Athens, Ilioupoli.
Shortly after noon on Tuesday, May 12, two 17-year-old girls fell from the sixth floor of an apartment building. One was killed, while the other is fighting for her life in critical condition. Before the suicide attempt, one of the girls left a note in which, among other things, she wrote:
“Mom and Dad, for three years now I have been living in a state of depression. And maybe this world has its beautiful sides, but perhaps another world is better. This is the year I am supposed to take the Panhellenic Exams, but I am afraid I will not do well. I know I will fail, and then I will end up with a job that will not pay enough money. Nothing in life pleases me anymore. I cannot see anything positive. Mom and Dad, I no longer want to live.”
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A society is judged not by its wealth, but by how much hope it leaves to its children. And when teenagers see death as a solution, then the crisis is not merely economic or political; it is profoundly humanitarian and moral.
“But,” you may ask, “are Mitsotakis and Karamanlis again to blame for this tragedy as well? Fine, for the crimes of Tempi and Pylos with their hundreds of dead victims. In the first case, they devoured the money intended for railway safety and killed 57 passengers. In the second crime, swearing by the supreme triptych of ‘nation, religion, and family,’ allegedly threatened by the ‘illegal’ entry of the ‘wretched of the earth,’ they allowed hundreds to drown.”
Yes, we answer you “with full awareness.” They are once again the same perpetrators, the moral instigators, since they never dirty their own hands as physical ones.
But to be precise and fair, guilty are ALL the representatives of the System served by Mitsotakis and Karamanlis. The first is the son, the second the nephew, of political dynasties — families that have governed this miserable country for entire decades, a state whose regime has transformed from hereditary monarchy into… hereditary transfer of power to sons, daughters, and nephews.
And not only power. In Greece, everything is hereditary. Wealth, influence, “prestige,” positions. Especially the latter, reserved even in the public sector not only for relatives, but also for lovers, party followers, friends, and even fellow villagers.
A vast graveyard of meritocracy and honest struggle — all those elements that compose the meaning of the “rule of law,” which Greece never truly possessed. It has always been a country of corruption, profiteering, clientelism, incompetence, carelessness, and sloppiness.
Two children jumped into the void because, at the age of 17, they had already understood the filthy game set up by this entire System of ruthless capitalism and savage competition, sustained and reinforced for years by its representatives. “We will fail the exams, we will not find jobs, we will not have money,” writes one child in the note left to her devastated parents.
This is what the thieves and every kind of lubricator of the System’s machinery have reduced life to. Life no longer has value without money. This world is not made for the poor, the honest, and the dignified. Those two children learned that lesson “from their earliest years.” And they chose to leave this life embraced together at the age of 17, heading somewhere that might indeed be better than the world ruled by money.
We wrote here only two days ago:
“Power in Greece is hereditary. Along with it, the country’s wealth is ‘bequeathed’ from father to son and grandchildren. From Konstantinos Mitsotakis to Kyriakos and Bakoyannis. And from Georgios Tzitzikostas to Apostolos. Effortlessly. Their only advantage being their name and their service to corruption and deceit. Equally hereditary are injustice, marginalization, and punishment for the honest and dignified — passed down from father to son and grandson alike.”
It is certain that these two children who yesterday chose to cut the thread of their lives did not have wealthy parents or a “powerful uncle” to support them, because they feared they would fail to enter a public university. And there, their dream of studies died. They understood very early that this world belongs to Mitsotakis, to Tzitzikostas, to the De Grèce family.
At their age, those people did not have to sit exams to enter public universities. Their fathers had already secured for them the best places at Harvard and the Hellenic College of London. And afterward, they were given a smooth and effortless road toward inheriting the positions of power, influence, and wealth they hold today.
Meanwhile, the two 17-year-old girls chose death because those very same people had already deprived them of life itself — depriving them of fair access to its goods. Equal opportunities, meritocracy, equality before the law, and justice.
These too are murders. Even if the Mass Media of Stupefaction call them suicides. These crimes have moral instigators whose signatures are written across them in bold letters.
Diotima:
The tragedy in Ilioupoli is not merely another “police incident” or a news story for temporary television consumption. It is a cry of despair from a generation growing up in an environment of constant fear, insecurity, and social suffocation. When two 17-year-old girls reach the point of believing that “there is no future,” then society must look at itself in the mirror without excuses.
The girl’s note is shocking precisely because it reflects the transformation of human worth into an economic measure. “I will not succeed,” “I will not find a job,” “I will not have money.” In these phrases lies the brutality of a system that teaches children from a very early age that their lives only have value if accompanied by success, career, wealth, and social recognition.
And this is the core of the problem: modern society does not produce only economic inequalities. It also produces existential despair. A child who feels they have failed in examinations often feels they have failed entirely as a human being. This did not emerge by accident. It is the result of a long political, social, and cultural decline, where meritocracy has been replaced by networks of power, nepotism, favoritism, and the hereditary reproduction of privilege.
For decades in Greece, the children of the powerful rarely experience the terror of uncertainty endured by ordinary families. They do not grow up fearing that “if I fail the university entrance exams, my life is over.” That is why public anger toward political and economic elites is not only about poverty or injustice. It is mainly about the sense that the rules of the game are not the same for everyone.
At the same time, a deeper caution is necessary: no social analysis should reduce a human tragedy to a mere political slogan. Depression, psychological exhaustion, and adolescent despair are complex and painful realities. There is not one single culprit. There is an entire web of pressures — familial, educational, economic, social, and cultural — capable of crushing a vulnerable human being.
And yet, the state bears enormous responsibility when it leaves young people without meaningful psychological support, without hope, and without the prospect of a dignified life. When survival itself becomes a continuous struggle of fear and competition, society gradually loses its humanity.
Those two girls should never have felt that the world had no place for them. No exam failure, no financial dead end, and no social comparison is worth more than a human life. And perhaps this is the harshest condemnation of all: that we have created a world in which 17-year-old children can believe that the future has already ended before it even began.