I am 36 and I have been thinking about suicide a tiny bit lately. But I will share my perspective with you, hopefully to draw a picture how different circumstances can be. I live in Ukraine and my optionality in life collapsed the day the war started. I had a good life, good income and traveled a lot. I used to dream of a career in big tech and life in different countries just to give it a taste. Now I am not able to leave the country because I am a male of conscription age. My city is being attacked by drones daily, and ballistic rockets a few times a month. Witnessing your country getting wrecked with rockets and drones is hell of an experience. Businesses, electricity plants, infrastructure, gas stations becoming rubble. There is also little hope in a resolution of this soon. I have to work on a job which provides a reservation from military service if I don’t want to fight, otherwise I will be picked up on the street to join the military.

I have it so much better than a lot of my countrymen, but holy shit does this suck and it is not getting better anytime soon. The hopelessness gets you.

Software engineering is one of my last remaining pillars of life remaining more or less intact. At least I get to write some code and make computers do things.

Life is a strange thing.

It is sad to see so many smart, inquisitive and dedicated people who come to this site feel this way. I suspect a lot of it may be because of how dedicated and passionate people are about their work and their skill and it's getting harder to make a living with it or feel like they are being valued for it.

I strongly encourage everyone to try keeping a gratitude journal - just write three positive things that happened to you today.it can really change the way you look at your life.

A lot of the suicidal ideation has to do with lack of agency and control over your situation in life. I am a firm believer that you need to take a step back and look at the possibilities in your life. You are not just a SWE/whatever your job is - you are a problem solver, someone with curiosity, someone dedicated someone who is playing other roles in life than just an employee - a friend, a parent, neighbour, child etc

If you feel like you have no control over the path you are in - change the path, don't stop the walk. You can move to a different career, different country, different partner. Sure some of our circumstances cannot be changed - but don't make the arbitrary standard of life you set for yourself determine whether your life is worth living.

Because it's highly relevant, I'm going to paraphrase a comment I made last week:

I think a big part of the problem is that middle-aged men are at the apex of their expectations to be successful in the eyes of society, and we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1]. Émile Durkheim coined it in his book Suicide, written not too long after the Industrial Revolution.

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

I think for a lot of men, it feels like just at the time when we should be able to rest on our laurels a bit after having worked so hard to play the game society told us to, the rules have been ripped out from under us and any sense of security going forward is lost. We feel too old to learn the new rules of the game in time to play well, but not old enough to be able to abstain from playing.

It's a psychologically very difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

To all those reading this thread, suicide isn't the answer. I know you've heard this and it's not special coming from me.

We all heard it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem and so many other quotes. I've lost a lot of people growing up to suicide and the impact it has on those who continue to live on that you love is traumatic.

The man who raised me like I was his son told my mother that he would never commit suicide. He had stage 4 cancer that eventually took his life on my 17th birthday. His reason for enduring through the pain was to teach me that suicide is never the answer because it hurts all those around you.

Although he passed away on my 17th birthday of his illness, he forever changed my life in so many ways. Each and every day I aim to be a better man because of how he loved me.

Please take a moment to utilize this time you have to change those around you. You don't need to create a massive company, be a CEO, have a career people admire, etc.. all you need to do is be someone that inspires others to improve like John did for me.

I'm 40, and I am not suicidal, but I've definitely felt those thoughts more than ever in my life in the past two years. I wake up two or three times every night from anxiety dreams. I began drinking too much, but luckily I was able to get out of that habit. Between (some of) the effects of AI on my career and hobbies, and the effects of politics on my country and even my own town, and many more problems, I can count more things I feel love and passion for that have been demeaned or destroyed in the past decade than such things that persist.

And this isn't even to mention money, and what my future is looking like, despite having every possible intrinsic and external advantage in The Greatest Country on Earth.

I've had one same-aged friend kill themselves, and I try to be attentive to the signals being put out by everybody in my circle.

This is me. I was in a leadership role at a large institution and made the mistake of joining a promising startup (great partners, good funding). In 2021, the company went down, and since then I have been rejected for everything. And by everything, I literally mean every possible way to get money in. I have only been scraping the leftovers at the bottom. Recently, I joined an outsourcing company to do digital transformation work (I have deep AI experience). It's shocking to see people getting hired with 0-1 interviews who then prove to be incompetent just because they are the right caste.

I turn 39 this year and am just finding more and more ways to become irrelevant. I can’t be the only one so these stats make sense to me. Fortunately, Australia has a good start on what mental health care should look like and its subsidised (or at least a few sessions are).

