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In his seminal work Suicide, one of the first works of Sociology, Emile Durkheim specifically refutes the thesis (from Le Play) that suicide is caused directly by poor material conditions.
He instead provides a now famous two-axis typology wherein the causes come from one's relationship to others and society, which material conditions only effect indirectly by affecting one's relationships.
Your second paragraph seems to me to describe quite specifically anomie, which modern living conditions are often accused of exacerbating:
What better way to describe recent times than dizzyingly extreme constant changes where nobody knows what is expected of oneself and no reliable way of judging one's position in the world can stand?
I dunno. It just seems like first world problems or a skill issue to complain too much about the modern world in any way (I'm only talking about first world western nations for the entirety of this conversation). It's a really nice world we've been given. Just the right difficulty setting, so to speak. I think the years from 1985-2005 in particular were essentially a paradise, real "peak of human civilization that will never be reached again" type stuff. (I've talked to both Gen X'ers and boomers who have similar nostalgia for the 90s, so it's not purely me being nostalgic for my childhood.)
I could see people killing themselves after the ASI singularity. When you've become such a god that the only challenge you have left to surmount is your own self-destruction. But we're not nearly there yet.
I'm approaching this as someone who is trying to build a mental model of a phenomenon that is deeply foreign to me. I am fantastically in love with life and fantastically afraid of losing it, so I think my threshold for when I would consider suicide is simply higher than many other individuals. Even many types of emotional and existential "pain" serve only to sweeten life (Nietzsche correctly identified that melancholy is a positive emotion). I will again reiterate that an "increase in suicides" by itself doesn't mean much without knowing what the base rate of suicide is in a wider range of cross-cultural contexts. (We also have to define what a "suicide" is. Is a Hamas suicide bombing a "suicide"? Is it a "suicide" if a young Russian man signs up for the front lines because he doesn't care much either way if he lives or dies? There are certain death-inducing phenomena that are present in other cultures but not our own, and that should probably factor into the conversation at some point.)
That's fascinating to me. Perhaps I need to get checked for depression, but aside from dangerous situations where instinct takes over (say, car swerved a bit in bad weather), I have no interest in life outside of what it means I can provide for my wife and family (both materially and emotionally), and can't actually remember the last time that was different.
Maybe, but, I'm deeply skeptical of the over-medicalization of normal psychological variance. Honestly I think you're closer to the population norm than I am. Everyone's always talking about how depressed they are and how meaningless everything seems. I feel like the odd one out in that I've never struggled with any of that. But on the flip side, I do struggle mightily with anxiety issues, and a few other types of mental health issues besides, so it's not like I got off free or anything.
You perform a vital evolutionary function. If your barometer for responding to external stimuli was too sensitive and hyperactive, it would only get in the way of the fulfillment of your duties. I'm deeply appreciative of people like you who are capable of performing the vital functions that I myself would only be able to perform with great difficulty. (My own designated functions, should I have any, are not nearly so vital.)
If we think of human civilization as a single living organism, then the various personality types and psychological dispositions that we find among individuals define the cell types; different individuals are specialized for different functions. Diversity (and experimentation, and mutation, and tragic ends) is necessary for the organism as a whole to function.
Selection bias is probably a very big factor influencing that perception. People talk about their malaise partially because they need to get it off their chest; people who are doing fine don't speak about just How Very Ok they are. I don't really think the Redditors traumaposting about their deep depression are at all representative of what the general population actually is like.
Regarding "suffering", I think that's a very difficult thing to quantify and can't necessarily be assessed so easily. Generally I think the discourse surrounding suffering is flawed in many ways; firstly people tend to overweight sources of suffering that are essentially severe but temporary over sources of suffering that are lower-level but more persistent, and secondly people tend to underweight the influence and importance of someone having hope that things will get better for them in the future and belief in their own agency to change it. The lack of conception of what a feasible "better life" would look like is an extremely underrated factor in suicides. More than anything else, I think our brains regard the idea of being stuck as intolerable, and searches for any kind of actionable solution.
In your hypothetical of someone experiencing a potentially fatal health condition, often suicide doesn't even occur to them because there's some kind of conception of a better future to fight for and a clearly defined set of steps to possibly stop the suffering that is currently occurring; you have something to fight against and a sense that you will either reach a state where things will get better or you're going to die trying. Paradoxically, I think actively being under assault creates more of a sense of urgency and purpose. You can look to the future and declare that you will be happy once you make the negative stimulus stop (at least, until the hedonic treadmill inevitably kicks in and you return to your natural affective baseline, but your brain focuses on the here and now and doesn't think about that). But when, on paper, you already possess the things that any reasonable person could expect - you're healthy and have a job, friends, hobbies, and so on, and yet you're still coming back to your apartment feeling horribly empty and unmotivated as if the things you were doing only served to prevent you from having to deal with yourself, there's nothing to work towards. It's much easier to fall into a mindset where life itself, or your own ingrained mental patterns, are the problem, because that's less of a concrete issue that you can identify and take steps to address.
I'm not sure people do it on a whim per se, rather I'd frame the impulsive and sometimes senseless nature of suicide as being a response to the straw that broke the camel's back. I think we have affective baselines which are more insensitive to circumstances than we would like to believe they are, and there is a subsection of unlucky people whose affective baseline oscillates somewhere between misery and ennui (an idea partially supported by behaviour genetics). Modern life has reduced the number of blameworthy agents they can pin the problem on and try to fix, which only makes it worse. When you don't even know what the fuck the problem even is, what would make you happy, or what there is to even strive for, when you on paper should be doing okay but everything only seems like pointless sound and fury, I see why one would look around at the paucity of other feasible options and choose the only way out.
I think it's just obvious that such a life would feel empty. If the best you can say about your life is that you've got "health, a job, friends, and hobbies", then of course something is missing. Without a higher purpose to tie it all together, then it's just a loose assemblage of unrelated experiences.
For some people that "something higher" might be as simple as their family. For others it might be politics, or a creative calling. It'll be different for everyone. But you've gotta have something, and millions of people even in our "modern nihilistic age" do find something, so you don't have much of an excuse to not get to it.
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