I Work with Suicidal Farmers
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
A steelworker or a coal miner may feel sadness at fifty that they have to start over, but they always saw the mill or mine as a necessary evil. The best option they had to provide for their family.
I have a friend who told me the story of his great grandfather losing a piece of his farm in the depression. My friend said we waited eighty years but we've brought it back into the family where it has always belonged. He got into an auction with a neighbor and clearly overpaid but he was so joyful. Almost like he paid a ransom to get his own child back.
But the rest of us better be grateful that they do it. The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.
Are you sure about that? Median farm household income is way higher than normal median household income [1] and farmers get a huge amount of subsidies at the state and federal level.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-sector-inc...
Big Midwest corn operations are like oil. They rake it in when prices are high and crash hard when they fall.
Smaller family operations from 100-1000 acres are all dying or dead now. In the 1970s, a 50 acre dairy operation was a viable business. Today, forget it.
My one friend pays more for his material inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc.) and gets paid less for his crop, than the bigger farms. He's got about a hundred side hustles going.
Like you say about the emotional bond, I know at least two people who live on roads named after their families.
Unless we introduce some kind of guaranteed minimum income for farmers, their long-term prosperity depends, sadly, on farm closures. We simply have more farmers and more small farms than the market can possibly sustain.
The quickest way for a country/civilization to fall is by interruptions in food supply. The US is a large country with many people. If the food price increase sharply or if there's food scarcity, it will most certainly lead to social unrest of the kind we've never seen before.
A large quantity of small farms, with slightly different approaches to problems, slightly different crops, different sources of financing, local ownership sounds like it might be more reliable in the long run. Admittedly, the efficiency of the system would suffer a bit.
One region gets flooded or hit by a drought, and then produces essentially nothing. So you want N+M regional redundancy, where you can lose the output of M regions and the remaining N can produce enough for the whole.
Amartya Sen's work on the huge historical famines argues that they were essentially economic phenomena where there was enough food but not enough money to buy the food. In both the Bengal and Irish famines there were even food exports happening during the crisis.
(also for most countries oil is a national security good that they have to import ... this has been a defining problem of the 20th century.)
1. Our [read 'us' as being either 'my country' or 'human civilization'] food supply needs to be sufficient to provide adequate nutrition to all living humans.
2. Our food supply needs to be robust against failures in production, transportation and distribution which could be regional, widespread, and last several months or years.
3. Our food supply needs reach all individuals, so that no individual person lacks adequate nutrition.
4. Our food supply needs to grow at a sufficient pace to match population growth.
5. Our food supply needs to be 'sustainable' [used in the sense of 'our agricultural practices shouldn't lead to future shortfalls' rather than 'environmentally friendly'].
6. Our food supply needs to be 'environmentally friendly' [as in, minimizing pollutants, energy costs, land use, and damage to native plant and animal species].
7. Our food supply needs to be 'ethical' [as in, the moral rights of the individuals who participate it and the animals which constitute it need to be respected; what moral rights the people and animals possess is left as an exercise to the reader].
8. Small Farmer Proposition: Individual farmers as well as corporations and state-owned organizations should be able to participate in agriculture.
9. Mercantilism Proposition: Rich countries should not be able to crush the agricultural sector of poor countries through protectionism.
This isn't intended as a strict ordering of priority, but I personally care a lot more about making sure everyone is fed than some of the other issues, and I'll note that if we're not producing enough food, the inadequacy of our food distribution and feeding programs is kind of a moot point. My very-controversial opinion is that that famines are very, very bad and that we should heavily over-invest in preventing them. There are obviously limits to all investments, but it's one of the Four Horsemen for crying out loud.
Unsurprisingly, fixing all of the problems with agriculture is a complex problem, or else we wouldn't be talking about it because it would already be solved, and it's probably going to require many solutions, policies, regulations, technologies and programs to fix, and many of those are going to create more problems that will have to be addressed in turn.
But policy-wise, I think you really want the biggest, dumbest, least likely to fail solutions for the biggest problem of "no famines". Encouraging over-production creates other problems, like depressing wages for farmers and farm workers, both domestic and internationally, but it does a really, really good job of keeping famine at bay, at least domestically. Even in the ways it is prone to gaming or corruption, it still provides a more than adequate food supply. [This is a risk with provisions built on stockpiling; it is much easier for corrupt individuals associated with the program to just not stockpile and pocket the money, or sell stockpiles, or otherwise not do their job, and it can go on for years without being discovered, until you need those stockpiles and it turns out they never existed.]
