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Natural selection.

If you decide to give up on life, you won't reproduce. Hence, people are naturally selected to have a high tolerance for missery. Humans are evolved to keep struggling and fighting.

If there is something to fight for, such as loved ones, a cause, or a personal goal, then it becomes much easier to keep fighting. Hence, depression is usually not just misery, but also a lack of purpose.

But finding new purpose in life is very doable. Making new connections with people, experiencing new things, and changing the environment you are in are the easiest ways to let externals factors help you here. Hence why people go on trips to "discover themselves".

As for your example; if during your childhood you are always told how important a job is, it is likely you will set the job as a purpose in life. Then spending all that energy towards it, feels like working towards a purpose and will make you proud. If, like me, you think this culture is horrible, and it should be fought against, then there is cause to fight for. Be the change, refuse those hours, and defy the system by carving out a happy life without adherence to that culture. Be proud of every smile you have!

I'm not saying that finding the energy to get out of a depression is easy. I have been there myself. Especially since a depression is more than a lack of purpose by itself. But I know that if you find even a tiny bit of fighting spirit in yourself left, you can feed it bit by bit. Take yoga lessons, take instrument lessons, find a book club, try a new sport, go on a roadtrip, switch jobs, etc. Don't expect to like any of the new experiences and magically be undepressed. Just experience something new. It took me years go to from properly depressed, to finding joy in all the things I do and learn.

I know this is quite the unpopular opinion and I'm gonna get it but... There's a lot of people keen on keeping others, even strangers, alive for some reason that I don't quite understand. It's always under the assumption that the person choosing suicide isn't thinking clearly, so you rarely see someone being supportive of someone else's decision to end their life even if they have reached a sound decision for themselves.

Like for example, I don't plan on living much. The moment my loved one dies, I won't have much to do around here because I have many reasons. But whenever I bring it up it's a battle to justify my decision which I've already sat on for decades and I know what I want. And the push back goes beyond this, from barring the topic altogether in forums, normalizing the trivialization of other people's motivations, to actively removing/adjusting products on store shelves that can assist with a humane death through legislation.

So my answer to your question is that others make it quite difficult for someone to exercise their own body autonomy.

Because the human mind is adaptable and further, adapts early to what's "normal" around it.

This is why poor countries have children who laugh and enjoy life by floating twigs in puddles while in western countries children scream like stuck pigs if they don't have the latest video game.

You start entertaining thoughts of suicide when things change for the worse, not start at the worst. Or if you start comparing yourself to other people who have it better than you do instead of your own circumstance. (And in the west you get a lot of pressure to compare yourself to other people. All the time. It's called "advertising" and it can be both overt and covert.)

Dunno. They were an awesome band and much more influential than people realise.

I think for a not insignificant portion of people it's about the people around them. Maybe I'm committing the logical fallacy of using my personal experience to assume a larger trend, but for me I know I'm only still here because I don't want other people in my family to be upset. It would absolutely crush my mother so as long as she's around I have to be as well.

Idk dawg, hard to overcome billions of years of everything being about the opposite. I've suffered extreme stretches of not leaving bed all day depression and considered suicide a lot. But it's just a null sum, and my brain is like turning off isn't the answer, It's the end of all questions, so I go on.

I dunno about the west, but i'll talk about my country (generally in the middle east)

Most people don't know what a "good" life looks like. Take this for example: you live under a brutal, autocratic monarchy that violently suppresses people that want change, and the working conditions/economy are pretty shit, too. That sounds like a pretty bad life, right? Well here, it's just the average normal day. You know what makes it more ridiculous? That some people like it here, despite all of these problems.

We don't really have anything else to compare our lives to. Everytime i travel to a western country, it practically feels like a different, almost perfect world [in comparison to here, ofc]. So we don't really know we live like shit, and i guess as a result of that we tend to be less depressed? I don't know.

Including this, is culture; suicide/depression is very frowned upon. It's the ultimate treason against life, and is not a sad thing, it's something to be ashamed of. This inclines people, even if they are suicidal, to stay in silence. And mental health is an almost never touched topic (for the developing world in general).

Different people have a different diversity of ways they can express objection to their living conditions. Where I live, there's a saying that goes something like "only the cornered deer will voluntarily jump off a cliff to not be captured by hunters". Some people, the "deer", often find a way to flee, to fight, to cope, to negotiate, to play social chess, etc. though this does not describe everyone. And even then, as it turns out, a large number of suicides are not like they appear on TV or even the educational health videos. Not all heroes wear capes, and not everyone actually ends up going out with a bang. Some end up fading away, dying of voluntary starvation or some kind of final attempt at risk-taking, totally losing themselves, or maybe overseeing SWAT called on themselves and staging a fight, just to use an example. Think of the distinction between "first degree murder", "second degree murder", "manslaughter", "criminal negligence", etc. and how one might apply that hierarchy to themselves. If someone so much as tries to hold off medical attention for a bad habit, you might say there is reason to worry.