Suicide is difficult not only for emotional or psychological reasons, but because it has been culturally pushed to the margins, demonized, made unmentionable.
Yes, it speaks of death. It speaks of an ending. But it does so within a culture that refuses to tolerate the possibility of a voluntary end.
We live in a society that has a culture of war, but no culture of suicide.
Those who go to war are often celebrated, honored, even encouraged to sacrifice themselves. The soldier can die with "pride," surrounded by medals and ceremonies.
But the person who takes their own life is dishonored, pathologized, reduced to an illness.
And yet, in war, many know exactly what awaits them, and they go willingly.
Think of the volunteers in current conflicts, like Ukraine: young people who knowingly choose to face likely or certain death, and do so with clarity, because culturally they are allowed to die for something.
Even in suicide missions that are not terrorist acts, but acts of rescue or containment, like the Chernobyl liquidators, there were individuals who consciously walked toward death by radiation. And they did it because a collective vision, a shared culture, gave meaning to their gesture.
Suicide, instead, has no place in collective discourse. It carries no honor, no rituals.
It is treated as illness, never as a choice.
And that makes it doubly difficult, not just because of the fear of death, but because of the lack of cultural language, of symbolic space, of societal legitimacy.
Of course, there are also psychiatric or neurological conditions that can make suicide more "accessible", and there are extremely traumatic events that can trigger sudden, acute decisions.
But in most cases, the difficulty of dying voluntarily does not stem from a deep love for life, but rather from a cultural wall, a symbolic desert, and a guilt that society has planted deep within us.
In some cultures, like Japan, the suicidal act, at least historically, has held a very different symbolic weight.
This shows us that it's not just biology speaking, it is culture that defines what is "noble" and what is "pathological."
Nature makes vitality very strong, even though many people die every day in different ways. If dying were as simple as holding your breath for a minute without feeling discomfort and simply dying, it would be as simple as the world already being uninhabited by humans, because at some point they wouldn't calculate how long it would take to hold their breath and therefore would die. Pain works the same way, because if something hurts, it's a sign that you're sick or something is causing you harm...
Summary: Dying is difficult because it's part of nature that no being dies so easily, in order to maintain balance on the planet.
For the person in your photo, dying likely wasn't that difficult. It was an act of deep coherence with the entirety of his philosophical outlook.
