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This but unironically. I've theorized that suicide as a specific act is less important to consider than a spectrum of self-preservation----self-destruction. There are a lot of guys today who kill themselves by gun or OD who in my dad's generation drove dangerous cars and motorcycles too fast too often until a crash got them, who in my grandad's generation joined the Marines and didn't duck fast enough, who in my great-great-great-grandad's generation joined a merchant ship crew and went off to tropical parts unknown and were never heard from again. It's just that today, you have to really try to get yourself killed, where in the past you could do fairly normal things (drive cars, join the merchant marine or the Marines) and probably get yourself killed if you didn't try to keep yourself alive hard enough. Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different.
I get what you are saying, that risk taking behavior is common in young men and the risks available these days might have less reward associated, but its still unreasonable to compare a risky yet possibly rewarding strategy (striking out on your own to make a new life out on the frontier) to literally just killing yourself. Likewise, some people use drugs to escape their reality, this is not the same as permanently giving up on reality by ending your interactions with it.
I think theres a few different "nothing"s being bundled here, the threshold for "i have nothing going for me in this town, i'm out of here even if it means joining the circuis" is pretty far away from "i have nothing to gain in this world that i can possibly reach and i would rather die than make any further attempt"
The two attitudes look identical from the outside if the way you deal with them is the same. "I'm going to join the Navy to get out of this nowhere town and see the world" and "I'm going to join the Navy and hopefully I'll die and end this stupid life" both look like "He joined the Navy and died in a storm or a fever somewhere East of Suez" to everyone but the man himself.
If the bottom 1% of men who just can't fit into normal life (and today become your school shooters, drug addicts, incels etc) existed before the 20th centure, their existence would have been hidden by just dying in ways that were written off as a normal cost of doing business back then. This article claims that during certain periods a fifth of British soldiers stationed to Jamaica died every year, while a third stationed in West Africa kicked the bucket. Merchant numbers weren't a whole lot better.
Sure, but the onus isn't on me to prove that they didn't want to commit suicide, whoever wants to add those numbers to the suicide stat needs to prove they belong there, which i am skeptical of.
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