're going to fill up this lack if we treat our projects as these things that can ultimately complete us and bring the struggle to fruition and make Us beings who don't fundamentally feel this sense of. Deep sense of lacking, then we're setting ourselves up for trouble. The meaning does not confer in relation to this ultimate fulfillment. It's conferred in relation to the activity of the project itself. And specifically, yeah, to the fact that to one's freedom, which in a way becomes the end of a sort.

32:18 Dr.: Aren't we ending up here talking about what it means to lead a good life? Isn't that what that is? Isn't what she's suggesting?

32:25 Mark: I guess that's the question in when you actually get to therapy, when you get to actually people who are suicidal, is their struggle with suicide in any legitimate way properly characterized as an existential crisis trying to find meaningful activity on a day to day basis? Or is it really just like they need something that doesn't have to be a great calling, it just needs to be, you know, if you don't have human companionship and you could be suffering because of that, then just getting a girlfriend or whatever, you know, that actually at least could temporarily solve the problem

33:02 Wes: that could address the. Not likely to.

33:05 Mark: No.

33:06 Wes: But let me say one thing because I'm recalling when Drew, when I was on your show, I think you asked me something about the key to a good life. And I said, day structure.

33:15 Dr.: Hang on, I want to introduce you. What I said was, I said, you're a philosopher. What's the meaning of life? And your answer was, I don't know, I have no idea. And then we talked about. And then we talked about it.

33:30 Wes: Yeah.

And then I went into this whole thing about day structure because I see people who have often come out of the hospital straight from a suicide attempt come into this house and that is. Can I really talk about this? I don't know. I have to think about it.

33:45 Dr.: While you're thinking about it, let me say that the happiness literature, which is a whole other. We should do a happiness episode sometime because that's as complex as suicide. And the people that really spend a lot of time thinking about that phenomenon, when you ask them what's the best thing for someone to do to increase their happiness, what they will usually tell you is, make your bed in the morning. Make your bed in the morning. That's the number one thing that can contribute to happiness.

34:11 Wes: So with people in my house. Yeah. However severe their situation when they come in, it's not like it's a magic bullet and it's going to make you suddenly happy to be here, although. Because now they have something new to gripe about, which is the rules and me, but just the having of rules. Having to get out of the house from 10am to 2pm, having to be around people which they might normally avoid, and then finally being required to have some sort of job or volunteer work, all of those things are immediately stabilizing. That really does tell you a lot about suicide in the sense that I generally am not worried that people who have had multiple suicide attempts when they come into the house, that they're going to try that.

Because I know it's an inherently stabilizing environment. And there is something just about being beholden to a rule giver and having to do things. There's something about that relation that goes back to the Durkheim, the higher authority, let's say, and to some sort of social structure that is bigger than oneself. Those things are inherently stabilizing, even if they're frustrating and not enjoyable and not the kind of thing that you would immediately think confers happiness.

35:22 Mark: If it sounded like before I was contrasting meaning versus pleasure, right, just get a girlfriend, you'll get some pleasure. You don't need meaning. What I really should have been talking about is kind of that meaning could come in different sizes. That what you're talking about, Wes, is the immediate purposiveness of actually being given a task. It doesn't have to be a cause that you're devoting your life to, but that like food and water is like a fundamental need. Having something to do on a given day, having something that, that you feel fulfilled in doing.

And that's quite different though obviously related to this larger idea of the overall meaning of your life and the overall sense of belongingness. And of course it would be better if you could have these little tasks in the context of feeling this overall sense of meaningfulness, but that we don't necessarily need. Again you could read that out of Camus that like just the fact that Sisyphus could make the rock his thing. It's not like the rock is the meaning of my life. But on a moment to moment basis he could put himself into pushing the rock up the hill.

And that's at least minimally what we need. We don't need meaning in the large religious sense. We need meaning in the immediate small sense.

36:34 Dylan: Well, it doesn't have to be something that is fulfilling. No, I'm just thinking even in a minimal way this is going to sound a little bit crass and I don't mean it to be that way. But if you're put in a position where you have to every day figure out to how to get your food. Like you're a subsistence living environment, right? I don't mean like you're in poverty in a big city, but like you're having to grow your food or hunt down your food or whatever. There's just a ton of activity involved just in living, just in an everyday way. Maybe this is sort of what I was trying to think of in terms of whether or not you'd say it's a modern question, but to the extent that you end up having the time to think about whether your life has meaning, maybe then that's the problem.

