I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about human suffering, and how it isn’t a cosmic necessity, but a reflection of our choices and priorities.
This wasn’t always the case. For most of history, life was painful, chaotic, unjust, and laden with toil. Every culture invented its own stories and myths to explain this state of affairs, justifying humanity’s place in an unsatisfactory universe.
But that era came and went, without most people noticing. Technology has given us the power to create abundance beyond the dreams of our ancestors. Machines do most of the work that used to break people’s backs and grind down their bodies. Science has allowed us to fight off the diseases and disasters that plagued past civilizations. We have the power, collectively, to eliminate almost every remaining cause of human suffering – if only we had the wisdom to make better choices.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
One of the larger obstacles to this better world is that those old stories, invented to give people the spirit to persevere despite suffering, now serve as positive defenses of suffering. Millions of people believe that life should be hard and painful, because their founding myths were written at a time when it was. Rather than accept that their beliefs are outdated, they want to hold the world in stasis to bend reality to their view of it.
I understand the spirit behind “suffering is an option”, but I counter that the reality is that there are times there is suffering. Example: the spouse was taking the kids to a school field trip meetup, sitting at a red light on a one-lane road, when an oblivious selfish idiot who was texting while driving slammed into him, propelled him into the car in front of him, which shot out into the intersection and t-boned a car that was legally crossing the road on a green light. The t-boned guy died at the scene, the driver of the car that did the t-boning went to shock trauma, and my spouse and kids were sent to the local hospital. All four cars involved were totaled. The spouse’s car was 3 years old and we had been nearly done paying for it.
The selfish jerk who caused it all claimed the accident was not his fault (forensics later said he was doing around 70 in a 35 and texting while driving) because he didn’t see what happened. Then our car insurance company claimed the accident was partially my spouse’s fault for not getting out of the way…on a one-lane road at a red light. And the health insurance didn’t want to pay because the hospital treatment was not pre-authorized.
Lots of suffering went on, and it wasn’t a choice. Or, rather, the choice (to drive recklessly) was made by someone else and inflicted on everyone at the scene.
I’m sorry about your spouse and your kids.
However, if a brief digression is OK, this is a good example of my larger point. Although it may not seem like it, traffic accidents are a mostly preventable problem.
The immediate cause of a crash is people behaving like reckless idiots, but the systemic cause is the way we design cities and roadways. Straight, wide-open, flat roads “feel safer” for motorists, which subconsciously encourages them to speed or to do dumb things like look at their phones while driving. Seemingly small design changes, like narrower or curved lanes, curbs that bump out into intersections, and zigzag road striping cue drivers to pay more attention to their surroundings:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slowing-traffic-is-street-design-not-speed-limits
As proof that this approach works – as of January, the city of Hoboken has gone seven years without any deaths from traffic accidents, thanks to redesigns like these:
https://www.hobokennj.gov/news/city-of-hoboken-reaches-new-vision-zero-milestone-seven-consecutive-years-without-a-traffic-death
I’m sorry to hear that, Katydid. This is just another case of insurance companies making people’s suffering worse. If the economy were not dependent on monetary exchange but instead made sure everyone had the resources to live, they would never get away with not helping for such obviously lying reasons. Once again, capitalism adds to the suffering of ordinary people while the worst people in the world profit off your pain.
Another great source of suffering is this mis-administration. There are so many sources of suffering being dished out.
The latest? Anyone who is in the military, was ever in the military, had someone they loved in the military, or is simply aware of the concept of national security is suffering right now with the knowledge that a group of Republicans not only see nothing wrong in using non-secure communications methods to discuss top secret plans that put the military’s life in jeopardy that our enemies have no doubt already hacked, but they also saw no issue with inviting randos to join their chat, AND NOBODY IN THE CHAT NOTICED OR QUESTIONED WHY A RANDO WAS INCLUDED IN THEIR CHAT. And apparently today the GOP are are denying there was anything wrong with that.
