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Great post. I have my own thoughts about the specific catalyst that prompted Bourdain to kill himself. Pleased to see that @coffee_enjoyer seconded it in the linked post (before I changed my handle).
I've met some of these people who are addicted to "wanderlust", and they often seem rather unstable and unreliable. They remind me of a Reddit thread I once read about underrated red flags, and one comment said if a person often says "I used to have this friend..." (Good example, even if I felt a little personally attacked by it.) Or one of de la Rochefoucald's maxims (I'm paraphrasing): we get excited by making new friends because we feel we aren't sufficiently admired by our existing ones, and hope that our new friend will admire us as much as we feel we deserve. Living your life on the road is advantageous for dysfunctional people, as all the people you meet will only know you long enough to learn about your good qualities: you don't plan on sticking around long enough for them to find out that you're careless with money, short-tempered or have a bad relationship with your family. As Chuck Palahniuk would say, they're single-serving friends.
People who struggle with long-term intimate relationships instead opt for short flings and holiday romances, but it's a vicious circle, because the longer you spend behaving this way, the less practice you're getting at the skills you'll need for actual relationships. By the time you decide you're getting too old for this shit and want to form a real relationship and settle down with someone, you may find yourself wholly at a loss for how to comport yourself in this context. Habitual womanisers know exactly what to say to get a woman into bed within a few hours of meeting her, but don't have a clue how to express their affection for her in the context of an actual romance. This is equally true of platonic relationships: I bet Anthony Bourdain would seem effortlessly charming the first time you met him, but I imagine people who'd known him for years might say he was a bit of a shitty friend.
It's not unlike how socially awkward people find social situations stressful and emotionally taxing, so instead they retreat into video games and social media – but the longer they spend in those spaces instead of in the real world, the more stressful and emotionally taxing they find social situations in real life, causing them to retreat...
Why do you think Bourdain’s suicide had a specific catalyst? By all accounts he struggled with mental illness, lived a lifestyle that doesn’t exactly root people in their lives, and it could easily have just been his unlucky break; no doubt he’d been close to suicide before.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he killed himself just a few hours after an angry row with his girlfriend in which she admitted being unfaithful to him but dismissed his feelings about it. No doubt the lifetime of drink, drugs and mental illness didn't help, but I suspect this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
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