So even if over-production creates other problems, or is "economically inefficient", I'd much rather see over-production continue, and additional policies, regulations and programs be added to address other concerns, both the problems over-production creates, and the problems it doesn't address, like the adequate distribution of food.
And why should food be cheap that farmers have to spend more than it takes to buy the food?
Regardless it’s moot as commodity crops in the USA is mostly (over)grown for feed or ethanol. It’s a disaster because the cost to environment and water is never taken into account.
And then there is california with its 45 billion dollar Ag income of speciality crops. Most of it is fruits and nuts going to export. 38-39 billion is production costs(at minimum wage rates). The actual food we eat is coming from South America and Mexico. It’s cheap because we are importing our food and not because we overproduce food crops.
Produce doesn't keep very long; you can't keep a large store of it in case this year's crop fails. You also cannot suddenly ramp up production in the event of catastrophe; it takes months between planting and harvest. Instead, you have to produce much more than you think you need, so that in the unlikely event that your yield is half of what you anticipated, there is not a food crisis.
You also have to destroy the excess when it's not needed, so that you don't distort the market, or acclimatize it to extremely cheap food.
Deliberate overproduction is a good use of government funds. It stops people from dying.
Most of what we overproduce is wasted. We import and export food now. We know how to preserve and process food now. Or converted into processed food. For example: high fructose corn syrup is everywhere. And it’s a lab created by product of our excess corn production. Overproduction and cheap food is causing disease and obesity and waste and environmental degradation.
We can synthesize food in fermentation tanks. We can grow food indoors and in containers and without soil. Having said that..it’s important distinguish between the various kinds of crops we grow..commodities like corn, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar beets, canola, soy etc. and then we have tomatoes and kale and herbs and spices. Everything can be frozen, dehydrated, processed and rationed. Every tilled field extracts a cost from the soil. Every pass of the tractor or every cross country trip to deliver goods is a fossil fuel expense. We haven’t figured ways to use renewable energy in Ag. We save water through drip tapes but we use mountains of plastic. Not to mention the tractor runs to lay it down and to remove it. We grow food without soil and save water but we use electricity with indoor productions.
No matter how you see it, production extracts a cost. Over production is more expensive. Over production a population that is growing exponentially costs even more. We should predict our needs(possible now), forecast expenses(possible now) and budget and ration resources..especially non renewable resources and not fritter them away with wasteful food over production.
We grow a lot of food, but a lot of the same thing: starch (maize, potatoes, wheat) and meat (beef, chicken, pork). Those were great when the problem was to few calories, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. We still eat as if we were starving.
It would be great if it were easier to encourage farmers to grow a variety of non-starchy vegetables -- including having quick-service restaurants that would serve them. That would take a pretty substantial reconfiguration of the American diet, but it would be better for us.
What is anyone doing to help them get out of it? Is there anything out there for recovering farmers?
I'm not sure this is the case. It seems like we'd just move even further towards large agribusiness and automation and away from the mythos of the yeoman farmer. Agriculture is far from a free market, and this nostalgia is one of the reasons why (along with more concrete, rational reasons like national security). The idea that a reduction in labor supply would cause prices to rise isn't as much of a given in a market like this, especially after the market shifts to adjust. I find it very hard to believe that the type of family farmer-owner you describe is a necessary pillar of our food production system.
Why? Why is working in agriculture more praiseworthy than in a service job?
I think I understand the sentiment, but I don't agree with it. I am not grateful to small farmers, at least, not especially. I suppose I'm glad that everyone is playing their part, but I feel this way about anyone contributing to our society. They sell nothing that I cannot get just as good and cheaper from large and industrial farms.
I work on something that I would argue many people "need" in their life. But I don't expect anyone to be grateful to me. Of course they shouldn't. I'm doing my work for my own benefit, mostly. I think very little about the end users whose lives are made slightly easier by my work. I am certainly not doing my work out of a sense of altruism toward their well-being. I suspect that most farmers are the same. The production is too far removed from the consumption. This is not therapy, massage, teaching, or housekeeping. This is business.