37:18 Wes: But I think that it's not just having things to do, but you have to be answerable to other people or responsible for other people in some way. There has to be some social element to that. And the reason, Mark, why I laughed about the girlfriend thing is because romantic relationships actually tend to destabilize people, not stabilize them, as important as they are, ultimately.

37:37 Dr.: And they always gravitate to that as their solution because it's immediately gratifying, but it makes things way worse. Way worse.

37:42 Wes: Yeah. Yep. And they gravitate to the wrong people and to toxic situations, and they do the same thing with family. You know, there's always this tie to these toxic relationship with family members that are addictive, really, and they just can't get away from it, no matter how destructive it is.

38:00 Seth: Toxic family members. That's.

38:02 Wes: It just.

38:03 Seth: It struck a chord, that's all.

38:05 Dr.: But it's predetermined, so.

38:08 Seth: All right, I'm gonna have this conversation with you at some point, Drew. I'm gonna explain my point of view on that.

38:13 Dr.: But, you know, listen, I get it, and I don't necessarily disagree with it. I understand it. I just can't live with it. That's the problem. That's why I'm poking at it.

38:21 Seth: Yeah, fair enough. Since you are creating your own meaning, you can create the meaning of freedom of choice and free will for yourself, if you like. That's the true essence of compatibilism bolstered by Camus.

38:37 Mark: So I think we are reaching near the end of what we wanted to talk about. Any last things, or you want to just give some closings, or.

38:44 Wes: I think we should just end it once and for all.

38:51 Dylan: This entire podcast has been meaningless.

38:54 Wes: Sorry, we'll have to think about whether to cut that off.

38:58 Mark: Well, so one thing I learned from the Very Bad Wizards interview with Matthew Nock was that hearing people talk about suicide does not raise the possibility of suicide. So somebody recommended recently like. Like with Our Camus episode. Can't you go back and put a disclaimer at the beginning and at the end of here's a suicide hotline and stuff like that, and.

39:17 Wes: And someone asked us to do it for. Or they emailed me and said, you should do it for this one. Well, what does Drew think about whether we should do this?

39:24 Dr.: Well, I gave a little disclaimer at the beginning, if you remember the second part here.

39:28 Dylan: Yes.

39:29 Dr.: And to follow with a suicide number. It's not a bad idea. But it does make the point that the solution to suicide is connection. But that's what we teach the people on the other end of the suicide response lines is that other brains affect other brains both positively and negatively.

39:45 Mark: So it is 1-800-273-TALK.

39:48 Dr.: One thing we didn't discuss, you know, Seth, you like to look at this, you know, from a deterministic perspective. I like to look at it from the perspective of evolutionary biology. So I always find all my answers in evolutionary biology. And this thing that sits under our cranium, it was evolved in a social context. It was a highly specialized instrument for social functioning. And both in terms of how it makes meaning and how it survives and everything, it evolved in that context. So I always look for solutions in the social context because I feel like that's what we were evolved to do.

40:19 Mark: One of the questions I came in here with is I suggested this to Drew almost immediately after we recorded with him last time. And partially it's because I feel like one of the lingering irrationalities in my own behavior is that a couple times recently when we go to a funeral, who. Somebody who died of suicide or at one point, I was offered the chance to sing at somebody I didn't know his funeral, who died of suicide. And I really didn't want to do it partially just because, you know, screw you, I'm angry about not even really knowing, you know, the guy's situation or anything, but, like, there's this lingering anger about it. And I was hoping that, you know, certainly everything, all the medical sounding research that I've looked into, like, anger is inappropriate because it is a symptom. I mean, Wes, you're saying that even though it is determined, it is angry

41:11 Wes: is perfectly appropriate and natural. I mean, that's the way loved ones feel. I've been to the funeral of someone who committed suicide, and it's awful. I mean, it's so awful for the family members. It's just. I mean, I cried at that funeral even though I didn't, you know, had no Close connection to the guy because just seeing what it had done to his daughters. I mean, I don't know, Drew, you can comment on this, but I don't see anger as an inappropriate response.

41:36 Dr.: Anger is part of mourning. Absolutely. But it's amplified when somebody takes their own life. And again, let's just roll out a evolutionary perspective. It's unfulfilled genetic potential. Right. And also, in terms of the holist or the social context, you sort of have obviated your responsibility to the group. And so, of course, people would be prone towards anger. And the psychoanalytic piece is all in there too, right?

