No one ever says, “I don’t want to live.”
Because not wanting to live is something people choose not to say.
Human beings are biologically programmed to survive. The heart keeps beating, the lungs keep working, the body produces resistance. But this mechanism alone is not enough. A person needs a psychological reason to live. Money, family, a child, an animal, sometimes just an expectation. These are not meanings so much as points of attachment.
When those reasons disappear, a person continues to live — but only physically.
The mind no longer carries the body. Life goes on, but it empties from the inside. That is where collapse begins. Not fast, but slow; silent and spread across years.
The effects of unhappiness on DNA are still being studied. Yet its consequences are visible in everyday life. Some illnesses arrive early, some wounds heal late, some bodies refuse to wait for old age. Death is not always sudden. Some deaths take a very long time.
When a person senses this emptiness, they cling to calendars. To responsibilities, to to-do lists, to expectations. These work for a while. Then they stop carrying the person. Because meaning and busyness are not the same thing.
No one wants to speak about this openly. Society can tolerate pain — illness, loss, poverty. But it cannot tolerate emptiness. Because emptiness is contagious. It cannot be explained, and it spreads quickly.
History offers examples of this. Viktor Frankl wrote that those who survived the concentration camps were often not the physically strongest, but those who had a “reason” to live.
Not hope — a reason.
Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche stripped the issue bare with a single sentence:
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Perhaps the real question is not:
Why do people die?
The real question is this:
Why do people survive? Why do they try to stay alive?
Because life does not sustain itself without justification. When meaning can no longer be produced, the body does not resist — it merely delays. And sometimes a person does not die — they slowly withdraw from life.
That is why some deaths are not measured in days, but in years.
And some people die not because they do not want to live, but because they can no longer find a reason to do so.
