Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
With young people like college student Ben Salas dying, families and experts are searching for answers.
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It's the growing disparity in wealth.
I recommend taking matters into your own hands before taking your own lives.
Itâs a lot of things. Climate hopelessness, a political system that seems hellbent on maintaining this negative feedback loop, yes, the economic situation, but also a soulless life under late stage capitalism where itâs proven over and over again you matter less than a line going up, we are commodified at every turn, our personality traits are nothing more than economic indicators or data points to sell us more shitâŠwe live in a hostile world. And itâs hostile by humanityâs own making. And itâs soulless by our own making. Maybe humans used to die at 25 by a mountain lion attack more frequently, but some kind of purpose was found in that survival life. Depression and anxiety and a feeling of pointlessness are capitalism-made.
This problem seems so framed by experts as âwhy do these kids want to die?â When the question they should be asking is âwhat is society giving them to live for?â
I'm on a train trip across the U.S. today, so I will add what I see out the window: A landscape systematically strip-mined of beauty, meaning, and sense of place in service of extracting maximum profit from the people who have to exist in it.
Yup. That too.
We are detached from anything close to a life tied to meaning. All meaning was bought and sold. Our ancestors were turned into bricks to build the foundation of capitalism, and we arenât even that important anymore. Weâre the fuel that the massive engine of capitalism runs on. The machine is built. Now itâs running over capacity and more and more of us are needed to stoke the fires that keep the over-indulged engine running at max capacity to spit out some goddamn pitiful little line that means further excessive wealth for those who were born from the people who turned our ancestors into goddamn bricks.
And they ask, âwhy are kids so darn melancholy?!â
Please point to the bootstraps I may pull to fix:
Income disparity
Inflation
Price Fixing
Expensive Medical Care
Rising rents
Increasing Fuel Costs
College Debt
Climate Crisis
Subsidized Oil,Gas,Corn,Beef,Eggs
Water Rights Crises
Because if they exist I will pull them.
Mutual aid. It has a real shot at working because it crucially isn't about pulling yourself up, but people getting together to lift one another up.
And longer term, a lot of mutual aid organisations have explicitly revolutionary goals.
Agreed. A lot of these problems are generational and stem from a twisted view of individualism. The "I got mine" mentality.
My reply was more about the ambiguity of "take matters into your own hands." I cannot solve this with my own hands. I need help. Mutual aid networks provide that.
Do you have any particular examples you like?
Food not bombs is a decent name, although it's decentralised so every org will be different. If you search "food not bombs" + your city or state you're likely to find something. All these orgs are local and decentralised because it's a primarily anarchist method, but once you get in contact with one group they can point you towards others.