I actually hate the words of this picture - and I think it's cruel. Indeed, I think the words should read instead:

If you are brave enough to suicide, are you brave enough to reach out? Because there is someone out there that needs you as much as you need them. Be brave you are needed.

We are taught from a young age to be distrustful of strangers and sometimes those who are closest to us can be selfish and the last person/people we'd like to reach out to. Reaching out and trust requires vulnerability. There is reason to be cautious about disclosing our vulnerability because people may take advantage of it, but they may not. Most people aren't sociopaths, although we do know they exist, but they are more likely to be CEOs rather than janitors and are no more than about 4% of the population. So we have to be brave enough to overcome those fears. This is a big problem because TV is constantly telling us about people being murdered by neighbors, friends and family all the time and this is not true. Child abduction is down and murder rates are down in general.

All of us feel lonely to some degree, we all need friends, we all need help, we all need to be useful, feel like we are contributing, we all need each other.

But there are different reasons for suicide, no one should blame someone living with a terminal disease for ending the pain.

"The only thing we've found to make the emptiness bearable is each other."

People trying to end it all, suddenly realize when they are jumping off the golden gate bridge that all that seemed unfixable could be fixed if only they hadn't jumped.

We all do need each other and TV teaches us not to trust anyone but we must make the effort to reach out to others who are alone and hurting whether it is simply to help elderly people with their garden or kids with their homework. Our brains are hardwired to search for human faces.

You're not alone and you are needed.

We are animals and as much as like to think we aren't,  we are.  If you think there was some designer, then that designer did a hell of a lot of cheating, because we not only share a lot of our DNA with monkeys,  we also share much of it with other mammals all the way down to our skeleton which we share with invertebrates. Even trees share much of our DNA. There are modifications here and there but the similarity is unmistakable, even and including how women give birth, just like other mammals.

We are animals because we need to do things other animals do, like sleep, eat, we have a powerful urge to mate and reproduce to pass our genes on. We need sunlight and nature and use the bathroom.

Because we depend on our environment we must care for the environment as a means of caring for ourselves. We depend on our atmosphere to protect us from radiation and to breathe. We depend on plants to produce oxygen and recycle our carbon dioxide. We must live in a symbiotic relationship with the environment but we don't. We pretend it is purely at our disposal.

This is because our brain is so powerful.  We have developed stories that are fantasies about our origins, such as believing we were created distinct from other animals because we somehow think we are special and thus these stories a tapestry of superstitions that are religion.

We depend on each other completely for our understanding of reality that we need contact with other human beings for our sanity and these stories we tell each other shape us into who we are.

We are clever animals who have evolved hands to be able to craft and utilize tools. We have also learned the value of communicating, storing and sharing information.  Indeed, some of our landmark discoveries has been the storing and transmission of information,  cave paintings,  the Gutenberg press, math, telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computers and the Internet. 

But our experience of reality depends largely on who and what we believe.  And knowing what is fiction can be difficult if we believe it. It's nearly impossible to find the flaws in our own thinking (or believing) and this can make it difficult to communicate with others who don't believe what we believe. It's nearly impossible to be objective enough to see our own hypocrisy, even when we are aware we may have flaws in our own thinking. Since we attach so much importance to sanity it can be deeply distressing to find out our beliefs are wrong.

I used to know a born again Christian who delighted in telling me about her favorite t-shirt which said: Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. She didn't realize this was her license to be completely immoral.

I became quite depressed the other day reading this article about suicide. The reasons people suicide are loneliness, feeling like a burden to others and fearlessness.

In my opinion, we've stopped knowing how to live with others because of television. We expect people to be pretty, solve their problems relatively easily and by the end of tonight's episode. Special problems may require two episodes. The people on TV are rich, have more than enough clothes to wear and a beautiful home. People on TV are interesting, they do interesting things, and have teams of writers making sure they make sense and what they say is funny. People on TV aren't annoying or if they are we just don't watch that show, we choose something else to watch.

If only real life people were so easy to manage.

More often than not we live by ourselves because, I think we compare the people on TV to the ones we deal with in real life. Real people are complicated, need too much attention, don't always make us laugh, can hurt us and can be unkind for many reasons. So instead we come home to television sets and an empty home.

Remember this article about facebook envy? Well how does your supposed facebook envy stack up compared to the lives that you see on television everynight?

Then we wish we had someone to love. If only we had someone to love and everything would be alright because thats what they do on TV - everyone falls in love and gets married. Then the marriage fails because its not like on TV. Marriages on TV are nearly always funny. Real life isn't very funny and when she's no longer as pretty as she was when she was younger or he's no longer as attentive as he used to be, the marriage fails.

Is there anything as glamorous as guns on TV? No wonder the second amendment is the most important. Owning a gun will make you just as cool as John McClane, as cool as Arnie/Kyle in Terminator and Neo/Trinity in The Matrix, right? I am a 100% certain that if Forrest Gump welded a gun, guns would NOT be so popular. But the movie of Forrest Gump with a gun is never gonna get the financing that The Matrix/Terminator or Die Hard are going to get. But if Forrest Gump with a gun is made, people will surrender their guns faster than a speeding bullet.

The third thing needed to suicide is the courage to do so. We're afraid of dying and we must overcome that urge to jump out of the way of oncoming vehicles. We can overcome the horror by becoming numb, and there again TV helps.

Television is the ride to suicide. They'll sell you the gun that you need, then help you pull the trigger.

We need each other, we need to be useful, helpful, we don't want to be a burden. As the article says mothers of new born children are the least likely group of people to suicide in the world, because they are totally depended upon by their new-born baby, whereas indigenous peoples are twice as likely to suicide.

We are hopeless by ourselves, we make a nice meal for a large predator, but together we are formidable.

The need to belong manifests itself in many ways. The need to belong can make us fiercely defend our group, as this article says lions will expose their throats to predators to save their pride. Part of this is genetic, and sometimes we chose to join families without any genetic connection. It can lead to devotion to football teams and political parties.

To paraphrase Donald Trump, its not whether your team wins or loses, its whether it wins. This can lead to blindness to the actions of the leaders of our teams. In the case of football, in general it doesn't matter much, but when it comes to politics the effect can be far more devastating. Some of the GOP steadfastly supported W's disastrous presidency as we see some democrats steadfastly support the current president.

Obviously the 1% are loyal to themselves and have little regard for the 99%. The American 1% are earning truckloads of money and could careless whether a large portion of Americans go hungry, are homeless and cannot get work. No doubt the 1% are afraid of us because we out number them 99:1. However this doesn't mean we can't learn from the rich. 67% of wealthy people watch 1 hour or less of TV every day vs. 23% for poor people and 6% of wealthy people watch reality TV vs. 78% for poor people. And apparently 79% of wealthy people network 5 hours or more each month vs. 16% for poor people. So the message is get away from the TV and socialize with real people!

As we wrest back some control over our lives from the 1% we must remember to stay together because together we are utterly formidable.