On Suffering

I make no attempt to debunk the contention that I am a supreme pessimist, one who offers only comfortless philosophy to those who hear it. This is not due to some faulty wiring in my brain (which is most certainly there, nonetheless), but everything to do with the obvious nature of existence and the human condition. There is no comfort. There is no hope. There is no happiness. You are condemned to languish on this wretched rock for a small period of time, until at which time you die and will revert back into non-existence once again. Everything you do, everything you say, all the people you meet, all your hopes and dreams - they are nice to have (and perhaps serve as the only reason for living) but they mean nothing. Nothingness is the only certainty. If this has upset you, I would recommend not continuing further, for you will be better off sleep-walking through life in an ignorant shell where each day melts into the next forming a cycle of nothingness.

It is absurd when one views how much suffering is so pervasive in this world. If suffering is not the direct aim of human life, then we have failed miserably. There is so much misfortune, so much pain inexplicably tied to life itself. Every single misfortune one will experience seems to come as something that is exceptional, but misfortune and suffering as a whole is the general rule.

Generally speaking, humans tend to find pleasure not nearly as pleasant as they had thought, and pain all the more painful. In our early youth we are like theater patrons awaiting the curtain to rise, waiting for the show to start, with highest of spirits and the grandest of dreams. It can be marked a blessing that we do not what is really going to happen. Children are innocent prisoners. However, they are not condemned to death . . . but to life. And as one lives, they may go through things fairly well, but the longer that one lives the more and more they shall feel, with great clarity, that life is a disappointment.

Animals are much more content with their existence than man. The animal lives only in today, his range of emotion and sight cannot see its entire past, and speculate about its future. Therefore it carries much less sorrow, but also joy, than man. It also doesn't hope. That fatal flaw in mankind, his hoping for something - hopes are nearly always met with disappointment, only adding further to the miseries.

This is a short treatise (I am running low on time), but if one would look to life with the information presented here, they would find far less sorrow and misery to be hold. Rather, the misery and sorrow would not affect them as much as otherwise. For instead of viewing ones misfortunes and miseries as uncommon events, one should view them as what they are - the very basis of existence.

None of us were asked if we wanted to be here, if we wanted to be human. And yet, here we are. Our eternal stretch of non-existence has been disturbed for an infinitesimally small amount of time.

I never wanted to be human.