I don't want to get into the habit of linking to my own comments, but I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082515 in the Bill Zeller suicide discussion and think it's related.
TL;DR: happiness is in your head. If you have money and still aren't happy, the next step is not "kill yourself" it is examine your head to work out how to be happy. If you dedicated years of your life to making money in order to be happy then it was misdirected effort, you should have spent the effort directly on happy. Working out how you can be happy and changing yourself so you can be, and are.
Biochemical/neural/medical disorders aside, that is.
TL;DR: happiness is in your head. If you have money and still aren't happy, the next step is not "kill yourself" it is examine your head to work out how to be happy. If you dedicated years of your life to making money in order to be happy then it was misdirected effort, you should have spent the effort directly on happy. Working out how you can be happy and changing yourself so you can be, and are.
In my experience, people kill themselves because they've already spent years or decades trying to find out how to be happy or even normal. Eventually, they give up hope and that is what leads to suicide.
I accept that's what they would claim to be doing, but I don't accept that's what they were actually doing. Not really.
You know how some people start startups and spend their time registering a company and designing a logo and imagining features and so on? Because they think that's what starting a business is, what it should be? But that's not how to actually start a successful business, building something which people value and then getting people to use it is how to actually start a successful business.
Is that true, or are people just trying to make themselves happy using the most obvious methods, ones that make other people happy, and it fails for them. It is not easy going against the grain, doing stuff that makes you happy that everybody else would laugh at.
TL;DR: happiness is in your head. If you have money and still aren't happy, the next step is not "kill yourself" it is examine your head to work out how to be happy. If you dedicated years of your life to making money in order to be happy then it was misdirected effort, you should have spent the effort directly on happy. Working out how you can be happy and changing yourself so you can be, and are.
Biochemical/neural/medical disorders aside, that is.