Motivation to Stay Alive

In order to stay alive a person must be motivated to sustain his or her own life. This means that a person must have incentives to live. The reason that people do the things necessary to live and keep themselves healthy is because they don't want to be seperated from the things that are important to them. They know that if they die they will miss out on things such as friends and family, seeing their children grow up, and important events such as Super Bowls and elections. This leads me to question the mode of thought that suggests that people who commit suicide are weak minded. The reason that people commit suicide is that they lose their incentives for living. The incentives for staying alive are different for everyone, but once they are gone the person will have no reason to go on. I have a friend who recently lost his wife to cancer. He is a total wreck. He can't go to work, as he is on psychological disability and seems to not care about anything anymore. It seems that he has no motivation to live, work, or take care of himself. People base their lives around certain things and when they lose those things their lives fall apart. Once you understand that a person's motivation to live is based on incentives, it is very easy to see why they commit suicide once those incentives are gone.