Philosophical pessimism

"Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips. The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated in these places, but it is undeniable that they are concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? ... Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads upon a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Yet consider. Consider pain. Give me a cubic centimetre of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death. We are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always. ... Consider the ways in which we may gain pleasure. Consider. Consider the ways in which we may be given pain. The one is to the other as the moon is to the sun."

"Sadness, more than an emotion, is a discovery. It is the discovery that we have no power over the world, that we are at its mercy."

"Life is movement. Stillness is an exception, because an individual who does not move is always in danger. That is why stopping is a risk. And when we stop, it is mainly to become aware of what we are doing, what is happening to us and what is happening out there in the world. By staying still we become an easy target. An easy target for all those thoughts and ideas that invade our mental tranquility, that frighten us and sometimes paralyze us. Existential anguish invades us and can take over our being until we are completely disarmed. Our defenses and rationalizations fall. At that moment of complete disarmament, we have no choice but to look at life and watch as the great chain of death unfolds before us, sweeping away and ending everything that exists. Some of us panic. Others of us look for some order or pattern in the world to cling to. Then there are those of us who give ourselves completely to the irrationality of existing (which means living without knowing what for and with an ever-present sense of anguish)."

"As a philosophy, pessimism needs no defense. If anything needs a defense, it is life itself. And there is no shortage of defenders; it is enough to take a walk around any bookstore to see that there are entire sections dedicated to positivism and self-help. Thousands of books and millions of words that seek to convince us that happiness is possible, that success and well-being are in our hands. That we have power. That we can achieve what we want. That we can succeed and we can win at life, because life is good and worth living. Look closely at what they tell us: life can be won. It seems to me that, without realizing it, these optimists do nothing more than confirm what every pessimist already knows: that life requires effort and that it is a constant struggle and sacrifice; that it is a contest, a confrontation, something that must be won. On this point, Schopenhauer's sentence is overwhelming: if life was designed for our happiness, then it was poorly designed, because everything in life seems to shout loudly: death, pain, illness, sacrifice and endless struggle."

"Following Schopenhauer, Julius Bahnsen said that we are will, but a will in conflict with itself: always in tension and contradiction. There is no eternal and indivisible will. It is not that the will wants one thing. It wants both. It wants everything, all possibilities. It wants to go and it wants to stay. But we cannot go and stay. We have to choose, which leaves the will forever dissatisfied, because the only way for it to be satisfied is for it to obtain everything it wants, even what is contradictory; but it cannot obtain such a thing."

"The night. The pessimist dwells in the night of existence, in the twilight of our lives. Where reality hides so that we do not see it as it really is. Where death, pain and cries of suffering try to hide themselves, the pessimist is there. He is afraid. Sometimes he feels sadness; other times he feels anger, disbelief or existential terror for everything that he has witnessed and everything he imagines. And if you look closely, you can see the pessimist trembling in that darkness."

"The Syndrome. In August 1973 a group of robbers entered the Swedish Credit Bank in Stockholm and took hostages for six days. What no one expected was that the hostages would end up identifying with the robbers/kidnappers. Suddenly they were more afraid of the police and felt that those who were holding them hostage were precisely the only ones who could now protect them. The victims identified with the perpetrators. That event was a small-scale recreation of what happens on a cosmic level. Life is a torment and a curse from the day we are born, but at some point we identify with it. Life is the cause of all our ills. But now we defend it."

"A unique life. For some pessimists, part of the human tragedy is explained by how insignificant and irrelevant our individualities are. We think we are special, but we are not. And because we are irrelevant, we have all the more reason to suffer. This seems to me to be true. But it seems to me that existence is tragic, too, for the opposite reason. That is, because we are important. In the end one can ignore what is irrelevant and trivial. Doing that (ignoring the trivial) is not only easy, but to be expected. What is certain is that there is no time to waste on superficialities. But ignoring what is relevant, important and unique is different. Doing so is painful and can be humiliating for the ignored. One of the many tragedies of life is precisely this: that my precious life, my poignant, fragile, unrepeatable and unique experiences are ignored by the world. Life has given origin to my existence, has applied the principium individuationis to me (i.e., has placed me in a space and a time). And now it is the same life that disowns me, ignores me, leaves me alone, and will destroy me. Created to be ignored. That is our existential reality."