I was made redundant in August and despite being a 20 year career vet who has done many different langs, I still can’t find a new job.

My skills as a developer are no longer required because the all knowing robot can (apparently) do what I need to do. I’ve heard multiple companies now using it to ship stuff all the way into production without any human intervention at all. This feels to me like driving the car without holding onto the wheel.

The side hustle I had of writing books to teach people development is over — they can just ask the robot instead. I was writing a new book about how developers can train up others, but have put that on hold (due to losing my job which was that thing, and because of AI)

I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do here to provide for my family.

I solo founded and run a men's suicide prevention nonprofit organisation in the UK. It's early stage bootstrapped at the moment but I have long-term plans.

I've facilitated 200+ talking meetings at this organisation and another I was involved with previously. Anecdotally, the average attendee at the male-only meetings is ~45 years old, has some level of issues with personal and/or professional boundaries, has had suicidal ideation more than once, and has made plans for or attempted suicide more than once.

There is some form of survivorship bias in the above, but I get a lot of pride from our groups keeping men alive. We haven't lost anyone in 2 years.

Ooof, not even that old here and I'm feeling that. Things are pretty bad all over. Gets hard to want to be around. AI took my job recently and I've been moved back to helpdesk and just awaiting further layoffs. There's not much fun in intellectual pursuits any longer as LLMs have taken it all. All my fun hobby projects are just jokes now as anyone with money can easily outdo me with an LLM. Sad times...

44. Three kids. Getting divorced. I live in my car now. Why? Because I have zero trust any job will come back. Also: I enjoy living in my car. I remain highly active building and building and building with agents. I am very up to speed. Have been getting interviews. But none of them convert. I think all the companies capable of paying my salary needs are going to be only downsizing forever. So that leaves do my own company or a startup. Neither of which cover my alimony or child support. I missed my last interview last week - I think they genuinely pulled the req, simply - not hiring the role anymore due to AI uncertainty.

I don’t know about everyone else. My approach is to cut costs to the absolute bone and live like a monk.

I have no idea what is happening to my employability. The only thing I can do is get as lean as possible. Thus - life in a van / car.

The things that motive me to stick around are holding the people ruining this world to account, documenting it and trying to thwart their efforts, a curiosity in seeing just how bad the climate crisis gets (how do we react, can it wake us from our stupor), and a desire to learn and help others (whether volunteering or just life advice). An absurdist lens helps provide some levity and not take things so seriously.

I had to step back from my career to focus on a mobility issue and at this point I don't know if the job path will continue to be there or even if I care. I'm focusing on small pleasures for now - cup of tea, exercise, peace and quiet. Music and film help provide a sense of meaning and catharsis.

I would have guessed middle-aged men and women, not just men. I think the reason is being the sandwiched generation.

Most of us had/are having kids late. Now our parents are old/getting old and in need of our support. Along with that, parenting expectations have never been higher. So between shuttling kids from one thing to another all week, and taking parents to medical and other appointments, there isn’t much time or energy left to enjoy anything. It’s exhausting.

Combine that with someone already depressed, and any unfortunate trigger could push them over the edge. It’s partly anecdotal and some of what I’ve observed.

I'm 40 and am accepting I will be single forever. I'm in shape / constantly lifting weights, dress well, work hard on maintaining a good attitude, and am financially stable etc. But not a great face, and extremely skinny (Think Oppenheimer or Bin Laden), am not funny or charismatic, and am not into dogs. Dating is a kick in the butt. Women don't "Feel the spark"

Middle aged family men are kinda invisible. The government only sees them when it needs taxation. Kids only see them when they need money. His wife ignores him too, or rather, they ignore each other as roommates.

They can’t escape because all those legal and moral responsibilities. They have to wait patiently until retirement —- if their hearts allow them to live that long.

It's interesting to see this on the HN frontpage alongside an article about how American's social activity has steeply declined over the last 30 years [1]. To me these are very much related. We have less and less community than ever.

Then, at the same time, other aspects of our lives -- family raising and career -- are trickier than ever. Family raising these days takes more time than ever [2] (which admittedly is good and bad). Career growth in the era of stagnant wages has been tough for many fields of work, and AI threatens many of the remaining ones.

It's hard to feel fulfilled these days: our social lives are poor, and we're constantly busy doing things that don't necessarily help us get ahead.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50089921 [2] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/01/09/millenni...

