Venting Is pleasure from life worth the suffering?

[Darkover]

I don't think the pleasure is worth the suffering, its too uneven. Having to go through so much BS for a few stolen moments of joy hardly seems fair to me. One thing I've realized about life is just how much waiting we have to do for so little reward.

I feel like I just tread water, or go in circles while I wait for the next dopamine hit. It comes in a flash, then it's gone, then its back to waiting, in a vicious cycle. If I had had the option, I would have said thanks but no thanks to all this.

Life seems to me to be a negative phenomenon in general: it looks like a process of decay/slow dying/escape from death. Yes, there is pleasure to be found here, but it feels like a temporary relief of a fundamentally broken existence.

Sex Animal instinct to propagate species.
An evolutionary trick to compel people to breed
Not only is it primitive but it's the very fucking thing that brought me into existence and the root of all my suffering, misery, struggles and all the unnecessary bullshit!
It's mind-boggling how just simply fucking for who knows how many minutes of pleasure it gave my fucking biological parents would cause a goddamn lifetime of suffering!

 

[banger12]

Damn I'm so sorry you're feeling all of this, I know it's rough. I gotta say your post really resonated with me. The answer to your question is ofc a personal one that will have a different answer for each person but the way you expressed it is strong. So many people just act and speak on the assumption that the answer is a universal yes but that in reality doesn't always seem fair. I hope you are well.

 

[R_N]

I don't find pleasure an ideal anymore. Because, look at us. Everyone chases pleasure and in the end we just die without any understanding. It's like we are manipulated in doing things and then life just ends. Things we find important never bring us insight, we just repeat the cycle.

And yet bodily pleasure is worshipped, same as things promised to bring us that pleasure. Then we are also manipulated by other humans because we are so simple minded so they can derive pleasure out of us being addicted to it. What are we doing really? Even here I see the same people as everywhere. Doing and valuing the same things. There is no difference at all.

 

[derpyderpins]

That's the big question, right? And we each must find our own answer. That's why the right to ctb is important.

In my experience, if you're only seeking shallow pleasure, the bad will probably win out. Sex is awesome, but it's the deeper connection that is more lasting and powerful.

 

[NumbItAll]

Life is negative EV

 

[sserafim]

No

 

[not-2-b-the-answer]

NOPE !!!!

 

[ceus]

I have a migraine rn so excuse me if I'm not making sense :P
Firstly, your post also resonated with me. It's how I feel (and have felt) for most of my life.
Ending one's existence here is the logical consequence of quantified Hedonism depending on subjective experience and evalution/contextualization of the same. Which is how many of us got here I guess.
Still I think there are at least two further important questions to consider here.

1. What is the meaning of existence?
2. What is justified belief/knowledge?

My take is that, to answer the first question we need to have the answer to the second one.
We can postulate a few theories on question Nr. 2, none of them achieving the status of absolute, infallible Truth (capital T).
Even the most robust systems of logic we can apply in our search for comprehension are inherently flawed, inconclusive, paradoxical, inconsistent or assumptive (See Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem).
To draw conclusions about anything we first need information. Without inference we can't come to conclusions and choices (if there is such a thing) would be inherently random.
For information we need an absence of complete redundancy, meaning some type of ordered distinctions (smallest one would be binary).
For deductive reasoning we need information to transport, manipulate and postulate our axioms in thusly we also need atleast simple arithmetical operations to handle binary information.
As Goedel's Theorem states a axiomatic system can't be both consistent and complete. Meaning either we accept the paradoxical breakage of formal logic or incomprehensive depiction of reality in our system of thought.
Both wouldn't result in neither 'Truth' nor certainty.
With that established we can start equating: belief=conviction on the basis of "rational thinking/logic"=justified belief.
No take on reality can claim infallibility or superiority over any other (possibly, everything is potentially falsifiable).
So what do we have left now?
Experience. Raw consciousness. Uncertainty about free will, morality or meaning.
If you feel you can quantify and weigh against each other the pleasurable vs. agonizing aspects of life you can do so and it will be just as True as any negation or counter argument. But maybe it doesn't feel that way. Direct experience, without judgement or contextualization beyond the raw awareness is quite possibly the most concrete thing there is.
So if you feel like that and that feeling entails a sense of dread or a longing for what you abstracted death to be nobody in their right mind could deny that with any claim to righteousness.
But neither can you claim to have 'The Truth'. Any linguistic answer to anything goes into the realm of semantics, information is inherently uncertain. Any verbal thought, depending on what consciousness is and if it is an emergent property of something finite even any experience is subject to uncertainty.