To the extent small farmers do think of me, I hope they realize that I would rather pay a dollar less for the same eggs, even if it means they don't get to keep working their ideal job. It's a little sad, but I have bills, and childcare, and rent to pay. Those things are no less important than the expenses of a farmer.
But you might want to re-think your position, because you can also be on the receiving end. That big egg grower? He may feed the chickens exotic chemicals if it means they lay more frequently, in order to produce your one-dollar-cheaper eggs. Those same chemicals may reach any females in your household, either through the eggs or the groundwater, and may do interesting things to their monthly cycles. And so on with other chemicals and other kinds of farmers. It might be worth a buck to support smaller farmers, presuming that they see their customers as human beings who can't be fed that stuff.
That being said, it seems your idea is a counterfactual. If it isn't, I'd love to know, but I don't see any evidence after brief searching that there are health benefits to eggs from small farms.
We are not a microserice entity where each part _only_ needs to know their bit. Each person is expected to get by themselves which means that we need to care about how things are done.
It's why we try hard to educate our kids to know how things work, but as was said, production is separated from consumption, which to me is a big hurdle.
> Food is a major mechanism by which people are exposed to pollutants. Diet is thought to account for up to 90% of a person's PCB and DDT body burden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor#Routes_of_...
To me, it’s worth the extra dollar for the eggs if it supports a more sustainable model of farming. Food production is at the heart of our society, yet we’ve become distanced from it.
The cheap clothes, the cheap food — they’re not actually cheap. We’ve just ignored the cost of the externalities. The polluted waterways, full of nitrogen from industrial farms; the antibiotics; the rising co2 levels from damaged pasture that no longer sequesters carbon, and the trucks and airplanes that ship out-of-season produce across the world...
I wonder if there is anything more emotionally negative about losing a farm than losing any other multigenerational family business.
I'd think it's more emotionally negative than the closure of the family mine, steel mill, or other such businesses where (typically) you don't have generations of children growing up on-site, playing around, and developing fond childhood memories. It's not just the dangerous workplaces that will have a reduced family connection when compared to a farm. Generations of kids probably won't spend as much time in the family medical clinic, law office, bank, design firm, etc. as they would on the family farm.
Maybe this is closer to the emotional negativity of losing a farm: after clientele dwindles, the multigenerational family restaurant with an upstairs flat has to be sold off. The family must move away, and now the space is an Applebee's.
The thing about farmers' suicide rates being uniquely bad has been debunked a bit, although the numbers are undeniably quite bad. It just seems to me a lot of unnecessary speculative baggage is being added onto the whole thing for some reason.
The problem is one of scale. If a small farmer is underleveraged, its simply not worth the time to farm. The return on equity is too low. If he levers up too much, then every season is literally betting the farm.
(With the caveat that the size of the equity stake and rate of leverage vary very much from crop to crop. Grains are very different than fruits and vegetables)
Farmers (well, I'm speaking mainly about livestock farmers here) spend their lives dealing with death, and doing cost/benefit analysis. When it's time to send an animal to slaughter, they do so. When the vet says some expensive procedure is not likely to work, they kill the animal, even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital. They have the weapons to deal with it.
So when a farm is failing, and they are in late middle age, they are more comfortable than average saying, ok, I gave it a try, it didn't work out, I can't start over doing something else. The skill I have spent my life learning is when to give up, and I've got the tool to do it.
Living among farmers (France) I can confidently say they have no emotional attachment to their animals. For them it's just raw material.
"[The 2016 cdc study] counted a lot of farmworker suicides as farmer suicides...so what's really happening is there is a suicide epidemic in migrant farmworkers. Through the magic of data-fudging it became a rash of farmer suicides, and then through the magic of the farm lobby farmworker suicides became a federal opportunity for funding farmers. Who when they're in legitimate financial trouble already have a thing we all have called bankruptcy law..."
Googling for the 2016 cdc farm suicide study reveals they have retracted the study back in June 2018: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-retracts-study-that-found-f... https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/
Sarah Taber had a recent twitter thread also questioning the therapy efforts as possibly ineffective if those with power in a farming community exert toxic traits: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658
I have to think that they wouldn't want to remove someone's ability to pay their debts. But I also imagine that when you get to bankruptcy, it isn't about that anymore.
