“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”<p>- David Foster Wallace
It's surprising that people would criticise those who jumped. Wow.<p>A focus on the idealised view of the jumper ("they would never have killed themselves!") blocks people from feeling the sheer terror and pain the jumper must have felt. The focus on some abstract concept like "suicide is bad, m'kay" rather than right-here-and-now burning flames and the terrifying strangle of unbreathable smoke.<p>The fact that so many jumped despite all our fears of heights and certain death, is proof of a greater horror in those floors. Society skews our perspective so we focus on the trivial, punishing those whose family members were lost, rather than learning something about the situation those poor people must have been in and empathising with their families.
As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide, stemming largely from the insidious just-world fallacy. It's a comfort to many of us in this fucked-up world, to think that maybe it's not as unfair as it seems. As persistent as that warped logic is, it doesn't withstand suicide. We don't want to imagine we could ever face a truly intolerable situation, so instead we imagine a world that doesn't allow such, and we damn those whose deaths would contradict us.
A former colleague was there and witnessed this. He struggles with it for a variety of reasons, including that he would have been inside a few minutes later.<p>The way he put it, which says it all for me, was that the jumpers were a sort of testimony to the fact there was no way out and no hope for the people trapped up there.<p>There's lots of cultural stigma to suicide, and one of the reasons for that is there is always reason to hope. The poor souls up there ran out of reasons.
I've allways found it odd that a culture that so values personal freedom: "the right to choose what to do with your life" so activity denies the right to choose how to end it.
One very morbid question I have is were some of the jumpers actually pushed? Some of the pictures you see people crowding to the few available edges, a crush of bodies trying to breath. Wouldn't some of the people on the edges have been pushed by those further inside?
The Falling Man has a name.<p>Though not officially identified, it is thought to be Jonathan Briley. A lot of people were killed that day. This is just one story. [0] You can view a documentary about this image here ~ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE</a> (1hr 11m)<p>RIP Jonathan.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man</a>
Perhaps "depersonalization" can explain the state some of these people were in.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization</a>
How can the same link be submitted twice?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708</a>
I'm not sure if it is mentioned in the article, but perhaps one of the soothing parts is that most of these people probably didn't even know what really happened that day.