An unlikely meditation on modern happiness
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
Everyone has their own version of God. For some it's simply Love or for others it's some hyper-intelligent being responsible for the big bang and creation. My personal theory is that it's not a bearded man in the sky, but nature's own intelligence, you know, the way nature seems intelligently designed, and in a way, perfect.
I will also add: God doesn't really care about humanity, with all its suffering and division. If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering. But then, what's the point? If we're all doped up on serotonin, or in a permanent MDMA like trance, what's the goal then? We need suffering IMHO to grow and prosper. Trees only grow because of wind and resistance.
All things in moderation.
Young children, for instance, can suffer terrible emotional distress when they do not get their way. One can be compassionate for that suffering while recognising they must go through it to learn and grow.
If suffering is the gap between our expectations and reality, necessary suffering is the amount required to calibrate our expectations sufficiently accurately.
I don't think anyone argues that terrible suffering you described is a good thing, but rather that suffering is endemic to living. We don't get to decide how much happens to us, but we can work towards a world that minimizes avoidable extreme pain and injustice.
But there's also suffering caused by things other than people: earthquakes, volcano eruptions...
I don't know if this is always true, but it does appear quite true that we spend a great deal more time worrying about misfortunes past and present than actually experiencing them as they happen.
There are people in this world who live short, unhappy lives entirely as a consequence of things outside their control. Even worse, there are people who live long unhappy lives, again outside their control.
No point of view that argues it's their own fault for wanting things to be otherwise, or that suffering is necessary for joy to exist, is ever going to be satisfying to me.
The modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor. There's a narrative that we' supposed to get married in our twenties, have kids, retire after a long career (a journey ending in management), then die of a heart attack at 72.
A lot of people torment themselves by telling themselves that this is what their life should be.
I think in this conversation we are conflating frustration ("my life isn't the way I would like") with suffering ("my child was ran over by a truck, I have brain cancer, my brother is dying of hunger in a ditch somewhere, I was tortured in a concentration camp, an earthquake killed everyone I loved"). The latter has little, if anything, to do with modern expectations of life. This kind of suffering has no greater meaning and is not necessary at all for joy to exist.
> The modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor
The ancient Greeks and even older civilizations had all sort of expectations about how life should be. I don't buy at all that suffering is somehow the result of modern expectations.
We created some new forms of suffering and got rid of some older forms. And yet other forms are permanent, outside our control.
Did you begin to suffer from these things when they happened, or when you were told they had happened? If, later, someone came and told you it was a mistake, it was someone else that had suffered all these misfortunes, wouldn't you at that point stop suffering?
If this is true, how can it be that these events in themselves are causing you to suffer?
Good luck telling the parent of a child who died horribly "were you suffering before the doctors told you, or were the doctors themselves the cause of your suffering?".
I've no patience for this.
Pain, disease, death, grief, injury, etc. are all real.
It is usefull to calibrate the subjective to be as close as possible to the objective so that we do not inflict additional suffering on ourselves on top of the objective suffering already there.
Callibrating the subjective to ignore the objective suffering, to just want things to be the way they already are, is harmful because it causes more future exposure to objective suffering.
This view is summarized in the doctrine of the two arrows [1]. When asked if he still felt pain, the Buddha said he was struck by the first arrow called pain, but not by the second arrow called suffering.
It's most obvious when watching kids deal with the world—oh my god, the suffering they subject themselves to for little or no actual reason is incredible, and they find it so hard to get out of the habit of harming themselves in that way—but most adults do the same thing all the time, too.
And trees can totally grow without wind and resistance, take a look inside any greenhouse that's go one in it.
The Christian position is that God made a utopia. The world we are currently living is is abnormal - it has changed.
Well, who changed it? God? No, man did.
But if God really cared, wouldn't He have undone it? He could. The price would be that what we choose and what we do has no effect. That meaninglessness is a pretty high price for utopia.
But does He actually care enough to do anything? Yes. His "fixing" process involved His Son dying on the cross.
That's the Christian position. You may disagree with it. But "If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering" (and therefore either God doesn't exist or He doesn't care) is not the only consistent view of our present situation.
