What is my Philosophy and Convictions?

Most of us are born into a specific kind of family, one specific religion and couple of people who will decide what we do for the next decade. Moreover, we spend the rest of our lives defending those specifically inherited things. The act of giving birth itself is morally questionable. We often try so hard to reduce the suffering of our children when the best thing we could have done to prevent their suffering was to never make them come into existence at all. A non-existent being doesn’t miss out on pleasure, but does avoid suffering — which is good overall. Even if you’re born, some people die at birth. Though mourning a situation, it was better than being born and dealing with an average 73years old life anyway. Many mothers die giving birth, which couldn’t be compensated enough for.

When you take a look at all the amazing technology uplifting humanity, all you have to ask yourself is: “At what cost?” Does that cope up with even one human’s chronic suffering? We have become so obsessed with our species advancing that we started to ignore individual suffering. Right now, the greatest moral catastrophe is animal suffering. Was such an aspect of human nature so important that we let trillions of animals choke on death, be gassed, or even just painlessly slit their throat? What kind of killing can ever be called a humane killing? At the current scope of scientific discovery, it takes no telling that a vegan diet can sustainably feed us. But we continue killing animals. It’s not particularly new to us. It was done at the moment when slavery was still considered not morally bad, sexism and racism seemed just like breathing air.

That’s about non-human animals. They are more or less born to suffer. In the wild, the herbivores are outpowered by the carnivores. Nature is cruel, not neutral. As Nick Bostrom said: “If mother nature was a real parent, she would have been in prison for child abuse.”

In the parts of human life, one is biased towards reporting a human life as net positive. One of the ways to calculate whether a life was good or bad is to add up the happiness and minus the suffering. That’s a really flawed idea. Suffering weighs much more than happiness. Suffering creates an obligation to help somebody out of it. But there is no obligation to make someone happy; even if there is, it doesn’t outrank suffering’s obligation.

Though life cannot be worth starting, it can be worth living, as many say. But the Hedonic Treadmill, Optimism Bias and Pollyanna Principle show us that human reasoning of whether a life has been good or bad can’t be relied on. In case, if you had to live the same life moment to moment, you’d realise it was going pretty badly. Furthermore, whether a life is worth starting cannot be based on what the individual says after being born or at the end of their lives.

Well, even if we can’t live an objectively positive life and life isn’t really worth living as many report it is, then can we live a subjectively positive life? At least that matters. After leaving all the scopes of life’s inevitable optimism, the subjective experience is what keeps us going. But in the current world, where is it being cared for? Who gives a damn about our own subjective experience? Capitalism, human induced suffering and institutions are causes that make even a living life not worth living. Rules and regulations that were made by selective people and that only serve the people that make them. In the end, the agricultural revolution is credited for humanity’s advancement. What Agriculture offered was: repeatedly digging hard soil, carrying heavy buckets, grinding grain by hand, performing the same movement again and again, working in awkward positions for prolonged periods. Which made life awesomely terrible.

“The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes”.

— Yuval Noah Harari.

The more humanity advances and populates 2.2 people per second, the more individual suffering increases. Physical ailments are cured and will continue to be cured. Most suffering is in the mind. Every depressing moment spent in the shower, inability to wake out of bed that no one will account for. And we’ve been told that something’s really wrong with the people who go through them.

Human or sentient life’s extinction is a possible solution to all of this chaos. The people being so concerned about birth rate drops. I personally rejoice. These are moments we get to rethink what we’ve caused. Is humanity a force for good? Humanity is the cause of more suffering than anybody has ever caused. (Except for God, of course, if it’s out there.)

As a living being, you’re better off not dealing with institutionalised suffering because there is already inevitable suffering to deal with. And if you’re indeed suffering, through, understand this is the default.

Apologies to the newborn. There is no purpose to life. We make up our own so that it feels good to be alive.

“The purpose of life is whatever is keeping you from killing yourself.”

-Anonymous