Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kiloreux 2767 days ago
I don't think it's the "notice" part here. It's the "caring" part. To know that if something happens to you all your relatives and friends won't care or feel anything for losing you is the part that hurts, as for noticing. For sure they'll notice.
3 comments

The question isn't whether people will notice if you die. It's whether people will notice if something bad happens. It's not a euphemism:

> One in nine didn't feel like they had anyone in their lives who they could rely on in a crisis.

It's entirely unsurprising that lonely people think other people won't notice if they're in a crisis -- that's what being lonely is.

There's a song called "How Do You Get That Lonely?", about a boy who committed suicide, in which the last lines of the chorus are:

    How do you feel so empty
    you want to let it all go
    How do you get that lonely
    and nobody know
But this has never made any sense to me -- surely, if the problem is that you're so lonely that the best option available to you is killing yourself, it's to be expected that other people weren't familiar with your situation.
Other people may well understand the situation all too well, but have no idea what to do about it. That can include professional help in some cases. Depression is a bad thing and outsiders often have no way to penetrate to the victim and say they care.
>you're so lonely that the best option available to you is killing yourself

The best option available would always be to meet a random person on the street because ending up with a bad person would not be as bad as dying.

People who agree would obviously do that instead of killing themselves, so you're just preaching to the choir.
My point is that suicide isn't usually a rational decision.
That depends entirely on your evaluation criteria. Your point is only that you don't want to commit suicide. Other people may.
Most people who commit suicide are not accurately judging their situation, due to a long term mental illness like depression, or often due to a momentary emotional upset. Just because someone "wants" to do something doesn't mean that it would actually serve their interests, and it doesn't even mean that they would want it one hour in the future.
Maybe in general there's a lack of caring, but I think there's more at play.

I have friends (I know care about me) who simply can't have a serious conversation about hard or uncomfortable subjects. They wont engage... When everything is sunshine and rainbows this seems just fine, but when you're in tears over something, or feeling really bad, it's almost scary to see.

That's something weird about us~. We all notice. Very rarely do people fail to see. They often stay in their persona due to weaknesses, fatigue or fear.