44, unemployed since July, on a cross country train trip trying to decide if it is worth going on. Stood on a bridge a bit too long the other day just wondering what the point is.

It is over for a lot of us in IT. It isn't going to get better, it is going to get worse very quickly. Rather than tell myself a convenient lie, I'd rather try to figure out why to keep living in a world like this.

Anyone going through the same thing, I hope you find something worth living for.

I’m college educated, have a successful career doing things that I enjoy to a decent degree, have a wonderful house, wife and kid. If you showed my life to my younger self and asked “would you take this life?” I would have answered every single time wholeheartedly “yes! I’m living the dream!”

But I only recently truly accepted that the life I am living (and have created for myself and family) is actually the dream. We so often miss the greatest times in our lives because we are too focused on the unknowns of the future.

My older brother killed himself nearly 20 years ago at the age of 50. I don't think he ever considered himself successful. He had financial problems, alcoholism, and was lonely without any lasting relationships. When his resources were exhausted he just ended his life. There was nothing in the estate of value since his assets, such as they were, were less than tax liability he had accumulated. The owner of the house he had been renting tried to get us siblings to pay for repairs and cost of disposal, but we demurred (and told the court we'd be happy if that owner was named executor; they declined the honor.) I think his car just disappeared off the street one day, probably towed to an abandoned car lot and auctioned. At least the state recouped some of the owed taxes that way.

I am not much of a gamer and sure as hell don't keep up with many people that I gamed with 20 years ago but there was one guy that I would talk with ever few years. I talked with him and a few months later he was gone. I don't know why his suicide hit me so hard. Maybe because I connect him to a different phase of my life. Maybe because he was the guy who was the life of chat. I don't know.

What I do know is that I wish he could have known how many people would miss him.

This is a very distressing article. If you're considering suicide, please don't.

The graph shows that suicides overall are down from 30 years ago, while the same cohort that was higher in 1985-2005 (25-44) is now higher in 2005-2025 (45-64). Perhaps there is something about the generation more than the situation or the age of the individual.

I am not suicidal and I am lucky to have loving people who I also love around. That said, with all the rapid changes in the software engineering industry and in life in general, I sometimes wonder what I am doing with my life and why.

It's like plenty of things are happening by inertia, but none of them bring any joy or make lots of sense. In such moments, I really envy people who have the courage to work on something they truly believe in. I have quite a few people to take care of, which requires financial resources, so I am not there yet.

Makes a lot of sense to me. If you're young and things aren't going so well then at least you can have hope that you'll be able to turn it around. You have time on your side. That all goes away when you start to get to middle age. You're locked in by your earlier choices.

Now I'm here staring at AI with the reality that if it makes my skills irrelevant I'll have no fallback, and I'll be at an age where reskilling is extremely hard and I'm still nowhere close to retiring.

Tomorrow a article, with the addition "... Women most affected".

In my circle, I've objectively had both the best and the worst life. I can tell when people are thinking about suicide because they reach out to find out if I've done myself in yet lol.

For them, I keep going. I think because both the best and worst times in my life were roughly due to my own decisions, I always have the idea that I will get back to the good times.

I see this a lot speaking to friends and just in general online discourse. Too much news and social media. Perhaps it will all go to shit. AI is definitely changing the entire world, our industry being the first on the chopping block (maybe).

But, what can you do. There's always been injustice in the world. You just never used to hear about it 24/7/365.

Now you wake up and read about it on the little screen, later you see it on the big screen, talk about it at work, then go to bed and read about it on the little screen again. I have friends who can't even talk to me for 30 minutes without just bringing the entire mood down with doomerism.

Idk, I just do sports, work and spend time with whoever I can in whatever little free time I have left over. I had to forcibly block every news site and social media via an app otherwise I'd get addicted again and become a cynic. Reddit is by far the worst for me, insta is 2nd.

Unlike 95% of people I speak to I actually love my life and enjoy my work, and just hope that AI doesn't steal that from me.

Growing up as a first generation immigrant in a country with some of the worst inequality in the world taught me to just ignore everything but what you need to do.

This is something I sometimes feel guilty about now that I have a comfortable life. But, I feel like trading that ignorance for constant awareness just leads to anxiety and guilt and is a poor trade I don't have to make.

Edit: also this is just 1 factor. There are other factors like actual poverty, loneliness etc. I don't meant to put forth the idea that it's purely the 24 hour news cycle and social media that's to blame, just 1 aspect I see most often in my life.

But for beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

I graduated college in 1992.

