Csdrhrt

Obviously this is a delicate topic that must be handled with finesse. I am obviously not going to call anyone out on anything and would prefer to do nothing, but I have tried to ignore it for over five years now and nothing has changed.

I know there is no correlation, but for some background reference we work the same job with relatively equal workloads. I know he is paid more than fairly for his job and our company is quite generous with benefits and other perks.

I have a coworker in my department who takes every opportunity to slyly bring up how he is looking forward to death. So much so that its become his "thing". Even a nonchalant "how's it going?" from an unexpecting coworker turns into subtle (and sometimes overt) morbid responses. He'll also make statements that "so-and-so doesn't realize how serious I am." Other guys who know him well joke with him about it and he goes along with them– things like situations where life insurance pays out more. I find the whole thing disrespectful and insensitive and that's just this topic; not to mention other non-work-appropriate statements/jokes/etc.

I understand that some individuals who are suicidal will seek attention, but the rest of his "tough guy" attitude is also driven by attention; overly elaborating how much he works and using straw-man arguments to fuel his presumptuous (and "provocative" to say the least) opinions. I don't want to get too specific with events/quotes, but he shares many traits with those people who post on Facebook with some factitious disorder, and sometimes posts them on social media himself.

Now even some of the junior-levels who looks up to him started occasionally mimicking these expressions. Not as over-the-top, but things like wanting to kill themselves because the project they were working on was difficult. It just feels like everyone is trying to one-up each other now as if our pay raises correlated to how much we want to die; even for simple tasks sometimes! Management has been pretty loose in general with all of this- our supervisor has heard the comments, but has not taken any action that I'm aware of.

Lately I've been following a somewhat notable tech blogger who was fighting cancer for the last two years. I never knew him and we never spoke, but I respected and related to him since we are the same age and in the same field. This last month he lost his battle and while I am usually not effected by "celebrity" deaths, this one hit me pretty hard. When this coworker asked me what I was reading about, I described the guy's situation and my coworker's response was "lucky bastard." As if this guy was lucky to die in his 30s of leukemia.

Again, I would personally just prefer to stay out of it and keep putting my headphones on to ignore it, but I'd really like that it just stop. If he's serious, I would think he should get some help– maybe my company will even help facilitate with a company-wide speaker or treatments (or something), and if he's doing it for show then he needs to stop.

How should I handle this? Or should I just keep ignoring it and minding my own business?