Corn land in Iowa runs, say, 5-10k/acre depending on quality and location. 640 acres per square mile. 3.8 million on the low end to buy one square mile...but the Chapter 12 debt limit is $4,153,150.
That doesn't count the 6 figure capex for the equipment, buildings, and the 5 figure spend for seeds,
It's typically at the 2-3000 acre level where farms become economically viable.
It's basically impossible to go from the city to a commodity corn, pig, or cow farmer.
Disclaimer: I have been involved in efforts to increase the limit.
https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...
I followed your link. She describes the problem as "predatory communities eating themselves alive". That sounds far from objective and painfully lacking in empathy.
The reasons I suspect that it's a machine are:
1. The voice sounds really familiar.
2. The person (or machine, but henceforth I'll just say person) read the names of the authors but never gave his own name.
3. The person had unusually long but consistent pauses between sentences.
4. The person read a few clauses strangely in a way that I don't think a real person, or at least a native English speaker, would have. The clauses were a little strangely worded, but the intent becomes clear as soon as you read the whole sentence. So although it's not impossible that a real person and native speaker would have gotten it wrong, they would have immediately reread the sentence with the correct inflection.
5. I can't imagine a real person reading such an emotional piece in such an unaffected manner.
All that said, if it is text-to-speech, it's the best I've ever heard. But you can see how I feel bad about saying all this. It implies this is either a fantastic text-to-speech program or a questionable VO artist. If this was a real person and that person is reading this, I apologize. I mean no disrespect.
Republicans in 2017 suddenly talked about how great stock returns / GDP / unemployment were doing when they spent 8 years saying they didn't reflect the true economy and the jobless rate was abominable. Now democrats are focusing on median income growth / GINI index / student loan default rates etc after saying everything was great for years. Statistics are just used as tools to accomplish policy goals and win arguments.
Perhaps we should do the same with GDP, since as income inequality grows it can continue to grow while suffering increases
Wealth is fundamentally something produced - absent generations of labor and progress things tend to be fairly bleak by default unless they are exceptionally fortunate.
Farmer Suicide occurring from unmanageable debt, is also a well-known phenomenon in India,
But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that
edit - there is a vicious little set of incentives in certain corporate environments that almost guarantees bullying and fucked up mind games unless the manager is some kind of a saint. Mix stack ranking and any kind of external weighting on a manager and they will comply with the weighting by hiring the person they can get to fail the stack ranking so as not to screw with their project team. And unless this person is lucky enough to be oblivious, they have just entered hell.
Maybe you are not welcome because you advocate "diversity aware hiring practices", not because you are a woman?
Yeah, we have only one woman programmer on our team of 14. She's also one of the superstars. (In most interviews, we ask questions because we wanted to find out what the candidate knows. In her interview, we asked questions because we wanted to learn things.)
This might not sound honest, but it's how I'm expected to talk
Loving the downvotes. I've literally been reprimanded for pointing out a pattern of sexist behavior -- 'cause apparently, counting to three before bringing it up to management is SO unfair
All of it sucks, and while I do not know your situation much, I'd say certainly keep on the lookout for better environments, and very specifically: find good/directional questions to ask in interviews that give you some leading indicators. I've worked for companies that seemed awesome at interview-time and then turned out to be toxic hell-holes. No company will say "we have a toxic culture"; you have to ask the right questions more subtly to get that info. (I wish I knew what those questions are; I haven't had to endure an interview process in many years; yes I realize how lucky I am; maybe others have suggestions?)
Not sure how many options you have, but keep them all open, the positive ones anyway, and I wish you the best.
Your original comment seems tangentially related at best. Gender issues, physicists, programmers, office politics... while the article is about farmers, economics, maybe genetics. I get you work with suicidal individuals, but beyond that superficial observation I don't see how what you originally wrote contributes. Maybe I'm just too thick. If you'll excuse me for saying so, you also seem to be spoiling for a fight.
FWIW just-barely-related top level comments tend to attract some downvotes.
You're probably just not being clear, but it looks like you agree with them. Just because they think they're being progressive doesn't mean they actually are.
This is a complex phenomena.
But if women start using more lethal methods we will see the ratio of male:female deaths by suicide change.