"It is no more. That conversation, which was so true and intense, ended and now it is nothing. That life, which was lived so intensely, ended and now it is nothing. We are as ephemeral as words."

"A photograph of life. Kevin Cárter was a South African photojournalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for an iconic photograph that captured the meaninglessness and cruelty of life as, perhaps, it had never been captured before. It is an image of a child in Sudan during a famine that occurred in 1993. The photograph shows an emaciated child, with ribs easily visible, hunched over on the ground and unable to lift their head. That in itself should be enough to move our emotions, but what is really terrible and hellish about that scene is that behind it, a few meters away, there is a vulture watching intently, waiting for the death of that child. If life could be captured in a photograph, this would be it. Moreover, if the will that Schopenhauer, Mainländer and Bahnsen speak of could be photographed, it would be this photograph. In that image we see a small and helpless life that suffers, that has reached its limit. We do not know why this child came into this world. Why they were born. They just were. They were born, they suffered and now they are waiting for death to take them away so that the vulture can feed himself, so that the vulture can live. But let the vulture not think himself lucky or powerful! Let him not be deceived, for death is also stalking him; it will also come for him and take him away without explanation. We are all victims."

"Indifference. On the day of your death, the sky will be blue. The birds will be singing. Somewhere in the world there will be a rainbow that will bring joy to a child. A warm breeze will kiss the smile of a happy person. On the day of your death the cruel coldness and indifference of the universe will be revealed."

"Life gets tired of you. Existence is so tedious and unbearable that not even God could stand it. That is why, says Mainländer, God committed suicide (giving rise to the universe), because he preferred non-existence to existence. And that is why, says Schopenhauer, we get bored (giving rise to suffering), because we do not tolerate being, that is, simply existing in the world. But the problem of tedium and boredom is even greater. That is to say, even if you do not get tired of life, life does get tired of you. It is life that puts an end to your life and eliminates it. in his book Tractatus Logicus-Suicidalis says that nobody dies, that there is no such thing as natural death. What happens is that biology kills us. We are eliminated. Therefore, every death is a murder. Even if you don't get tired of life, death is proof that life gets tired of you."

"Defense. We live in the world and are part of it, but we are always on the defensive. Diseases, bacteria, viruses and pandemics are always around the corner. We create antibiotics, antivirals, analgesics and drugs of all kinds to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves. We also protect ourselves from betrayals, impossible loves, disappointments, risks. We close our hearts, we erect defense mechanisms. A whole life dedicated to defending ourselves, to protecting ourselves. But what are we really defending ourselves from? From life. Yes. In the end we spend our lives defending ourselves from life."

"One can regret not having done something and one can also regret having done something. Doubt, dread, and fear of deciding are life's way of telling us: don't decide, stay still, silent, immobile. Stay like this and life will take care of everything. If you are patient enough, death will come and will free you from that indecision, from that fear. You just stay there and wait."

"If one finds it. If the meaning of life is to seek meaning in life, then to find meaning in life is to remain without meaning, without reason to live."

"What does one do when one has a question that is so difficult to answer? One tactic employed particularly by analytic philosophers is to ignore the question altogether; to call it useless, ill-posed, or meaningless. But reducing the question to a linguistic dilemma is akin to a psychological defense mechanism where one does not want to face the underlying problem. And in doing so, curiously enough, the question of meaning is transferred from life itself to language, and in the field of language it is finally possible to pass sentence: there is no meaning (because the question is meaningless). In the end, according to certain philosophers, although it is true that we do not know if life has meaning, at least we do know that the question itself has no meaning. And knowing one thing is, they would say, better than knowing nothing. This analytical tactic can only convince those who already have a certain optimistic predisposition towards life. This is because to think or believe that a profoundly human longing (the longing for meaning) can be ignored is to think that the human being can live relatively well without knowing why they live. The teleological pessimist is, on the other hand, a pessimist who sees the lack of meaning in life as one of the great sources of suffering. And if it were true that the question cannot be answered or that there is no point in asking about the meaning of human life, then that would only exacerbate the sense of weltschmerz rather than appease one's inner torments."

