First of all, many people commit suicide. Official estimates are that around one million people around the world commit suicide each year. Among young people (under 40) suicide is the third leading cause of death. And these figures are probably much higher since many cases are not reported as suicides but as accidents because in many cultures suicide is considered a shameful act.
Second, even if we agree that the number of people who decide to commit suicide is an indication of whether life is bad, since not all people who decide to commit suicide were able to realize their decision in practice, what needs to be examined is how many people tried to commit suicide. And the answer is, and again the number of official cases is almost certainly minimal compared to the real numbers, that for every case of people who committed suicide there are at least 25 cases of suicide attempts. That is, according to the logic of the working premise of this claim, at least 25 million people a year, explicitly state that life is definitely that bad.
But this figure is also very partial and misleading in terms of being an indication of how bad life is, because committing suicide is very, very difficult. People are equipped with survival instincts that make it very difficult for them to actually take their own lives. They are biologically built to fear suffocation, drowning, heights, and pain for example, which makes the possibility of killing themselves very daunting since most of the options that people have include at least one of these components. This built-in fear, by the way, is one of the reasons that many people do not succeed in committing suicide, because survival instincts arise during many of the attempts (mainly in drowning and suffocation attempts). Apart from concrete, built-in fears, people naturally fear death itself. Therefore, many people whose lives are horribly bad, and they want with all their might to end them, feel trapped inside a body that refuses to cooperate with their will.
And natural physical recoil is only part of the matter. Many people are very reluctant to the idea of suicide because for them there is a religious prohibition on it. For them, committing suicide is a sin.
Many people are afraid of death itself, that is, of what will happen to them after they kill themselves. Not all people think that death is their absolute end and the end of all their experiences in every possible way. Therefore, some are afraid of death itself.
Many others are afraid of what will happen to them if they fail to kill themselves, that is, seriously injure themselves during a failed suicide attempt, and then end up worse off than they were before they tried.
Others shy away from the idea of suicide because they perceive suicide as a cowardly and defeatist option and they don’t want others to think that about them even if it is after their death.
Since suicide has a very negative social stigma, many people do not want that after their death people think negative things about them, and about their family that supposedly failed.
People know that family members of people who killed themselves tend to blame themselves, and many people who want to end their lives don’t want to make the people they care about live with this sense of guilt for the rest of their lives.
And regardless of the issue of guilt, many people just don’t want to hurt people they know care about them.
Considering all these difficulties and many others, the number of people who try to commit suicide each year is rather large. If tens of millions of people a year manage to overcome so many obstacles and try to commit suicide, this indicates how bad people’s lives are for them.
However, considering how difficult and discouraging it is to commit suicide, a more reliable indication of how many people think their lives are really bad is not how many actually tried to stop it themselves, but how many wanted to and did not try for one reason or another. In other words, the presence of so many significant obstacles in people’s way of ending their lives, obstacles that are not related to their quality of life but to other circumstances, misleads and distorts the true extent of people who feel that their lives are really bad. It is much more credible to examine not how many people tried to commit suicide, but how many people wanted to commit suicide, and how many people seriously thought about it. And according to many studies and surveys, these figures are huge. Comprehensive surveys conducted at universities in the USA and Europe found that over half of the students seriously thought about suicide at least once in their lives, about 20% thought about it seriously more than once, about 15% made a suicide plan (write a letter, buy accessories, choose a location, etc.) And almost 10% also tried to commit suicide.
If people did not have a very strong natural reluctance to commit suicide, if they did not feel subject to a religious prohibition to commit suicide, if they did not fear social shame, if they did not fear ending up in a worse situation if the attempt did not materialize, if they did not fear what would be thought of them if they committed suicide, if they did not fear what would be said about their family if they commit suicide, if they weren’t afraid of harming their family if they commit suicide, many, many more people would commit suicide, many more would try, and many would seriously consider it.
In order to examine how bad life is, the question is not how many people commit suicide or even how many try, since people are imprisoned in a body that is built to survive, with a soul that is afraid of death, in a society that condemns suicide, in a culture that sanctifies life, in a legal system that prohibits suicide, in a world where there is no convenient option, safe, quick and available for suicide (imagine one super fast pill without dangers or side effects that can be purchased cheaply anywhere), with religious systems that prohibit suicide, and in family and social relationships with people they don’t want to hurt. The question is how would people feel about life without all this. If, despite all the obstacles, restraints and hindering factors, so many people think about suicide so seriously, think how many would seriously consider it if all these factors did not exist.
And the fact that if we could neutralize these factors and isolate life itself, so many people would choose to stop it, but they don’t only because they are so deeply rooted in their bad lives, is another reason why life is really so bad.