God has omniscience to know exactly what will happen. Even if you somehow claim that human free will overrides omniscience, which seems unlikely, an intelligent being could predict the outcome of the circumstances to varying degrees of precision.
The real Christian view, though not often admitted, seems to be that God doesn't really give a shit about earthly life because it's all irrelevant compared to eternal paradise in heaven. Jesus offering forgiveness makes it all good, because you get this infinitely more heavily weighted component to your infinite lifespan even if your earth life sucks. Which, hey, isn't wrong, given the premises.
Huh? Maybe we read a different Genesis. Yahweh cast out Adam and Eve so that they wouldn't eat from the Tree of Life and become like him and the other gods. The humans didn't change anything.
> The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden
Genesis 3:22
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
If you are already familiar with "This is Water" the below podcast of a philosopher and a psychologist about it might be of interest:
It's not that suffering is noble, it's that suffering is the default and we don't know why. And in the meantime the suffering causes growth. At least we hope.
Challenges may cause growth, and I don't think anybody really wishes for an unchallenging, boring, uneventful life. But suffering? No, thanks.
I've seen countless individuals raise friends and family rounds for ideas I was working on and as a result of my lack of connections or proximity to wealth the growth of my bootstrapped company was slower and worse without capital investment.
Better is better, worse is worse, romanticizing suffering is a form of stockholm syndrome often times, where people just can't come to terms with the fact that their lives are demonstrably worse for the malnourishment they've experienced.
These people arguing that suffering creates growth must have very benign views of suffering or have experienced suffering very limited in scope.
I think many have only experienced personal challenges and conflate it with loss and suffering.
Human psychology seems to think everything is a trade off, it's not true, some things are pure win and pure loss.
Suffering creates a personal internal response, often times a stoic or any psychologically positive response is beneficial to the individual because of its motivating effect (similar to how optimists tend to outperform pessimists), but let's not fool ourselves, the man with severe brain/body damage may do better with an optimistic perspective than pessimistic but they'll never code or procreate again and their local maxima is objectively worse.
As an example see one of the replies to me from someone who seems to be arguing that
> "[...] the modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor. There's a narrative that we' supposed to get married in our twenties, have kids, retire after a long career (a journey ending in management), then die of a heart attack at 72."
is somehow related or at least partially to blame for all human suffering.
While there is of course a lot to think and argue about modern life, the "rat race", the notion of "my career is my life" or equating academic/job achievement to happiness -- all of this merits debate and discussion, of course! -- the idea that this in any way, shape or form is in the same category of young children dying from horrible diseases, or the Holocaust (or any kind of genocide), or having a debilitating and permanent condition, or being tortured, is infuriating and frankly insulting.
I've no patience for people who would argue this.
Sorry, are you trying to describe even worse suffering than the poverty the preceding comment described?
The suffering of hunger makes a meal taste better.
The suffering of the hot sun makes a dip in the pool or a cool breeze enjoyable.
If we learn, as individuals, to be better people, under all circumstances, is that not the same as learning to ride a bike? And once we learn to ride our bike, perhaps there'll be other things to learn too.
Unless theres an equal playing field for all and everyone has means to overcome their suffering, then this "God" is nothing more than perverse and cruel, not some kind of benevolent parental figure encouraging us to edification.
LOL good thing he did not write it in the present day... Also, found this quote interesting
"In his recent and acclaimed book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, philosopher and literary critic Martin Hägglund challenges the details of Kierkegaard’s account head-on. He argues that while Fear and Trembling makes the single strongest case for the compatibility of religious faith and meaningful engagement with the world, the case ultimately fails."
Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else. All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does.
So there's a chance you won't ever believe in it? That sounds liek what I was saying.
> Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else.
That's the part I doubt. I'm not saying I am or they are smarter, I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. I just think people can have widely different personal experiences, and some people lack faith. There are a few mentions of this, either being called "dark night of the soul" or "spiritual dryness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_dryness.
> All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does.
That's true when you consider people from an external perspective. I was asking about internal experiences.
> This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up.
reminds me a lot of the concept of impermanence in Buddhism.
> Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’
“Making peace with the loss” of meaning/reason in the world seems a good secular parallel.