To prevent suicide you want to address the misery that causes people to feel suicidal, and since women report similar levels of misery we need to give them some focus, and that focus is currently weak in research and prevention efforts.
I've heard women attempt three times as much as men, but how much of that is explained by the fact that once you complete, you can no longer attempt. Had every one who succeeded failed, how many more attempts would they have added to the total?
It is kinda like the paradox where planes should have armor in the places they don't get shot, because the planes shot in those places are the ones which crash and are never in the data set to measure.
No, I don't think that at all.
Because we are seeing the beginnings of method substitution in the data, especially for older women.
> Why are they not using them now?
We don't know, which is why it's a complex phenomenom.
We can make guesses. We can guess that women find it easier to access support than men, that women are less isolated than men and so more likely to be found after an attempt, that the elements of contagion around suicide and self-harm prime men and women differently so they use different methods.
Research is tricky and we don't have much.
It describes the huge amount of services around that person trying to keep her safe.
https://twitter.com/SashaInquest
Twitter isn't a great format for this.
The coroner introduces the jury to the court and describes what their role is: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122801091794677761
Here's the coroner introducing the case: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122810288682803201
Here's the chronology of events: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122816136586899456
It seems strange at first that concern for apperance and tidyness but given that suicides usually involve skewed priorities.
> Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4][7] This greater male frequency is increased in those over the age of 65.[8] Suicide attempts are between two and four times more frequent among females.[9][10][11] Researchers have attributed the difference between attempted and completed suicides among the sexes to males using more lethal means to end their lives.[7][12][13] The extent of suicidal thoughts is not clear, but research suggests that suicidal thoughts are more common among females than among males, particularly in those under the age of 25.[11][14]
The method matter when it comes to outcomes. With suicide it means men die more, with domestic violence it mean women die more.
Addressing the misery that causes people to cause violence against themselves or others is a good idea. What ever priority we want to use for one is likely a good choice for the other.
As a new faculty member I had to scramble to find researchers in other departments with similar interests to mine and to join up with on a proposal. I had to trawl through their websites to specifically find women and it felt like stalking and it made me uncomfortable. Emailing these women felt creepy and selfish.
However I want to work with anyone I can. Were it not for this specific requirement I would happily had taken the time to contact people and get to know others organically.
Ultimately it’s nothing compared to the despondency you describe and I did get in touch with some great people that I hope to work with in the future. Perhaps this experience was necessary if jarring.
I cannot offer you anything other than good intentions. I’m an engineer and I work with fluid mechanics. I want to work with the people who do the actual work, not the parasites who do all the talking.
This sounds like the experience of almost every employee in every industry. Very, very few people get to work on truly influential and interesting problems. And from what I've seen at several big companies, no one simply gets asked to do that kind of work (in a meeting or otherwise). If you want to do that kind of work, you have to find a way to contribute yourself. If you wait for "duties" to be assigned to you, you'll get assigned the work no one else wants to do.
On one hand I get the idea of trying to assume positive intent because wrongly assuming negative intent can make a situation much worse, but I still hate the idea.
First, it gives negative intent the ability to hide and pretend to be positive intent. Not many people will do this, but the ones who do can use it to great effect and cause significant damage they won't be held accountable for.
Second, it contradicts our standard actions elsewhere. If a stranger asks a kid if they need a ride, do we tell the kid to assume positive intent? No, we inform them to assume negative intent. We measure the situation of either option on a case by case basis and only then determine what is safe to assume (and in the example I give, it is more prudent to assume negative intent).
Third, it has an implicit idea that positive intent is good enough. That isn't always the case. Sometimes it is, but especially when it comes to leaders in an organization, specifically those with power and compensation to match being a leader, the demand is higher than just trying to be positive. We need people who have the knowledge and experience to do more than just having positive intent.
When you higher a security expert, do you hire someone who will try to achieve security and count that as good enough, or is the demand for their to be realized results and failing to achieve those results lead to negative consequences unless there is adequate explanation.
When someone is parenting a child, is trying good be a good parent enough, or do we demand a certain level of competence in parenting and remove children from those who fail to reach a certain level?
