THE COMING WAVE OF WHITE COLLAR SUICIDES

Mourner from the Tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 1300s

What point is there in seeing into the shadows of a dark age? I don’t write much anymore. There’s little point. So: are you sure? That you want to know what happens next? Should we even care anymore…about a world like this? Let me try again. Here’s what happens next. You won’t like it. As you read this, if you need help, please get some.

I’ve died many times. And I’ve been lucky, or blessed, or fortunate. Someone or something saved me and brought me back to life. I was an abused, suicidal kid in America. I stepped off a train in Canada, and everything changed. I was alive again. Fast forward thirty years. Doctor after doctor around the world told me I was going to die. I’d lost fifty pounds in a month. I couldn’t eat. I went on a date, just to make conversation. My future wife told me: you have a rare condition where the light can kill you.

But of all the times I’ve died, the worst has been, the one I’d never wish on anyone—let me pause there. Sometimes people say: you almost died. I shrug. To face the certainty that you’re going to die is a kind of death, in all the ways that matters. Spiritual, emotional, intellectual. I was never the same person after standing face to face with death each time I did. Nobody is. You die. The old you is annihilated. Blown apart. And if you’re lucky, you come back to life. Only the fates can say why. But you’re never the same.

All these deaths gave me gifts. Strange and mysterious ones. Foresight, intellect, judgment, wisdom, courage. And in that way, I thank the creator for them. But of all these deaths, the one that I almost couldn’t bear, the one that was too painful, pure agony, was this one: losing everything.

And I’m gently telling you about my life because now a whole lot of people are going to die just this way.

There are many ways to die. Disease, old age, illness, infirmity, a sudden accident. But the worst of them all, the unkindest, the most unbearable is this one: losing it all. I don’t mean that metaphorically. Two of the world’s great economists (and when I use that term, I mean it, because we have very few left) studied what they came to call “deaths of despair.

This is what happened to America’s blue collar or working class, as deindustrialization ripped the heart out of everything they’d had and held dear. Livelihoods, towns, communities, professions, a future.

And now those deaths of despair are coming for everyone else. Especially America’s white collar class, but not just them. Young people, middled aged people, the elderly. Let me be clear: when we see life expectancy shrinking, this is a function of people dying in very real ways of preventable causes, and they’re interlinked, rivers pouring into a sea.

So let me try to explain what I mean by “losing it all.” You might think that AI will cause a wave of suicides, and that it certainly will. Scores of professionals will kill themselves when they realize they have no future left whatsoever. And so will legions of young people. In one of the grimmest statistics I’ve ever read, Americans fear running out of money more than dying, which is something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and which should begin to illustrate the point I’m making.

But what about the survivors? The ones that don’t choose suicide? They will face a life like this. They will slowly grow poorer and poorer. From a place of relative affluence and stability. And there will be no way out. In the beginning, they’ll try and retain the cheer and bravado Americans are famous for. Everything will be OK! But they will have to spend their savings, month after month, year after year.

And in the end, the math will only add up to one thing, one number, one digit.

Zero.

How long will people last without incomes? Imagine that you have a million dollars in the bank today. Do you feel safe? Most don’t with even that amount. That’s because it buys you, in America, maybe ten years, at a pretty mediocre quality of life. The math only adds up to one thing, one number, one digit: zero.

And the descent to zero is the most painful and terrifying thing, if you ask me, that there is. I’ve been there, right at the edge of the other ways of dying. When I was doubled over in pain, a stick figure, and the doctor couldn’t understand what was wrong with me? I felt a sense of peace. A spiritual revolution lit my mind on fire. At least I’d lived a good life. When I was a kid, being beaten by my neighbors, in an America that wanted everyone like me dead? I felt a sense of anger, resolve, determination. I’d be the one to end things on my terms. And I found my consolations: music, art, nightlife.

But it was when I was losing everything that I understood what pain truly was. And the truth is that nobody can bear it. Take a look at the unfortunate souls you see every day. They’re the products of this trajectory. And many, if not most of them, have been driven out of their minds, by the trauma.

