The reality is that black-and-white thinking on such a complex subject is unproductive and ultimately gets you nowhere. Ironically you are pushing your belief that the world is only made for suffering the same way you say those who are 'pro-life' push the belief that happiness is everywhere. Regardless of suffering or not most people are happy or at least content with living, they are not ignoring an underlying cruelness to this world.
I believe that life is meaningless and from a biological standpoint our only purpose is to live and reproduce. I do not see us as any more valuable than any other lifeform in the grand scheme of things. We are just here. Is this positive or negative? I'd say neither because you can't objectify it. Some people believe they lived great lives with very minimal, while others have had it "all" and have hated life. It's a subjective experience but by no means is painting positive experiences harmful. If anything, viewing experiences/life through a filter of only good/bad is more harmful.
There
is an underlying cruelness to the world though, it's not simply a belief..unless you want to go back and forth about semantics..and quite frankly, most "happy" people (people with much less suffering and far more privilege than others) do in fact, ignore it, until the day it comes for
them.
I'm also not sure where you got the idea that most people are happy or content with living from?
They sure could have fooled me.
You also can't really go by what people tell you, when so many of us wear masks and play pretend to survive.
The fact that's it's a subjective experience, doesn't take away from the other fact that objectivity, as we have come to know the term, does exist.
Suffering exists, and will continue to exist, especially if we are forced to keep this whole charade going for the sake of some other possibility of happiness for another person(s) (a person or people who somehow think the relentless suffering of those around them and those who came before, is somehow worth it, despite not having had to endure themselves).
At the end of the day, if you really distill desires down to their pulp, human beings all want similar things out of the time they've been given on this earth-against their will (or ability to consent), and if they cannot have those things, then they suffer dearly.
Sometimes an end to said suffering is even one of the things that is denied to a person (until inevitable death occurs long past due).
OP might have views that are at the far end of the spectrum, but it doesn't mean they're not worth taking into consideration.
Neutrality or gray vision, is not as beneficial or without harm as you seem to think it is.
It gets us nowhere a lot of the time, or keeps things exactly the way they are. Shit.
OP alludes to a valid point, that positivity about living often causes harm in and of itself and obfuscates the suffering of those who got the short end of the stick, thus making it easier to perpetuate and propagate their demise.
It also further torments them to live in tandem with what they can never experience for themselves.
Part of the reason why people continue to come into being and suffer, is because there is this bias towards life-affirming sentiments..which is conflated with being "positive".
And we wrongly describe the opposite as being "negative" when it's simply describing an unfortunate truth that many poor individuals have to navigate..wanting to be heard and seen alongside those who beam with unbridled contentment.
OP has to dig their heels in and shout louder, they can't just bend and blend into the middle ground..otherwise there would be no middle ground. No spectrum without extremities.
All that said, I agree with your comment about life ultimately being meaningless, but plenty of people could give you a hard time about that too.
There are times where I absolutely need/want my suffering to mean something..even if that something's only destiny is to morph into a plea that will lead to the end of future suffering for others.
But perhaps it really will all mean nothing, long after I'm gone. Depending on how you define meaning.
(And meaninglessness could be considered suffering, to boot.)
*Sorry for the tangents, I just found your comment to be more worthy of jumping off from than the flippant one before it.
yeah, i know, ive been on this forum for a while. but.. idk, im getting tired of certain comments on FC posts, just let her vent like any other user. its getting tired, what with the snarky attitude lately.. just my thoughts
I agree.
You truly have created a prison of your own intellect. It seems like all of your views have hardened into total absolutes that reality has to fit to rather than the other way around. It is just as harmful to deny all happiness and beauty as it is to pretend suffering and cruelty doesn't exist. I wish you would stop torturing yourself this way because life is difficult enough as it is.
What do you consider "happiness and beauty" and what do you say to those who are denied both?
Who cares if something exists, when often the defining part of suffering is being starved of what is right before your eyes, yet completely out of reach.
Stop the victim blaming rhetoric of making sure OP is burdened with the responsibility of their own torment, which they did not ask for nor conjure up.
Your first and last statements could be arbitrarily thrown at just about anyone on this site..or off of it.
I'm glad some people can be happy.
At a great cost..which they themselves rarely have to pay.
I think the positive attitudes about life are a result of propaganda. We are force-fed those ideas from the time we're born and only a few reject them.
Same with religion, nationalism or any other ideology peddled en masse. The majority are going to eat it up, then regurgitate what they've been fed.
They'll become indignant with anyone who suggests life is anything less than precious. Even when you cite evidence to the contrary.
(Tell someone you doubt the existence of their god and you get the same response)
I don't assign much validity to these viewpoints because I know how they came to be.
In the early days of the war, I'm sure millions of Russians believed what their government was peddling in regards to the conflict.
Most people go around spewing what they've been taught/told.
Even when they speak from a place of experience, I still don't give it any validity.
How many people will swear up and down that racism is dead because they don't experience it or see it. Am I supposed to honor that POV?
They start believing in the message so deeply that they begin to employ confirmation bias or worse, take the negatives and spin them into a positive. I do it myself sometimes.
A bad thing happens and they don't see it as proof of a negative life experience.
Instead, they say that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger... They say the good lord wouldn't give them any more than they can handle... They say their dead children were called home to God. SMH.
That's nice. You can dress it up, spin it and wrap it in all the positive platitudes you want. Translation? Life sucks.
Admit it or not, agree or disagree -it doesn't change the truth.
Yeah, some people have perfectly fine lives but that's not enough to undo the overall observation that life sucks.
Good points, a lot of this is where I'm coming from as well.
Things are not always as they seem, and we should also know by now that the apparent majority view should never be treated with kid gloves.