2 male friends from college died by their own hand within the last decade.

By most measures, they were successful professionals.

Before everyone jumps in with their favorite ad-hoc reason, take a look at the graph first. The headline is technically true, but barely. For the 45-64 age group, the suicide rate is barely different than it was in 2012 and 2018, and about the same as it was in 1985 (24 vs 22-23 per 100k.) Seems like all age groups have held steady (10-24 25-44 and 75+) or trended up a bit (45-64 and 64-75) since the early 2000's, after dipping from the 1980s.

I am in my late 40's and I am struggling more than I ever have in my entire life. I have a great marriage and 3 children and I have a good job with good income. I have nothing to be unhappy about.

And yet my children are grown now and mostly gone. I feel a profound sense of loss.

I feel like I'm entering the age where I'm a prime candidate for any myriad of diseases and I get so anxious every time I get a symptom. I go to the Dr. a lot. I went to the ER twice every year in the past 3 years. Ironically, its occurred to me that if I do have something terminal, I don't have to go on like this. And I like the thought of that. I'm both terrified of death and also really looking forward to it.

I used to enjoy my work, but AI has made it so that I just kind of show up and ask it for things. Anyone could do what I do. There's no sense of accomplishment in anything.

The worst thing about this is that I have every reason to be the happiest person here. So the fact that I feel the way that I do actually makes me a pretty bad person and that makes the whole thing feel a whole lot worse.

Late 40s here, on antidepressants for the anxiety side more than depression.

I can totally see why this is highest in my demographic.

An underlying cause is quiet desperation, there are elements of failure in ones' own life, perhaps pressure caused deliberately by others as they step on you to get to the top. Perhaps it's the fact you start to notice death, your parents, family, and friends. You also see the beginning of your own aged based health decline.

Until society can support genx and older with their goals at this age, instead of telling them to get talking in men's groups, or saying it's alright to show emotions to a generation that grew up without this culture, this will probably continue.

I don't have an answer to fix it, but what I do feel would help is if was treated as a high risk stage of life without stigma. So 45+ men or menopausal women, can take time off to adjust, spend more time with family and friends, and it be treated as normal process, like a sabbatical or maternity leave or just a wind down from society like partial retirement.

This will never happen obviously because it means as a society we have to have a better welfare state and drop the ingrained idea that if you're not working you're a problem (not working is NOT the same as not contributing or benefiting to society, but people conflate this).

Perhaps the AI age will force us to fix that due to mass unemployment, the way COVID kick started remote working.

I believe every death is unique and not a statistic.

However, since the article is about "men" and "suicide". There is substantial evidence that suggest women (especially young girls) attempt suicide more than men... while men are are more likely to die from a suicide [1]

Does gender have a role in suicide? Maybe. But I would hesitate to generalize too much.

[1] I asked chatgpt to back up my claims. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

at 40 I became a woman and never been happier

I think about suicide every day. Thankfully death still scares me. If I didn’t have some of the responsibilities that I have then I probably would have drank myself to death and accidentally overdosed on pills just due to mixing both together.

I’m in the stereotypical category. I’m college educated, have a successful career doing what I enjoy, have a great house, wife and kids.

I deal with OCD, negative thoughts I can’t get control of, low self esteem, paranoia, and trust issues. It’s impossible for me to feel loved. However, I’m one of those silent sufferers and no one would be the wiser for the most part. Death feels like a sweet escape after having a few drinks. However, I’m too OCD to actually kill myself because I have too many final tasks and arrangements to finish up so that I can leave everything perfectly in order. The guilt aspect is serious too.

Middle-age is a serious thing to face. It’s a super scary time on all fronts, because if you don’t already have your shit together, then you’re completely fucked if something happens.

Man this is for real. I’m 46 and I tell my therapist and my friends that I’m not suicidal but like… can we wrap this shit up already? (A tasteless joke stolen from Tom Segura)

I have been meditating on WHY I feel this way. On paper things are pretty good. I’m married. I have a job that is safe for now. I have kids. Two dogs. A house. Two cars.

But I feel really lonely and unseen and like I am a disappointment to everybody including myself. Like it makes sense I’m unseen because I’m unexceptional.

So I’ve done some things that have helped a little including scheduling lunches with friends and coworkers, more frequent date nights (especially double date nights), working out (setting and achieving even small pointless goals like mile time, distance, weight lifted, etc really helps).