Losing everything is different. Illness comes for us all. Accidents are strokes of misfortune. But losing everything is the unkindest death of all because it’s slow, long, an endless night. It feels like a nightmare that never ends. You wake up, and the panic sets in. How much more will I lose today? It’s the inevitability of it that kills, in the end. And this is what “deaths of despair” are about.

Losing everything involves everything. It’s never just about money. It puts everything else at breaking point too. Relationships, marriages, families, friendships. In those days? When I was losing everything? I’d reach out to friends for some advice, and hear a busy tone, or voicemail. Friends I’d made a great deal of money for. Friends I’d always been there for. Etcetera. This is the way life works. Really works. People aren’t there for you when you need them most. They can smell the despair on you, and don’t want it to infect them. Especially not in America, where weakness equals death.

So losing everything is losing everything. This is what the two great economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, by the way, were trying to teach us. It wasn’t just about money and jobs, but the consequent chain reactions of loss those detonated, like an explosion that never ended. For men, especially, we will see a great wave of death, because their identities and selfhood are tied to their professions and jobs and incomes.

It came for the blue collar, and we all know it’s now coming for the white collar. But I think that most people don’t understand, not one bit, just the scale and devastation of what we’re talking about. So I’ve tried to put it for you in stark terms above. Human ones. Many people are going to lose everything. They will never have jobs, professions, or incomes again, and step by step after that, everything else will go, too. And almost nobody can bear this kind of pain and live through it.

Losing everything is the worst way to die. It will drive you to drink, drugs, self-hatred, abuse of every kind. It is every demon screeching madness at every midnight. It’s one thing not to have had much—the mind and spirit can accommodate that, somehow, but they cannot so easily adjust to having had something, enough, and then losing it all. To fall from a white collar to being part of a “permanent underclass” is a transition that many simply won’t survive. Too much pain and trauma will be involved. The hopelessness will be unendurable.

Let me sketch out the chain reaction now. A profession. A job. An income. Savings. A home. Retirement. A family. Relationships. A community. Friends. A town, city, etcetera. This is the way a life ends. When you lose even half of this much, people don’t easily “recover.” More often than not—especially when there is no hope or chance of ever regaining what has been lost—there is nothing left to live for. And so people become dead men walking. You can see the light has left their eyes. They are not really here anymore.

Right now, people are sanguine about having already lost a great deal. Things that don’t matter to them, because many people are fools. Democracy. Truth. Justice. Science, art, literature. People, being fools, don’t understand that these are mere bagatelles and beginnings. When these pillars are lost, the rest crumbles, too, because these are what an individual life stands on.

They will not be sanguine for long. When reality sets in, that they are going to lose everything, and there is no way out, there will be a psychic shock unlike any other. Not even during the Industrial Revolution, no, because then, people did not have much to lose. Now they do, especially the kinds of people who have won some level of affluence and comfort, and can scarcely comprehend that everything has been for naught, all of it, education, career, working, saving, day after day—bang, gone, and now there’s just a slow, inevitable descent to…

A single digit, a single number.

Zero.

And when that terrible number is hit, everything goes with it. Especially in America. There is no such thing as dignity already. Everything is tied to “a job.” Everything needs to be bought. What happens when you can’t buy anything anymore?

Many of these people will kill themselves. Many others will try to last as long as they can. How long is that? A million dollars buys you ten years. Half a million, five. It’s not much time. And even that time isn’t good time. It’s agony, torture, panic. It’s day after day lived in the terror of ruin. This is why losing it all is the worst way to die.

And this is how people’s lives will end in our age. Nobody will care. Not failed systems and institutions, not those with more than enough to buy the planet, not even their own class, which will have long turned on itself in rage and despair, for whatever crumbs are left. A different way should have been chosen.

Please understand, I’m not encouraging anyone to kill themselves. Quite the opposite. I believe everyone should have resources, dignity, a reason to live, money, democracy, civilization.

I don’t write much anymore precisely because there is nothing left to write about. I hope you understand what I mean now. There is nothing left to write about because we are the ones who threw five millennia of human civilization away. And that is an act so profane it only deserves silence and contempt.

Losing everything is the worst way to die. To have to say anything about it at all is obscene, an insult, a disgrace to being and its nobility and power. So. Curse these words, and burn them in the name of all that has ever been holy.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)