To come to a conclusion:
Anything you could do, live or die, decide or don't is in no thinkable logical way better or worse. Closer to the truth or further away. Desirable or not.
You can not think your way to certainty.
You can not ask questions and get anything more than a facett/perpective back.
So if you want you have all the reasons to trust yourself as much as any other person or just any random answer.

Maybe I'm completely delusional and lost in this type of thinking.
Maybe I've misinterpreted some of the things I'm refering to. Maybe there are huge gaps in comprehension.
But maybe, just maybe existence works in a similar way to what I tried to describe.
Maybe it was interesting or helpful to someone to read this.

Thank you for your take, it definitely resonates with me and I thought it was quite the descriptive and interesting post. I feel similarly actually - which is why I'm hanging out on this site.
Subjectively l've experienced times where this balance shifted, although they may have been brief.
All the best on your journey, wherever it may lead you.

Much Love
Ceus

 

[Imagined_Euphoria]

Depends entirely on the circumstances of each individuals life. In my case? No. When I look back at my life I see SO much unnecessary suffering, just bad luck after bad luck.

 

[etherealspring]

i think the cons outweigh the pros

 

[GuessWhosBack]

As Goedel's Theorem states a axiomatic system can't be both consistent and complete. Meaning either we accept the paradoxical breakage of formal logic or incomprehensive depiction of reality in our system of thought.

Good to see someone who also likes logic here. I shortened your reply because I'm only addressing this claim. I'm sorry to be writing this but I write it in no ill intent. I'd just like to correct your vocabulary here in the quoted sentences.

---

Let us revisit Godel's first and second incompleteness theorems, stated in full detail.

1. No logical system has a consistent deductive system for which one can write an axiomatisation equivalent to PA- (Peano's Arithmetic without the Axiom Schema of Induction), often referred to as Robinson's Arithmetic or Q, and possibly extend it to an axiomatisation Σ, through which one can use Σ to prove every single truth about the standard model of PA (what people call ℕ) that is written in the first-order language of PA.
2. There is no logical system, which has a deductive system:
   • with a sufficiently rich language to write the axioms of Q in
   • that is also capable of proving its own consistency

Because the standard model of PA is so ubiquitous in mathematics (natural numbers) these results have big consequences on mathematical reasoning in general, so it is of no surprise that people extend this phenomenon to the metaphysical.

---

With that being said, there are many examples of complete, consistent logical systems. But by Godel's results, they are relatively meager and cannot be used to say much. It's not that sufficiently strong formal logic "breaks" per se - no, this is not what happens. What happens is logical independence, and mathematicians get around it by admitting independent statements as part of their axioms.

Let me explain. Let S be a statement that cannot be proven nor disproven in some deductive system. If the deductive system is consistent (with respect to the semantics defined meta-theoretically by the logical system), then whenever we add S to our axioms, we still remain consistent. Similarly if we add the negation of S, we still remain consistent. This is because without any information on S, the deductive system could have never reached a conclusion about S. So the only way the deductive system can talk about S, is by adding S, or adding its negation (in classical logics). So we can do either or, and explore what happens next. This is done, for example, when extending the axioms of ZF set theory with Martin's axiom, or with Choice, etc etc. We still keep using the same formal system, but we simply extend the axioms as needed.
From a model theoretic perspective, thanks to the Completeness theorem, what is actually happening is this:

• You write a list of axioms you want to study, in the language prescribed by your logical system.
• In your universe of discourse (some set theoretic model, perhaps your Computer's RAM - just kidding, etc) there will be structures which adhere to those list of axioms, called models.
• The Completeness theorem says that what you should be able to prove from deductive reasoning alone, should be exactly the set of all common truths shared by the models.
• If your models share exactly the same set of truths, then the common truths are all the truths, and your axioms must be very trivial and certainly weaker than PA.
• If your models do not share exactly the same set of truths, then logical independence occurs. You will have statements which, by the Completeness theorem, are unreachable from deduction, because those statements hold in some models, and don't hold in some others. Remember all the models obey the same basic set of axioms in step 1, so your deductive system cannot be consistent and simultaneously uncover all the truths about one model specifically.
• PA suffers from this "multiple non-equivalent models" phenomenon. You can show this either by simply just describing two non-isomorphic models of PA, or by using Löwenheim–Skolem's theorem.

 

[ijustwishtodie]

No, it isn't. The suffering outweighs the pleasures for 99% of people

 

[kinderbueno]

I don't think the pleasure is worth the suffering, its too uneven. Having to go through so much BS for a few stolen moments of joy hardly seems fair to me. One thing I've realized about life is just how much waiting we have to do for so little reward.

This really resonated with me. It's too much fucking effort for a few moments of happiness. If you're neurodivergent or physically ill/disabled there's even more hoops you have to jump through to reach happiness