What's The Point Of Anything?
Suffering is a fixed cost.
Terrible things happen to great people. Everybody gets sick, and everybody dies. By all accounts, it looks like the game has been rigged against us.
And that's only the beginning.
You and I are also deeply flawed. We inflict pain on ourselves and others, sometimes intentionally. This trickles up into corruption of culture, rotting of institutions, and the large-scale moral catastrophies that stain history.
We are fallible people, in fallible societies, faced with an impossible problem.
How to act, in light of this?
One answer is to do nothing. At least that way, we can stop polluting the planet with our inventions, and creating inequality with our economies, and draining the planet's resources with each new generation.
Everybody, in times of struggle, has wondered if life has any real meaning. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe we're simply too weak to accept that everything is ultimately pointless, and the most rational option is to lay down and die.
Perhaps, if we were strong enough, we'd build our societies around this premise. We'd abandon the concept of merit, so people would stop striving forward. We'd claim that there are too many humans on the planet, so people would stop having kids. And we'd reduce our consumption of resources to zero, so we wouldn't waste any more than has already been wasted.
Then finally, once the last humans were gone, the problem of suffering might be solved for good.
Unless, of course, there's a better way.
If suffering is an unmistakable experience, then so is the absence of suffering.
So, if we posit the reduction of unnecessary suffering as fundamentally good, we have an eternal headwind to fight. An eternal problem to work on. An eternal source of meaning.
In many ways, this is an impossible burden to carry. But look where it's gotten us so far. Look at the buildings that fill our cities. Look at the food that fills our supermarkets. Look at the children playing in our parks, and the artists filling our galleries, and the scientists expanding our frontiers.
Time and again, humanity has faced insurmountable challenges. And time and again, it has surmounted them.
Isn't it worth it to follow in their footsteps, and try to make things better?
Or would you prefer the alternative?