Fourth, there is a double standard in application. Every time someone tells me to assume positive intent, they were assuming I didn't already have the positive intent in doing so. And dare you point it out, you will be seen as assuming negative intent about their assuming negative intent. This alone isn't really a major issue, but it generally represents a larger double standard on application of such rules.
intent can't separate actions from their necessary consequences, but it is important to consider before imposing additional consequences on a person.
how can you be so dismissive of men? I am a physics graduate student and I spend literally every waking minute of my life in lab. It's really embarrassing to admit, but it's been 3 years since I've had sex or had a social life outside of lab. This is self-imposed - I'm chasing a dream, but surely 3 years of complete isolation, devoid of intimacy of any kind can at least compare to being "left out of meetings"?
also as a Phd student you shouldn't expect to be "given work". You make research proposals and execute them, no?
Academia is a lot of things, but Feynman's era is long gone, the golden age of physics is in the past now. I don't know you, and I don't know your situation. But I have known a lot of people that may be like you, and I have know a lot of situations that may be like yours.
Generally, these days, grad school isn't about the work, it about the network. If you want to stay in the ivory tower, networking is your job. If you want to get out and do something else, go through the classes and just learn that stuff. Get the experience, but do not put your soul in this, you will not find the rewards you are looking for in a lab. Hell is other people, yes, but so is Heaven.
From this teeny-tiny bit of a comment that you left, almost nothing to reasonably go on really, it sounds like you need to get out of the lab. It sounds like you want a partner, a girl/boyfriend, and you should probably do that, and it is ok to do that. Save the python script, put down the polarizer, go to ask someone to a dinner. If your advisor freaks, so be it, they aren't a person that you should be trusting if they don't hold your well being above the work.
Do not put your advisor's career first, put yourself first. It's ok to do that.
Woah there. Your lack of sex is NOT my problem. And you're also describing almost exactly my experience in grad school, for most of my time there. Get out of the lab. Make some friends and blow off some steam. Maybe hire a sex worker, if that's such a priority for you.
The situation at my company is ridiculous. Men are literally being assigned to do work on the very topic of my PhD thesis. They're bewildered by the complexity, and the smart ones come to me for help. The others just wing it, and get shit results quickly.
I'm not a PhD student. I have a PhD and a decade of professional experience. I make research proposals and they're silently handed to men, and I'm kept out of the loop until they get stuck and drop a stinking-hot emergency in my lap. My proposals include reasonable research outlooks and timelines. But they ignore my expertise and expect me to produce 6 months of research in a week. Which could be entirely avoided by inviting the subject expert to meetings about the research she kicked off.
My point about the overworked men is that they're working hard but not smart, while I'm under-utilized. We'd all be happier, the company would be more successful, if I was kept in the loop. Sexism is bad for everyone, oddly enough.
I never said it was your problem, in fact I mentioned that my problems were "self-imposed". I simply stated that I have problems that exist as well, with comparable, or worse severity to yours, despite being male. I asked how you could so easily dismiss these problems. You then promptly dismissed my problems. Maybe people don't want to work with you because you have no social skills.
Also the solution to your problems is a lot less drastic than “hire a sex worker”, it’s doing the more common action of leaving your job.
In case of a management problem you may have a chance of turning each person to turn the tide?
Everybody always knows stuff doesn't work optimal but does not have the guts to change it. That's why we need strong women.
Alentejo, the part of the country where I work, has the greatest suicide rate in the country (~28 suicides/100k in the coast region, 19 suicides/100k in the interior region, when the national average is around 10 suicides/100k).
Some say isolation, ageing alone, the economic crisis and poverty and unemployment are to blame. I suspect alcohol consumption has a lot to do with it.
Just a few days ago someone I knew ended his own life. I was away visiting family, and sadly I could not attend the funeral. He knew my great grandfather. I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
>I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
Just out of morbid curiosity: if you were in this situation -- quite old, quite sick, the very fabric of your body reminding you it's time to go, wouldn't it make sense?
With a spouse, there's obvious pressure not to. Without one, I feel like I'd do it. Ideally, I'd go somewhere where assisted suicide's legal so that I can end things neatly -- much bureaucracy, such dignity. uwu Not have aid workers find some messy or creepy corpse and depress the locals. (At $1,500[0], though, that may be a luxury.)
0: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/1023/How-Californ...
I talked to some local people about it, and it seems his disease was treatable. I don't know if he was in pain, but I do know he was still working as usual until the day he took his life.