All of that and it feels like I’m bailing water out of a sinking ship. It is barely enough to stay afloat and heaven help me if I skip a day or make a mistake…

It is hard to imagine doing this for another 30 years…

I used to think Soma was one of the more disturbing ideas in Brave New World. These days, I understand the temptation a little better.

I am 43 and only in the last few years have things turned better. I want to say that life is tough for different people from different parts of the world. For various reasons. But overall we have a set of systems that do not care.

The lack of friendship, care, love cannot be eased with money. I used to be crazy about startups. I used to want to live in New York (I am from Kolkata). I had a great run in my twenties but I crashed many years ago. Living in Germany helped a lot. I realized I was not loved or cared for. By myself mostly.

My parents love me but my dad has mental health issues which took a really bad toll on my childhood and teen years. I swept away the need for a love and care and replaced it with money. Many of us are doing this. The system needs most of us to slave. Now, I have been living the village life for about 6 years. I moved my parents as well. We have farms. I still write software, well, mostly generate them with LLMs.

There is a sense of purpose here that I started to feel. Over these last years, I have become more calm than I ever was. Happier, in a way I notice, every day. With less money than I ever had. Life is not about lots of achievements. We need meaning, love, purpose, care, friendships. We need slows walks, flowing water, walk in the rain, healthy food with zero labels. We need to grow our crops, care for animals, raise kids as a village.

I know I am typing this on a computer. But I no longer work for any tech company. I have a small consultancy client. I live as per a typical countryside routine. Most of my (whatever little savings) money is now invested in our farms where I work a few hours everyday, on time. Animals, dirt, mud, poop, crops, cleaning. All of it. Connected to how life is supposed to be. I used to hate glass buildings, still do.

Concrete, glass and everything about artificial spaces makes me sick. I am just one person, I do not have some research paper. But I know how I feel today vs a decade ago. Hope it helps.

Highest among non-married middle-aged men or all middle-aged men?

There have been plenty of periods in history with millenarian challenges, but I don't think there has been a period in history with so many different existential threats and uncertainties happening at the same time.

Between climate change, AI, economic instability, political catastrophes, various actual and impending wars, social media bot farms and trad media content farms, and entire industries that exist to lie about what's happening and pressure everyone to work and consume and live an ideal lifestyle with ideal productive values - there's quite a lot going on.

I am early fifties, and due to some sort of intrusive thoughts OCD-ish variant of ADHD, I have probably thought about suicide 25,000 times in the last ten years (not an overestimate). It is a several-times-per-day thing, if it’s not all day. Sometimes only an intrusive flicker, sometimes very much not. I have spent the last year or two dealing with burnout thinking about it regularly in depth; usually not for now, but for maybe ten years time when I believe it will be necessary.

I am a single man with no dependents who is struggling to work due to burnout, and I perceive that we are really not far off a world where young people will take seriously the idea that older people like me have had our time. I do not expect to be able to work for much longer because why would they let us keep our jobs or get new ones when we are taking away theirs? What can we teach them when we have built the tools that will destroy their livelihoods and wrecked the environment in which they live? Why should they listen to us at all?

Leaving a bit early may be the morally responsible thing for me to do. Understanding that living until I am dependent on care from the young is not going to be a good time when we are a despicable, despised generation, it’s an oddly liberating thought.

I wrote an article about youth mental health for my substack recently that touched on this. The suicide rate for the 50-59 demographic is far higher than the general population, but it collapses once you hit retirement age. If I had to guess, social supports for seniors plays a role.

Most people that age right now have no idea where they are going or where they will end up. And not even in their delusions can they pretend the world will somehow magically care about them in another 30 years.

Personally I have given up on hoping for a nice planned and well executed life up through retirement. My own skill set just isn't valued enough by the markets to set myself up separated from the festering human pits. Im just going to go for as long as I can just to see how things go at this point. I always did enjoy thrillers and tragedies, it sucks to be in one but it is better than being in nothing at all. And if the world just keeps getting crazier, maybe ill just join them in being crazy and maybe hopefully go out with a bang near the end.

Well, if you look around at this world, there ain't much hope for the future.

Guys should go back to the basics.

Back when we were in high school we were aiming to do the least amount of work to get through the year and spend the rest of the time hanging out with our mates.

A big part of our fault is also that we accept to get dragged by women into a territory that is not ours which is made up of large amount of introspection, extremely fine margins between good times and awful times and walking on eggshells with regards to social cues , the avoidance of social faux passes, planning years and years into the future down to the smallest detail .