"The longer I live, the more I feel that the simplest formula for the constancy of my fate is: on a lost watch."

"The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena."

"Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly, harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. The preponderance of words for bad emotions, contrasted with the greater frequency of good emotions, suggests that bad emotions have more power. Some patterns of learning suggest that bad things are more quickly and effectively learned than corresponding good things. The lack of a positive counterpart to the concept of trauma is itself a sign that single bad events often have effects that are much more lasting and important than any results of single good events. Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. The self appears to be more strongly motivated to avoid the bad than to embrace the good. Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). Convergence is also provided by Rozin and Royzman (in press). Quite independently of this project, these authors reviewed the literature on interactions between good and bad, and they too concluded that bad things generally prevail. Our review has emphasized independent, parallel effects of good and bad factors, whereas theirs emphasized good and bad factors competing directly against each other in the same situation (such as contagion). Both approaches have confirmed the greater power of bad factors. Thus, the greater impact of bad than good is extremely pervasive. It is found in both cognition and motivation; in both inner, intrapsychic processes and in interpersonal ones; in connection with decisions about the future and to a limited extent with memories of the past; and in animal learning, complex human information processing, and emotional responses."

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."

"Nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. It is very simple. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many other umwelten. He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden that man bears, the experiential burden. As we saw in the last chapter, man can’t even take his own body for granted as can other animals. It is not just hind feet, a tail that he drags, that are just “there,” limbs to be; used and taken for granted or chewed off when caught in a trap and when they give pain and prevent movement. Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man’s very insides—his self—are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange. Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing."

"The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive."

"We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance."

"We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer."

"In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons."

"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness."

"Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way."

"Modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength. The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naive belief, of simple-minded hope. We put the accent on the visible, the clear, the cause-and-effect relation, the logical—always the logical. We know the difference between dreams and reality, between facts and fictions, between symbols and bodies. But right away we can see that these characteristics of the modern mind are exactly those of neurosis. What typifies the neurotic is that he “knows” his situation vis-à-vis reality. He has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth. He knows Truth and Reality, the motives of the entire universe."

"It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible."

"And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept."

"For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on."

"who may tell the tale of the old man? weigh absence in a scale? mete want with a span? the sum assess of the world's woes? nothingness in words enclose?"

"dead calm, then a murmur, a name, a murmured name, in doubt, in fear, in love, in fear, in doubt, wind of winter in the black boughs, cold calm sea whitening whispering to the shore, stealing, hastening, swelling, passing, dying, from naught come, to naught gone"

"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

"Birth was the death of him."

"If there is no God to redeem suffering, and if there is no God to ensure that good triumphs over evil, the problem of existence poses itself anew. Is life really worth living if it contains more suffering than happiness, more evil than good, and if it promises no reward or redemption in some life to come?"

"Above all, we cannot expect the state to make people happy. Even if it effectively protects the rights of everyone, it is still possible for them to be miserable. There are four fundamental evils of human life that are constant and that cannot be eradicated by political means: birth, sickness, age and death. Mainländer’s pessimism was immune to political change or reform, because no state, even a socialist one that cares for all human needs, could make life worth living."

