Since when did wanting to die become a meme?

A person commits suicide every 40 seconds. Also wanting to die is a meme.

When English indie band The 1975’s front man belted out the chorus to I Always Want To Die (Sometimes), I chuckled. It’s so absurd yet painfully true. The idea of “wanting to die” is prevalent in our everyday grumbles. Too much work? Gosh I feel like dying. Late for a meeting? Just let me die. Dinner’s not great? Omg somebody kill me now.

There’s no shortage of memes on the topic of wanting to die too.

But memes are just for laughs. Nobody is really serious about dying, right?

The statistics say otherwise: a person commits suicide every 40 seconds globally. Take a moment for that to sink in.

I think back to my life and wonder where the suicide cases are? It wasn’t until I was writing this essay that I recall the incident when a schoolmate had committed suicide. We were 16, or 17. I’ve never heard his name before, they said he was a quiet boy. Details about his death were passed around in hushed whispers, to the point that they seemed more like rumours than anything else. Not long after, exams consumed our existence and we didn’t talk about him anymore.

When things get tough in life, we joke about “dying” so that the problems will go away. It’s not meant to lessen the severity of suicide. A self-deprecating joke is just a way to defuse the tension.

At some point however, the joke isn’t enough to make one feel better. The problems never go away, and it seems like there are nothing but problems.

Suicide rates are rising in many parts of the world, and still when somebody takes their life it’s a mystery to us. We’re plagued with a million whys and not enough answers are coming up.

One person dies of suicide every 40 seconds

When K-pop star Sulli took her life, many immediately pointed to the toxic online culture in Korea as the main cause of her depression and suicide. Yet, if we look at her life as a case study, she seems to have the life many can only dream of. She’s got beauty, success, fame — three things not every K-pop wannabe can or will have. Let’s say our guesses are right and the internet trolls are really to blame, were her career successes not a source of satisfaction to at least put the online vitriol into perspective? Or let’s increase the stakes and say that indeed, the K-pop industry is filled with dark terrible things behind the curtains, and the industry as a whole was too much to bear for her, could she not have retired from K-pop to pursue another career?

Her death is a real tragedy and I’m by no means trivialising what happened to her. But on the matter of suicide I’m not at all concerned with one’s right to choose as I am with one’s right to live.

A few years ago, I watched an interview about the life of North Korean defectors by Youtube channel Asianboss. One of the defectors Kim Pil-Ju’s story stands out. As a teenager, he risked his life to give his best shot at freedom. After narrowly escaping death (multiple times), he finally found freedom in South Korea. Despite all of that, he once contemplated suicide. He realised he had been chasing after materialistic goals, just like his peers, and it didn’t make him happy.

His story really puts suicide into perspective. That when surrounded by death, life had a value, no matter how small. Putting your life on the line to fight for a dream was worthwhile. But when society hands you a livelihood, and you’re expected to fall in line instead, life loses its ground.

But on the matter of suicide I’m not at all concerned with one’s right to choose as I am with one’s right to live.

In the modern society we live in, it’s not just easy to follow the crowd, you’d be a fool not to do so. The storyline is almost identical throughout the world: study hard, get a job, and you’re pretty much set. What we get, if we follow through with the steps, is a materially stable life. Why wouldn’t anyone want this? The problem is that this storyline does not take chances on dreams and possibilities. We don’t need to dream. We just need to pick something from the current list of money-making activities and call it “passion.”

We stop thinking by ourselves, for ourselves, even congruently with ourselves anymore. In following the daily trudge of the masses, we lose ourselves completely to it — our drive, our dreams, our identity, our reason.

The right to live is a right we all have to fight for ourselves. No organisation can hand us the ultimate right to live if we do not uphold it for ourselves.

But do you know what you’re fighting for in life? Do you know what you want to fight for? And more importantly, are you willing to take a chance to discover what matters to you in your life?

And the day we start fighting for a life that’s ours, will also be the day we stop making memes about wanting to die.