Is Suicide a Symptom of Modernity?

 Zachary Rosario 

Professor John Horgan 

Seminar in Science Writing 

25 February 2026 

Is Suicide a Symptom of Modernity? 

Because my grandpa can no longer drive, one of the things me and my mother do is take him to the grocery store weekly.  

One day we were in the bread isle when an old man, who looked like he had once been a PE teacher, passed by us. 

  My grandpa stopped him for a chat and like clockwork they began talking about the good old days and how these new kids don’t know anything about hardship. 

Younger folks, admittingly even I, recoil at the thought of starting small talk with every stranger we see, but for my grandfather it’s one of the ways he makes meaning in his life.  

In talks I’ve found that the biggest issue my friends struggle with is finding that meaning in life. To them many of them, the world's future is too uncertain to bother dreaming. I think not just my friends feel this way, I think a lot of us in Gen Z feel this way. 

Suicide rates for New York state’s young adults have risen by 10 percent and in midwestern states that number is up to six times as much1. The reason for this drastic increase in youth suicides is often attributed to social media, but I think there is greater answer that's lurking. 

How is it that my grandpa can strike up a conversation with anyone his age, but young adults are afraid to communicate with each other?  

In the bread isle that day my grandpa said something interesting to that man which I think contains our answer: “The battle of Okinawa... Young people these days know nothing about that.” It reminded of me of something a mechanics wife once told me after my car broke down in upstate NY, “If you think it’s hard now, I lived through 9/11”.  

The generations before us seemingly have had all some events happen that despite all their odds, brought them all together. For my grandpa's generation that was WWII, for my mother's that was 9/11.  

You would think that the pandemic would have been that event for Gen Z, but it wasn’t; it brought us further apart. We were separated from each other, unable to communicate our grievances, expect through cynical memes online. While the world was collapsing, being divided into essential and non-essential, Gen Z watched from the sidelines receiving updates every second from social media. All we could do was burrow into our social enclaves and react.  

Modernity has revolutionized what it means to be an individual. Everything we do now is so personalized that we just all have so many more differences, making it appear harder to connect. But we are more alike than we realize. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki found that young people vastly underestimate how much their peers desire closeness. We assume that we are alone in wanting connection, when in reality, nearly everyone around us wants the same thing. Recognizing this may be the only way we close the distance modernity has created between us2.