It can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of Playbeing Magazine headlined an article with the words, "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life", the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.
What can you do when you've seen it all? Not much except kill yourself, apparently. After all, there's nothing in the world you'd really want to see twice.
On its way to becoming a Forgotten Trope, a Seen It All Suicide occurs when a cartoon character, having seen some outrageous sight, proclaims "Now I've seen everything!" and promptly produces a pistol and shoots himself on the spot. The reason this might happen is because the character feels they have finally cracked and wish to end their lives before it gets worse. When these old cartoons are reaired nowadays, however, this joke is usually Bowdlerised out. Watch for it — if a character proclaims that he's seen it all, expect him not to show up again.
In Real Life, people sometimes say things like, "I'm ready, Jesus," if something momentous has just happened — meant to indicate that they're ready to die, but without the rather jarring effect of pulling a weapon out of thin air and actually doing the job.
A subtrope of Suicide As Comedy.
For the more serious and dramatic situation when a character decides to die because they've seen and done everything and can't see anything in their future but crushing boredom, see Nothing Left To Do But Die.
See Also: Check Please.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
A random demon audience member in YuYu Hakusho proclaims "Somebody kill me, now I've seen everything!" after witnessing an apparent one-shot kill.
Literature
Invoked at the end of Shards of Honor. Emperor Ezar Vorbarra, expecting to be dead within the week, engages in a bit of Gallows Humor with Lord Aral Vorkosigan, who has just suggested the Minister of the Interior as a possible Regent for soon-to-be-Emperor Gregor: "So you do have something good to say for my Ministers after all. I may die now; I've heard everything." He doesn't die immediately, but after he's recruited Aral as Regent, he falls back in exhaustion, implying he's not long for the world. (In Barrayar, Ezar hangs on just long enough to see Aral confirmed as Regent, after which he finally succumbs to his long illness.)
Subverted in the first Erast Fandorin novel: this looks like the cause of the suicide on the first pages, but there is a lot more to it.
Played for drama in Haunted 2005. The Nightmare Box supposedly shows the "truth" of reality, driving people who look into it insane and eventually to suicide.
This one is not exactly a suicide, but pretty close. On an episode of Friends, Phoebe believes that she has been possessed by the spirit of an old woman who didn't want to pass on until she had seen everything. Later she attends a lesbian wedding, at which point she says in an old lady voice, "Well, now I've seen everything!" goes limp for a moment, and then is back to being her old self.
A dramatic version of this was the originally explanation for Gideon's disappearance on Criminal Minds after Mandy Patinkin quit. However, Patinkin refused to do that scene and it was changed to an indefinite road trip.
In the "Twilight Zone" episode Time Enough at Last, Henry Bemis is the only survivor of an H-bomb. Since almost everything is destroyed, there is not much to do. This upsets Bemis and he pounds his hands on his knees and says "If only there was something to do!" He sees a gun and puts it up to his head to shoot himself, but he sees a library and doesn't shoot himself. Of course, this being the Twilight Zone, he was better off with the first option.
MMORP Gs
Common when people have run out of things to do in EVE Online, and often can be justified as in-character.
Music
Matthew Sweet's song "Someone to Pull the Trigger" (the title an example of Exactly What It Says on the Tin}, which includes the line, "Everything I'll ever be, I've been."
Some tabletop RPG players, not realizing that it's possible to simply retire a player character if they've gotten bored with it, have had their PCs commit suicide so they can roll up a new one.
An artifact from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a magical organ that could produce various effects by playing certain songs. However, if the performer who played the song rolled high enough, anyone who heard the song (including the performer) would be so struck by its beauty that everything else would pale in comparison, causing them to become depressed or even suicidal.
In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Dracula is carefully planning one of these. But before he dies, he wants to know what awaits him on the other side.
Web Originals
Apparently the result of drinking "the perfect drink" as brewed by SCP-294.
Subject later committed suicide, leaving a note which read "I'm sorry, but at this point everything's just one big letdown." Requesting such a drink again is highly discouraged.
Raocow: Well, now I've got an argument that life isn't worth living anymore, because I doubt I'll ever experience anything better ever in my life. So, um, this is the last video ever I'll ever make as I'm going to end my life shortly. See y'all in the afterlife.
