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entirelyuseless comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong Discussion
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People often want to die long before they commit suicide or even consider it. I think Sister Y said at one point that she had wanted to die for years, without ever committing suicide.
It doesn't seem to me highly unlikely that the point of psychological exhaustion would be close to the physical one. That seems like the sort of fit that evolution could produce pretty easily.
meh, I don't think so. I can't see the fitness advantage.
If you live in an extended family or something similar, as long as you don't give out physically, it's helpful not to give out psychologically. So if psychological exhaustion is something that naturally happens, selection could push it off until physical exhaustion so that you can keep contributing to the tribe as long as possible.
Of course this is a just-so story but I don't see why it's an unreasonable one.
But why would psychological exhaustion naturally happen at a rate that's fast enough to be relevant? There's no second law of thermodynamics for algorithms; it's simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets psychologically exhausted, so that's (to a first approximation) what would happen. It seems that evolution layered a routine for suicide on top of our brains too, but it seems that that routine doesn't check for "how old are you", it checks for "how low status are you", probably because your family may lose resources trying to help you and thereby reduce the inclusive genetic fitness of your genes etc.
The argument that you're making (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_shadow) specifically only works for things that need active effort to prevent them from breaking, which tends to mean physical stuff. Psychology isn't really susceptible in the same way, because although or psychological health will be in the selection shadow at e.g. age 300, there isn't that pressure of thermodynamics to break it.
There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there's surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes "psychologically exhausted", runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it's going to commit suicide with a blue screen.
So I still don't see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn't a reasonable one.