The argument which I have personally engaged with most often (which is not the same as the one which I have seen put forward most often) is the one where without suffering, people would just turn into a bunch of pleasure-seeking narcissists who would accomplish nothing of meaning or value in their lives. Assuming that humans would still be needed to run technology and society, eventually people would just abandon their duties altogether and civilization would collapse.
I find this, along with all the other arguments I’ve seen, rather dubious, but this most of all because I have personal experience with it. As a practicing hedonist, I do have a satiation point, and would very much not prefer to be hooked up to a bliss-o-tron 24/7, thanks. And I’m perfectly capable of finding meaning and value within my activities regardless of whether they’re related to experiencing pleasure or not. Same as with other hedonists I know. This sort of thinking strikes me as coming from a place of never having been truly satisfied with one’s life to the point that one isn’t even aware that such a thing is possible, though I can’t really say that for certain. The people making it don’t seem to know why they intuitively think that it must be true.
@Adam, I agree road design needs work. I agree that people speed and drive terribly (I was going to say recklessly but the pun with “wreck” was too strong) and make stupid decisions like choosing to text while barreling down the road at twice the posted speed and approaching a known stoplight.
My point was that there are times other people’s depraved indifference to life causes suffering for others. Another example is the 10-year-old girl with brain cancer–which certainly wasn’t her choice to get. She was born in the USA, fell ill with a terrible cancer, and was receiving treatment for it when her immigrant parents were scooped up in a highway stop and forced to decide whether to take their medically-fragile child with them to a country she wasn’t even a citizen of, or to leave her and her also-American siblings behind to the mercies of US foster care.
Lots of unnecessary suffering there, too.
@Adam, and now I have to apologize for going off on a tangent and not addressing your post on OnlySky.
I agree with you that we could end a lot of (not all!) suffering if we had a will to. Not long ago I saw a documentary on affordable housing that was built to be uplifting and attractive. I just did a quick search for more details and couldn’t find the documentary. I think the affordable housing apartment was in Brooklyn, and it’s open and clean and wholesome and amenities (such as public transportation) are walkable from the building. I want to say this is the same one with the garden on the roof, adding green space and (perhaps?) food for the people who live there.
And my note on people inflicting suffering because they believe life should be hard (for anyone but them): I raised my kids during the Rush Limbaw and Dr. Laura war-on-women era. Their particular target was career women. In that environment, my kids’ elementary school had an after-school program right at the school–since the school day is 6 hours and the work day is 8 hours, this program was popular with a lot of parents who were happy to pay for their kids to report to the cafeteria for supervised board games. Several stay-at-home mothers launched a campaign to rid the school of the after-school care on the pretext that women working was ruining society. Kids staying after school for sportzballz practice was great; kids staying after to be someplace safe was not.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? We could eliminate the overwhelming majority of human suffering but doing so would require capitalism to be replaced. Post-scarcity is theoretically possible right now; we don’t need futuristic technology for it. Our rulers know this, and even though they would lose nothing from the change, they’ll keep capitalism and wealth inequality even if it kills us all and leaves the planet a lifeless husk. Even if everyone knew that, say, solving homelessness could happen now if billionaires would pay their fair share, and even if massive public pressure arose to end capitalism in a grassroots movement that made the Civil Rights movement look like a minor disagreement over table manners, our rulers will still keep capitalists and billionaires in charge even if that leads to total civilizational collapse. If a better world were possible, why hasn’t it happened already?
I think the main thing we’re missing which would make a post-scarcity civilization feasible is a mostly-automated food supply. I suppose you could also pay very good wages to field workers, food packers, and the like, so that people would actually choose to do such things rather than endure them for poverty (or even subsistence) wages. The former is something we’re currently inching towards, one new piece of farming tech at a time; the latter would require a socialist revolution. I consider the former much more likely to happen first because I believe a socialist revolution would be much more likely to happen *after* there has been massive amounts of job elimination, and the loss of most farming and food industry jobs would be a big step towards that.