Deadpool: ... Okay, no. Pigeons...no. Just...no. We're done here. (He Puts a gun to his head, and pulls the trigger)
Western Animation
In the Warner Brothers adaptation of Horton Hatches the Egg, a fish (a caricature of Peter Lorre) does this after seeing Horton, sitting on a nest in his tree, going by on the deck of a freighter.
A number of other Looney Tunes cartoons employ more or less the same gag, usually with the antagonist offing himself in response to something outrageous. Bob Clampett loved doing this gag in particular as many of his cartoons featured this. (The picture above is from Clampett's An Itch in Time.) Of course, since the 1970s Moral Guardians - afraid that children might procure firearms and, on a lark, blow their own brains out - have edited most of these scenes out for TV airings.
Tex Avery's Cross Country Detours has a scene where the narrator states, "Here's the sound of a frog croaking" where the frog then pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.
Ballot Box Bunny ends with Bugs and Sam playing Russian Roulette after losing an election to a (literal) "dark horse."
Subverted when Bugs gets the gun and the scene irises out when you hear a bang, the iris reverses to find that Bugs "missed" and hit Sam instead who is not amused.
In The Grey Hounded Hare, the race announcer says, "Now I've seen everything!"...and then a gunshot is heard over the P.A. speaker.
In Rabbit Romeo, a lovesick female rabbit keeps pestering Bugs for a kiss. He pulls a goldfish out of a bowl and thrusts it into her face instead. Afterwards, the fish pulls out a pistol, walks inside his tiny aquarium castle and seconds later a burst of bubbles erupts from the door.
Chuck Jones' Cheese Chasers uses an extended version of this trope and Nothing Left To Do But Die. Hubie and Bertie discover that they have eaten enough cheese to make themselves sick of the stuff, and decide to commit suicide by cat. Their efforts cause the cat to go mad and try to commit suicide himself by letting a bulldog "massacre" him, driving the dog mad as well.
In another Jones cartoon, "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", Daffy Duck's script ends with this: "There was nothing left for the Scarlet Pumpernickel to do but blow his brains out, which he did." And so does Daffy. Being Looney Tunes, however, he recovered: "It's getting so you have to kill yourself to sell a script in this town!"
Wolfie in Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood, which is never shown nowadays. Ironic when you consider the original planned ending where Wolfie and Grandma have a family was apparently too shocking (you know with cubs implying certain relations) and changed in favor of this one.
Metalocalypse has something very similar to this. One episode deals with the group learning to be stand-up comedians from a strange old sea captain. After they put on a good performance, he says "Well, can't teach them no more," pulls out a gun, and blows his brains out. Despite being an animated series, this is decidedly not cartoonish.
Cartman(brightly): Well, I'm out, guys. If this is what's cool now I think I'm done. I no longer have any connection to this world. I'm going to go home and kill myself. Goodbye, friends.
Futurama does a version of this in "The Late Phillip J. Fry". After witnessing Earth become nothing more than a charred, dead planet and there being no way to get home, Fry suggests to Farnsworth and Bender that they might as well watch the universe end, and with nothing else to do, they agree.
Real Life
Actor George Sanders committed suicide and left a note behind saying he'd done it because he was bored.
Same with Hunter S. Thompson, though he also claimed to have done it because he had been alive for seventeen more years than he actually wanted to be. His family states it was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful and chronic medical conditions.
Also George Eastman, the creator of Kodak left a note saying "To my Friends, My work is done. Why wait?"
This also appears to be the reason for Ernest Hemingway's suicide, as well.
An old Italian saying: "Vedi Napoli e poi mori" (See Naples and die) plays with this trope. It can mean that after seeing beautiful Naples, you can die happily. Joke is, it can also mean "See Naples and then Mori" (Mori is a town in northern Italy).
Naples is also an Italian euphemism for Hell. So it can also be interpreted as something along the lines of "See Hell and die." (Va fa napoli, or something very close, is essentially the Italian bowdlerised version of Go to Hell.)
The possibility of this was invoked by Dr Johnson when he stated, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." (Parodied with the Douglas Adams page-quote.)
Greek philospher Democritus, father of atomism, allegedly decided to starve to death once he had reached the age of 100, stating that he has lived enough and wanted to die with dignity.