That's the perfect recipe for depression for guys

We should go back to the basics and hangout with our mates trying to do the least amount of work as possible, play sports, banter with each other, take everything much less seriously and when we feel the need to have sex shoot for ONS or visit escorts or prostitutes and then go back to our mates.

Ancillary comment, From TFA:

    She said: “The evidence is clear that successive governments have failed to deliver on their promise to reduce suicide rates and make suicide prevention a priority. Today must act as a wake up call. The current approach is not working; we need meaningful action and proper funding if lives are to be saved.”

Sucks when friends dies. Cancer, accidents and so on is just terrible, but suicide really sucks. One of my old friends ended his life a couple of years ago. It really hit me.

At the end of the day we (men) are the ones expected to provide, to win over the women, to keep the marriage from falling apart, to keep the kids safe. And at any point we fail in our career or one of these things we are left staring into the abyss with no one to help us but ourselves. This is why I reject a lot of liberal views. Even when we tried equality, all we did was take away power from the man that is still expected to do everything.

This was a tough article for me. I'm only alive because I have to be. I have one family member left in poor health, and they depend on me, but when they are gone, I don't really see the point of sticking around. I am simply sticking around for them.

The last thing I will do is die alone, or worse, confined to a nursing home, abused by underpaid staff. Yes: I have tried over 15 medication's, therapy, you name it. I came to the conclusion a few years ago that accepting that my life has an end, and they I will make that decision to end it, has been comforting. I feel like it's the only, perhaps last control, I might ever have

To anyone with a degree not in software, you can pivot to a hands-on job. I'm a technician for factory equipment. AI is not replacing me for a long time.

It's not surprising that murder-suicides are popular in the US amongst this age group, responsibility can be crushing.

The Founders Guide to Suicide: https://anthonydavidadams.substack.com/p/the-founders-guide-...

I wrote this about overcoming the suicidal urge, what I learned beating an “incurable” diagnosis without meds, and how it’s informed my coaching of some of the most successful unicorn founders in history.

Any breakdown by race?

I’m bored of how shocked people are about this. It’s been going on decades now. Think of all the great and/or famous men that have killed themselves in the last 60 years. It stacks up quick. No one cares.

but how does that effect women?

https://archive.ph/sBfx5

Who can blame them?

After having failed romantically one too many times and having an average dev job AI will probably take from me, that won't allow me to FIRE for 6 more years even if I can keep it, life's not fun for me at 35 already, how will it be at 55, all wrinkled up, frail, probably cancer stricken and with no future potential left?

We live in a winner-takes-all world. Either you are compounding success, or you are compounding failure. Middle-age is when all potential has been spent and where you are is essentially where you will be until you die. Some middle aged men are billionaires with access to nearly anything they could want. Others have seen only repeated failures, accelerated by an economy that doesn't reward anyone but the most nimble, intelligent, or sociopathic.

Just got “over the hill” here. It’s…complicated, but not at all surprising on the whole.

My friends who are older are pessimistic as fuck. Several have been unemployed for lengthy stretches due to ageism in American hiring practices, which has resulted in their life crumbling around them as they lack the resources for basic upkeep anymore. I see that and shudder for myself, wondering if we’ll finally get this sorted before I hit my 50s or if this is just going to be a shitty fucking thing for the foreseeable future.

Social activity is hard for middle-aged men. We spend several hours a day commuting to and from work, which eats into our social budgets. Hard to host dinners, attend game nights, or go on dates when 80% of your day is spoken for work alone in some capacity (preparing for, getting to, performing, commuting home), which leaves us isolated. Most of our peers have paired off, so they have a stronger support structure - yet they too disappear at alarming rates.

At every conceivable intersection for the past fifty years, we’ve chosen to make life more hostile and less comfortable. I’m tired of feigning surprise at what, at least to me and my circles, is so sickeningly obvious.

Sometimes I think joining a cult wouldn’t be too bad right about now. Hear me out: a bunch of people pool money to buy a massive amount of land somewhere and then building everything they need by hand: homes, farms, etc. and everyone has a strong sense of community from daily interaction and shared purpose, with regular rituals to keep a sense of stability. If we must work by manual labor, it is more satisfying to work to benefit those around you than for increasingly worthless dollars. No smartphones or thinking machines allowed.

get a dog?

We all know what the problem is.

Dear HN, please stop posts like this in making to the top page. This actually normalizes the idea of suicide even with people not thinking about it. I don’t remember the book but it has been discussed a lot in psychological aspects of these news articles influencing the behaviour in them.