Everything Is F*cked(49)
In the old days, life was hard. Famines and plagues and floods were constant. The majority of populations were enslaved or enlisted in endless wars, while the rest were slitting each other’s throats in the night for this or that tyrant. Death was ubiquitous. Most people didn’t live past, like, age thirty. And this was how things were for the majority of human history: shit and shingles and starvation.
Suffering in the pre-science world was not only an accepted fact; it was often celebrated. The philosophers of antiquity didn’t see happiness as a virtue. On the contrary, they saw humans’ capacity for self-denial as a virtue, because feeling good was just as dangerous as it was desirable. And rightly so—all it took was one jackass getting carried away and the next thing you knew, half the village had burned down. As Einstein famously didn’t say, “Don’t fuck around with torches while drinking or that shit will ruin your day.”
It wasn’t until the age of science and technology that happiness became a “thing.” Once humanity invented the means to improve life, the next logical question was “So what should we improve?” Several philosophers at the time decided that the ultimate aim of humanity should be to promote happiness—that is, to reduce pain.14
This sounded all nice and noble and everything on the surface. I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to get rid of a little bit of pain? What sort of asshole would claim that that was a bad idea?
Well, I am that asshole, because it is a bad idea.
Because you can’t get rid of pain—pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire. Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering. It causes you to see dangerous ghosts in every nook, to see tyranny and oppression in every authority, to see hate and deceit behind every embrace.
No matter how much progress is made, no matter how peaceful and comfortable and happy our lives become, the Blue Dot Effect will snap us back to a perception of a certain amount of pain and dissatisfaction. Most people who win millions in the lottery don’t end up happier in the long run. On average, they end up feeling the same. People who become paralyzed in freak accidents don’t become unhappier in the long run. On average, they also end up feeling the same.15
This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living.
Or, as Einstein once brilliantly put it:
Just as a stream flows smoothly as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body but only the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities but of some insignificant trifle or other which continues to vex us.16
Okay, that wasn’t Einstein. It was Schopenhauer, who was also German and also had funny-looking hair. But the point is, not only is there no escaping the experience of pain, but pain is the experience.
This is why hope is ultimately self-defeating and self-perpetuating: no matter what we achieve, no matter what peace and prosperity we find, our mind will quickly adjust its expectations to maintain a steady sense of adversity, thus forcing the formulation of a new hope, a new religion, a new conflict to keep us going. We will see threatening faces where there are no threatening faces. We will see unethical job proposals where there are no unethical job proposals. And no matter how sunny our day is, we’ll always find that one cloud in the sky.
Therefore, the pursuit of happiness is not only self-defeating but also impossible. It’s like trying to catch a carrot hanging by a string tied to a stick attached to your back. The more you move forward, the more you have to move forward. When you make the carrot your end goal, you inevitably turn yourself into the means to get there. And by pursuing happiness, you paradoxically make it less attainable.
The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.
The Only Choice in Life
In 1954, after nearly seventy-five years of occupation and twenty years of war, the Vietnamese finally kicked the French out of their country. This should have been an unequivocally good thing. The problem was that that pesky Cold War was going on—a global religious war between the capitalist, liberal Western powers and the Communist Eastern Bloc. And when it turned out that Ho Chi Minh, the guy who gave the French the ass-kicking, was a Communist, well, everyone kind of freaked out and thought this could spark World War III.
Terrified of a major war, a bunch of heads of state sat down at a fancy table somewhere in Switzerland and agreed to skip the nuclear annihilation part and go straight to slicing Vietnam in half. Why a country that didn’t do anything to anybody deserved to be cut in half, don’t ask me.17 But apparently everyone decided that North Vietnam would be Communist, South Vietnam would be capitalist, and that’s that. Everyone would live happily ever after.