"Disability rights advocates also correctly note that quality-of-life assessments differ quite markedly between those who have impairments and those who do not. Many of those without impairments tend to think that lives with impairments are not worth starting (and may even not be worth continuing) whereas many of those with impairments tend to think that lives with these impairments are worth starting (and certainly are worth continuing). There certainly does seem to be something self-serving about the dominant view. It conveniently sets the quality threshold for lives worth starting above that of the impaired but below normal human lives. But is there anything less self-serving about those with impairments setting the threshold just beneath the quality of their lives? Disability rights advocates argue that the threshold in most people’s judgements about what constitutes a minimally decent quality of life is set too high. However, the phenomenon of discrepant judgements is equally compatible with the claim that the ordinary threshold is set too low (in order that at least some of us should pass it). The view that it is set too low is exactly the judgement that we can imagine would be made by an extra-terrestrial with a charmed life, devoid of any suffering or hardship. It would look with pity on our species and see the disappointment, anguish, grief, pain, and suffering that marks every human life, and judge our existence, as we (humans without unusual impairments) judge the existence of bedridden quadriplegics, to be worse than the alternative of non-existence."

"The injunction to ‘look on the bright side’ should be greeted with a large dose of both scepticism and cynicism. To insist that the bright side is always the right side is to put ideology before the evidence. Every cloud ... may have a silver lining, but it may very often be the cloud rather than the lining on which one should focus if one is to avoid being drenched by self-deception."

"Some crass optimists attempt to justify procreation in the face of the risks by pointing to the option of suicide. Their argument is that if the person brought into existence finds the quality of his or her life to be unacceptably low there is a way of opting out of existence. These really are shallow words that belie the depth of suffering that precedes and precipitates suicide. The life drive is immensely powerful even when people are enduring unspeakable suffering. This is one reason why suicide is by no means an easy option. Another is that suicide causes great distress to the family and friends of the person who takes his or her own life. . . . One cannot be glib about that."

"The overwhelming urge to repeat the optimistic messages, especially in the bleakest times, suggests that they are not quite reassuring enough. It is as if the repetition of the “good news” is essential because it is so at odds with the way the world seems to be. While the optimists have answers to life’s big questions, they are not the right ones, or so I shall argue. Their answers are believed, when they are believed, because people so desperately want to believe them, and not because the force of arguments supporting them makes it the case that we must believe them."

"The (nonhuman) animal predicament is particularly revealing. Confronted with the awful spectacle of billions of animals being eaten, often alive, by predators, humans typically do not attempt to propose any cosmic meaning to those lives. Indeed, the usual monotheistic response is to say that the (or at least one) purpose of animals is to be eaten by others higher up the food chain. It is hard to reconcile that with the existence of a purportedly benevolent God, who surely could have created a world in which billions did not have to die each day to keep others alive."

"Moreover, it is thought that there is something absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We take ourselves very seriously, but when we step back, we wonder what it is all about. The step back need not be all the way to the cosmos. One does not need much distance to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities, the purpose of which is to keep the whole cycle going: working, shopping, cooking, feeding, abluting, sleeping, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, and various engagements with ever-expanding bureaucracies. Even if these mundane activities are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. There is plenty of scope for questioning the significance of even the broader goals of one’s life. This (personal) cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people tend to reproduce, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations and will continue until humanity eventually goes the way of all species—extinction. It seems like a long, repetitive journey to nowhere."

"The prospect of one’s own death, perhaps highlighted by a diagnosis of a dangerous or terminal condition, tends to focus the mind. But the deaths of others—relatives, friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers—can also get a person thinking. Those deaths need not be recent. For example, one might be wandering around an old graveyard. On the tombstones are inscribed some details about the deceased—the dates they were born and died, and perhaps references to spouses, siblings, or children and grandchildren who mourned their loss. Those mourners are themselves now long dead. One thinks about the lives of those families—the beliefs and values, loves and losses, hopes and fears, strivings and failures—and one is struck that nothing of that remains. All has come to naught. One’s thoughts then turn to the present and one recognizes that in time, all those currently living—including oneself —will have gone the way of those now interred. Someday, somebody might stand at one’s grave and wonder about the person represented by the name on the tombstone, and might reflect on the fact that everything that person—you or I— once cared about has come to nothing. It is far more likely, however, that nobody will spare one even that brief thought after all those who knew one have also died."