42:01 Wes: Yeah. But depriving people of your presence, you know, in their lives. But also, there is that element of, you did something extraordinarily violent, you became one of those people. Even if it's your own person, you acted in this extraordinarily cruel and violent way, and there's something about that.

42:18 Dylan: Them.

42:18 Dr.: Right.

42:18 Mark: You killed somebody I love.

42:20 Wes: Yes. There you go.

42:21 Mark: Perfect fact that that was you doesn't make me any more forgiving of you.

42:24 Dr.: Well, it does. Irrationally, it doesn't. When you think about it, you can not on the emotional front.

42:30 Mark: Uhhuh. People hearing us talk about this is going to affect them one way or the other. We're not letting you off the hook. We're not saying that there's any legitimate philosophical justification probably for you, unless you are terminally ill and all that. You know, the extreme case, but probably not. So don't even think about it, you bastard. How about that? Is that helpful?

42:50 Dr.: Yeah, go ahead. Shame people, Mark. The shaming we know works with people who are suicidal. Shame them some more.

42:58 Mark: Exactly.

42:59 Dr.: Exactly.

43:01 Wes: I do think if someone who's suicidal can conceive of the idea that someone might be angry at them, that that would have a positive effect because. Because that suggests that someone actually cares, as opposed to they just exist in this vacuum where no one cares about them.

43:18 Dr.: Well, and back to the connection thing. That's a kind of a connection, because one of the final thoughts people usually have that flips them into action is the world people that I love are better off without me.

43:29 Mark: So even though we don't know you, we care about you, and we want you not just to have an extra statistic in our listenership. If we hear that you've done this, we're going to be pissed at you. You all right? Thank you, Drew. I would love to just say next year or so, talking about happiness with you, if you're up for another one of these. Sounds awesome to me.

43:48 Dr.: Yeah, it's a nice book. And to suicide. Thank you.

43:54 Mark: Well, it's good for us to have a yearly appointment with a professional. I get to that.

44:00 Wes: So we'll check in. We'll see what progress we've made. And the oh geez.

44:09 Mark: All right, a couple of announcements before I let you go. First, that suicide hotline again is 1-800-273-TALK. Second, a few of the texts in here that we covered are intrinsically deserving of much more discussion time than we gave them here. I want to remind Partially Examined Life Citizens or $5 Patreon members that Wes released a subtext episode on Freud's Mourning and Melancholia where he talks to two other mental health professionals about that article. Also, Wes and I recorded a follow up on this discussion that is nearly as long as this episode where we get more into the Durkheim book and into different types of explanations, sociological versus psychological and within psychology, the explanations given by psychotherapy versus those given by evolutionary psychology.

So if you don't see that it'll be posted soon, I also want to remind you about the Partially Examined Life wall calendar. They're flying off the shelves. I am also now adding a store item for my new album, Mark Lint's Dry Folk, which you can order in electronic form or get the giftable physical cd. I've also, in an attempt to raise money for that project, put on the store for a limited time. I personally will be offering one on one tutoring interrogation sessions by phone with you to talk about philosophy or music or whatever. So if you want to get that eerie feeling of talking back to someone that you're used to listening to in your headphones, we can explore your particular interests, your ideas.

I just did my first one of these this week with one of our listeners. It was super satisfying for both of us. And if you don't want to talk to me, we have plenty of mugs, t shirts, etc, partiallyexaminedlife.com store is where you would find those. Finally, our closing song is a depressing little number called Disappear. It is by my latest Nakedly Examined music guest Chris Cacavas from his 1997 album Anonymous. You can hear me talk to him on episode 87@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night everybody.

45:59 Seth: Good night.

45:59 Wes: Good night, good night, Good night.

In the middle of the night. And if you look I'm not around Will I be nowhere to be found I'm only six feet underground down

46:55 Mark: and

46:55 Wes: I won't be found. Catch me if you can I don't think you can. Cuz now I'm in my car

47:22 Seth: and

47:22 Wes: I'm shifting the sand. And if you look around well I'm here but nowhere to be found. Only six feet underground and I. They gave me a new name and a different face. I feel like I am not around well I'm here Nowhere to be found. Only six feet underground and I can't be found. I will not be found. I cannot be. I'm not around. It.