Darkover
Angelic
- Jul 29, 2021
- 4,739
Life is shit. We're all going to die. Most of us are forced to work a 9-5 job we don't enjoy in order to put bread on the table. Over 40% of people in the UK will suffer cancer at some point. 900 million starving people in the world (but thanks to huge inequality and pure dumb luck you're not one of them). Studies have found that most of us would rate ourselves as "happy" or "very happy", but we're engineered to be overly-optimistic about our lives because an optimistic organism has better inclusive fitness; it is more inclined to "try, try and try again" until it breeds. Studies have found people tend to over-estimate the quality of their lives. Most people - even those living in poverty - must lie to themselves and others that their lives are worth living because the alternative would be to either face the cognitive dissonance that arises from continuing a life they believe is not worth continuing, or to kill themselves. Our lives are devoid of meaning. Most people recognise that life objectively has no meaning, but go down the existentialist route of inventing some subjective bullshit reason to delude themselves that their lives are significant in some way.
Our brains are constantly trying to bullshit ourselves, and for many people it works most of the time, but at times it fails. "What about the happiness in life?" What about it? According to Schopenhauer, what we call "happiness" is a "negative" (i.e. derivative) quantity, a label we attribute to the relative absence of suffering, which is the "positive" (i.e. real) element of existence. This is why the pleasures you experience are always less pleasurable than you expect, and the pains always considerably more painful.
Besides, even if you somehow find a true source of happiness, it wouldn't last. If there's one certainty in life beside death, it's the impermanence of all things. This is a truth recognised not only by Schopenhauer but in Buddhism as one of its core principles. It has a special name for the kind of suffering associated with our recognition of this impermanence of the state of affairs: Viparinama-dukkha. You enjoy your life now? In the best case, you're going to grow old and decay, and then die. Your significant other is going to die. Your pet cats and dogs are going to die. You'll get sick. You'll get hit by a car. You'll end unemployed. The economy will turn. So the takeaway is that happiness in a world like ours is fleeting at best, non-existent at worst.
"In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope — in such a world, happiness in inconceivable. How can it dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over."
And then we have Professor David Benatar, who explains in Better Never to Have Been that "a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all". He demonstrates that, due to an asymmetry that exists between the values of suffering and happiness when comparing situations that entail a transition from a state of non-existence to existence, every single one of us was overall harmed by being born. Why do we exist? We're biological machines put together by our constituent genes to serve their interests by acting as vessels through which they can proliferate while having a measure of protection from their environment and the machines of competitor genes. We're engineered, like all life, to survive and breed effectively within our environments. It in the interest of these genes to wire our brains to believe our lives are meaningful and worth continuing however bullshit this might be because pessimists and nihilists tend to be far less inclined to survive and reproduce. "Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon." -- Aristotle, The Wisdom of Silenus
Our brains are constantly trying to bullshit ourselves, and for many people it works most of the time, but at times it fails. "What about the happiness in life?" What about it? According to Schopenhauer, what we call "happiness" is a "negative" (i.e. derivative) quantity, a label we attribute to the relative absence of suffering, which is the "positive" (i.e. real) element of existence. This is why the pleasures you experience are always less pleasurable than you expect, and the pains always considerably more painful.
Besides, even if you somehow find a true source of happiness, it wouldn't last. If there's one certainty in life beside death, it's the impermanence of all things. This is a truth recognised not only by Schopenhauer but in Buddhism as one of its core principles. It has a special name for the kind of suffering associated with our recognition of this impermanence of the state of affairs: Viparinama-dukkha. You enjoy your life now? In the best case, you're going to grow old and decay, and then die. Your significant other is going to die. Your pet cats and dogs are going to die. You'll get sick. You'll get hit by a car. You'll end unemployed. The economy will turn. So the takeaway is that happiness in a world like ours is fleeting at best, non-existent at worst.
"In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope — in such a world, happiness in inconceivable. How can it dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over."
And then we have Professor David Benatar, who explains in Better Never to Have Been that "a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all". He demonstrates that, due to an asymmetry that exists between the values of suffering and happiness when comparing situations that entail a transition from a state of non-existence to existence, every single one of us was overall harmed by being born. Why do we exist? We're biological machines put together by our constituent genes to serve their interests by acting as vessels through which they can proliferate while having a measure of protection from their environment and the machines of competitor genes. We're engineered, like all life, to survive and breed effectively within our environments. It in the interest of these genes to wire our brains to believe our lives are meaningful and worth continuing however bullshit this might be because pessimists and nihilists tend to be far less inclined to survive and reproduce. "Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon." -- Aristotle, The Wisdom of Silenus
