A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture (2013)

I don't think all (probably not even most) suicides have anything to do with having made a mistake that needs apologising in the first place.

i used to struggle a lot with suicidal thoughts. i kept wanting to get out from the loneliness and general sense of "well what's the point? nothing i do really matters". i felt like the world was broken and alternated between trying to enjoy myself as much as i could, and wishing i could make things better.

what helped me finally move past this was repeatedly trying and failing to kill myself. always someone would come by, or i'd change my mind, at the last minute. i internalized the idea that it's not possible for a person to experience their own death. i see it in terms of the multiverse; if someone dies in my timeline, their world track has diverged so far from mine that we cannot meaningfully exchange information. i see things like war and the holocaust as being more akin to network partitions than destroyed hardware. the big bang was the network splitting for the first time, and portions of it have been trying to reconnect ever since.

i have no idea whether this is true or not, but it's .. being free from those thoughts immediately forces me to think "well if i'm stuck here, i have to make things work better for myself, since leaving apparently isn't an option."

sometimes i think i DID successfully kill myself - years ago, on my first attempt in 2006 - and i'm in a purgatory now.

i see stories of "life extension technology" being developed, and i think it's entirely plausible according to "mainstream science" that people my age will be able to live indefinitely. everyone else tells themselves "well its because of this new technology" and in the back of my mind, i keep thinking that i won't have a choice - i'll be alive forever because you can only die once.

i'm sure this all sounds ridiculous to anyone hearing it, but honestly being able to put aside suicidal thoughts, and focus on improving my life, has been really, extremely helpful. it sounds like this guy has found another way (i.e. not involving believing immortality is the default state, or that you are already dead) to make it happen.

The other thing that got me very curious is how did a monk develop heart disease. I mean he must have been very very active and probably eating healthy.

I'm not a psychologist, so I won't comment on the _why_, but veterans have an extremely high suicide rate. http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2427 (the PDF link has the data)

    > Of the 147,763 suicides reported in 21 states, 27,062 (18.3%)
    > were identified as having history of U.S. military service
    > on death certificates

This article has some discussion on how this data is hard to collect: http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/21/us/22-veteran-suicides-a-day/

From that article:

    > A recent analysis by News21, an investigative multimedia
    > program for journalism students, found that the annual
    > suicide rate among veterans is about 30 for every 100,000 
    > of the population, compared with the civilian rate of 14 per
    > 100,000. 

I'd expect that after a war, you have a new population of people in this particular high-risk group...

> Hikikomori (shut-ins / NEETs) seem to be a real problem... real enough that they've entered Japanese Anime culture as a new character archetype.

Character archetypes don't have to be real... they have to be interesting. It's vastly more likely that a character in a new show who draws on a different character in an older show does so because that original character was popular than that it does so because society as a whole has moved closer to that character in personality.