Editor's Note, 4/3

The moment that changed Dr. Jerome Motto forever came in the 1970s, when he was a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. “I went to this guy’s apartment,” he told Tad Friend for The New Yorker. “In his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”

Friend recalls spending three full hours talking about the Golden Gate Bridge with Motto—who’d since become a campaigner to build a suicide barrier—during their interview in 2003. It’s a moving story, a heartbreaking pair of arcs. Touched by the barren isolation of another human being, someone else’s crippling loneliness, an observer took it upon himself to change the conditions of the other’s misery.

But the bridge was never what produced it. Friend acknowledges this in his piece, writing that though a barrier would prevent suicides, “to build one would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other.” He responds to the famous boast by the Golden Gate’s chief engineer, that the bridge would demonstrate man’s domination of nature: “…and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within.”

Since then that wildness has taken too many. Last month, The New Yorker ran another story called “The Neglected Suicide Epidemic,” highlighting trends reported in various other publications. The picture is alarming: between 1999 and 2010, the number of Americans aged 35 through 64 who took their own lives jumped by nearly a third. Suicide has surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death in America. In one French study, one out of five 15-year-old girls reported trying to kill themselves in the past year. Across the developed world, in fact, “self-harm is now the leading cause of death for people 15 to 49, surpassing all cancers and heart disease,” as Newsweek reported in 2013.

Why, though? Reading these numbers, it’s tempting to ask what’s happening to the people around us. But it’s not exactly everyone. Over the same decade that saw a surge in suicides among middle-aged whites, rates among black and Hispanic people of the same age grew less than a point. Although they’re more likely to be poor, members of these communities seem “more enduringly tied by the bonds of faith and family,” observes Tony Dokoupil. And research suggests that while it’s true that poor people report being less happy than the wealthy, they also seem to find their lives more meaningful.

Where, amid poverty and oppression, do the underprivileged find meaning? Recently in The Guardian, David Graeber summarized a spate of new studies describing the psychological differences between rich and poor. The findings show how, on multiple counts, working class people are just more empathetic creatures. “They care more about their friends, families and communities,” writes Graeber. “In aggregate, at least, they’re fundamentally nicer.”

I think about these stories in my final year at a prestigious research university, an institution increasingly resembling a stamp of access to a higher standard of living. I wonder: at what cost?

Beginning with the admissions essay, fledgling undergraduates are expected to forge a distinct narrative for themselves. They must be unique, outstanding, able to overcome adversity with wit and hustle. They plunge down that solitary road, customizing everything from their balance of work (school-, home-, extracurricular, social media) to their lattes at campus coffee shops. Those that continue on to graduate programs enter an even lonelier world, one known for encouraging social detachment and fostering depression at as much as seven times the normal rate.

And when students look up from their books, their cellphones, their Facebook profiles—what do they see then? A sea of alien faces? Has college become an education in isolation?

A quick Google search for “Duke innovation” turns up more than 51 million results, while the query “Duke Durham” yields about 34 million. What is the profundity we seek alone, absent in the world so close outside?

The beauty of fiction, George Saunders once told The New York Times Magazine, is that it “softens the border between you and me.” So much of creating compelling characters, he reflected during his recent visit to Duke, has to do with learning to “meld yourself with them,” asking how—put in the same set of circumstances—you might react.

It’s a useful exercise for any human being, not just those interested in fiction writing.

The story of the star youth is surely a seductive one, and probably a tool that works wonders in teasing out alumni contributions. But how many cosmic coincidences—beginning with the location of your birth—have landed you in this place about to hand you a certificate of difference? How many poor friends do you have, exactly?