More and more people — and they seem to be young people — are taking to social media and various doomer sites (Reddit/Collapse is one of them) to moan that they are so bummed by the prospect of civilizational collapse that they are considering suicide. Now, suicide, like sex, is talked about far more than it is actually done — but this drivel should be dealt with before it becomes a fad.

Did you not get the memo, young tragedians, that you (and I, and everyone we know) are going to die? I can understand the error, because our culture is about being special, and forever young, and being anything you want to be, and never, ever talking about death.

Two years ago I wrote here about the Catholic theologian Richard Rohr’s research into initiation rites, through which all humans passed until a few centuries ago. He found that these ceremonies, in all cultures and times — were used to impress just five basic ideas on young people passing into adulthood. Prominent among these dicta: you are going to die.

In our age we don’t do that, of course, so you youngsters may have missed the fact that everything dies. It’s not just you — another edict of the initiation ceremonies was “you are not special” — and it’s not just humans. Everything dies, including the planet we inhabit and the sun that warms it and the constant stars that decorate its night sky. As Shakespeare put it, “It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

The thing that allows us not to think about dying is the uncertainty of its timing. The time and place of our individual appointment to step off the planet is unknown and unknowable to almost all of us. That helps us construct our lives despite the death sentence that shadows us. Life, it turns out, really is a sexually transmitted, fatal disease.

That is not news. What we humans have done, for millennia, is resolve to live as best we can while we can, and to maintain — even against the impending pain of death — values that ease our passage and that of our fellow travelers. Things such as kindness and helpfulness and compassion.

Suicide might be a valid option when the crash actually occurs. The radical downsizing of the human population that will ensue will surely present situations where it would be preferable to jump than to be pushed. As I observed here a few months ago, it is time we eased the religious and social strictures against taking one’s own life, for several sound and practical reasons.

But here’s the good news, initiates: you may well die before the crash, in a school shooting or hurricane or while taking a selfie. So cheer up, stop obsessing about the crash, or the death of the sun, or whatever, as a reason to cut your young life short. As the ceremonies used to say, you’re not special, and death will come when it will come. Suck it up.