"We are ephemeral beings on a tiny planet in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe (or perhaps the multiverse)—a cosmos that is coldly indifferent to the insignificant specks that we are. It is indifferent to our fortunes and misfortunes, to injustice, to our hopes, fears, values, and concerns. The forces of nature and the cosmos are blind."

"Our lives contain so much more bad than good in part because of a series of empirical differences between bad things and good things. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring. Orgasms, for example, pass quickly. Gastronomic pleasures last a bit longer, but even if the pleasure of good food is protracted, it lasts no more than a few hours. Severe pains can endure for days, months, and years. Indeed, pleasures in general—not just the most sublime of them—tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There are people who have an enduring sense of contentment or satisfaction, but that is not the same as chronic pleasure. Moreover, discontent and dissatisfaction can be as enduring as contentment and satisfaction; this means that the positive states are not advantaged in this realm. Indeed, the positive states are less stable because it is much easier for things to go wrong than to go right. The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Those who deny this should consider whether they would accept an hour of the most delightful pleasures in exchange for an hour of the worst tortures. Arthur Schopenhauer makes a similar point when he asks us to “compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.” The animal being eaten suffers and loses vastly more than the animal that is eating gains from this one meal. Consider too the temporal dimensions of injury or illness and recovery. One can be injured in seconds: One is hit by a bullet or projectile, or is knocked over or falls, or suffers a stroke or heart attack. In these and other ways, one can instantly lose one’s sight or hearing or the use of a limb or years of learning. The path to recovery is slow. In many cases, full recovery is never attained. Injury comes in an instant, but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime. Even lesser injuries and illnesses are typically incurred much more quickly than one recovers from them. For example, the common cold strikes quickly and is defeated much more slowly by one’s immune system. The symptoms manifest with increasing intensity within hours, but they take at least days, if not weeks, to disappear entirely."

"Things are also stacked against us in the fulfillment of our desires and the satisfaction of our preferences. Many of our desires are never fulfilled. There are thus more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires. Even when desires are fulfilled, they are not fulfilled immediately. Thus, there is a period during which those desires remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, that is a relatively short period (such as between thirst and, in ordinary circumstances, its quenching), but in the case of more ambitious desires, they can take months, years, or decades to fulfill. Some desires that are fulfilled prove less satisfying than we had imagined. One wants a specific job or to marry a particular person, but upon attaining one’s goal, one learns that the job is less interesting or the spouse is more irritating than one thought. Even when fulfilled desires are everything that they were expected to be, the satisfaction is typically transitory, as the fulfilled desires yield to new desires. Sometimes, the new desires are more of the same. For example, one eats to satiety but then hunger gradually sets in again and one desires more food. The “treadmill of desires” works in another way too. When one can regularly satisfy one’s lower-level desires, a new and more demanding level of desires emerges. Thus, those who cannot provide for their own basic needs spend their time striving to fulfill these. Those who can satisfy the recurring basic needs develop what Abraham Maslow calls a “higher discontent” that they seek to satisfy. When that level of desires can be satisfied, the aspirations shift to a yet higher level. Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work."

"Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of how well our lives are going. This is because there is actually a form of self “censorship” in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires and goals that we do not even formulate because we know that they are unattainable. For example, we know that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain expertise in all the subjects in which we are interested. Thus, we set goals that are less unrealistic (even if many of them are nonetheless somewhat optimistic). Thus, one hopes to live a life that is, by human standards, a long life, and we hope to gain expertise in some, perhaps very focused, area. What this means is that, even if all our desires and goals were fulfilled, our lives are not going as well as they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted."

"Human life would be vastly better if pain were fleeting and pleasure protracted; if the pleasures were much better than the pains were bad; if it were really difficult to be injured or get sick; if recovery were swift when injury or illness did befall us; and if our desires were fulfilled instantly and if they did not give way to new desires. Human life would also be immensely better if we lived for many thousands of years in good health and if we were much wiser, cleverer, and morally better than we are."

"We laugh, but inept is our laughter, We should weep, and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass and thereafter Remolded no more."