The question of whether life sucks comes up a lot in discussions on antinatalism. The answer is, of course, a subjective one. But I think that those who answer negatively are more often than not misguided.
The claim in this post’s title is ridiculous on its face. It makes no sense to say that someone who is happy is really not. Who would know better than they themselves? And if they were unhappy but didn’t realize it, how would it matter?
But the question of whether you are happy with your life is very different from the question of whether your pleasure has outweighed your pain. In the context of antinatalism, “Does life suck?” means “Does the pain in your life outweigh your pleasure?”.
Let me first note that pleasure exists: it seems to come only in the form of relief from pain, but the pleasurable feelings are real. Also, how valuable the pain and pleasure in your life have been is subjective. (But do not make the mistake of assigning higher weight to pleasure than pain just because you like pleasure more than you do pain.)
When answering the question, you should take into account all pain and all pleasure you have experienced, are experiencing and probably will experience. Right now, you are probably sitting comfortably at your computer. Because of that, you may downplay the pain you have endured up until this point.
Even while taking this into account you may underestimate what you have been through. Many people advise themselves that whatever pain they are currently in, it will only be temporary. This is good advice and mostly true, but the same holds for pleasure and absence of pain. It’s not that comfort is the default state of existence that you return to after some short insignificant dips into misfortune. I would argue that it is exactly the other way around, but the point here is that you should be aware of these biases. Do not discount current or past painful periods as “just a passing phase”, they are no different from your comfortable or pleasurable periods in this regard.
For example, someone who has successfully battled cancer is likely to overrate their life. They do not account for the shock upon diagnosis, the chemotherapy, the fear of not getting through, … It’s not that for them the “pleasure” of overcoming outweighs all that, either. They simply sweep it under the rug.
For those who think this is an unwarranted assertion, consider this: if the pleasure of overcoming cancer outweighed the pain of struggling with it, would it be a good thing to endow everyone with cancer, provided that they will all be cured eventually? Is it really a net benefit to have endured cancer? What if the cancer keeps coming back? Is that even better than overcoming it just once?
No. This is clearly an example of discounting past pain. Many people, including myself, fall prey to this all the time (remember them good ol’ times?).
The discounting of future pain is more difficult to exemplify because I admittedly am not very good at predicting the future. Just like pretty much everyone else. Hah! Gotcha!
Now, next time you have a headache, are stuck in traffic, feel miserable mentally and/or physically, fill out your tax forms, lose someone you love, pull your hair out over some colleague, break your leg, secretly hate your life, or are out of toilet paper when you most need it, think of this. It all counts.
Hopefully, you can now more accurately evaluate your life.
2011-03-19 at 23:40:53 |
Why is the question whether someone’s pain outweighs his pleasure (in some objective sense) more important than whether someone is subjectively happy?
2011-03-20 at 07:54:38 |
I may have posted this one too hastily. The main point was that when people are asked whether they are happy, they don’t take into account that they were really unhappy maybe as little as five minutes ago. And if they do, they’ll dismiss it as a passing thing.
It’s as if they climb a mountain to look back on their life, and all they see is other mountains that hide the valleys behind them.
Asking someone whether they have been, are, and will be happy on average is no different (at least in this respect) from asking whether their pleasure has outweighed, outweighs, and will outweigh their pain on average.
I turned it into a pain/pleasure thing because “happiness” is such a problematic concept. For me it is just comfort: to be relatively free from pain and annoyances. I have no idea what it is to others; it is usually described in terms of puppies and sunsets. But when tallying their happiness in life, these people do count the periods of comfort as happy periods (because “not unhappy” is considered a good thing rather than a neutral thing (except when that valuation would be in favor of The Asymmetry)).
2011-03-20 at 08:15:56 |
Because the notion of happiness is so vague and ill-defined that people can interpret it as idiosyncratically as they want. The way happiness is usually measured in scientific studies is by asking people how happy they are. Even if a more complex scale is used, it usually measures avowed happiness. These types of measures are highly suspect because how can people know they are happy when there is no standard operational definition for happiness?
Imagine you’ve only ever had gruel and Salisbury steak and didn’t know that other dishes existed. If you were asked whether you have ever had gourmet food, you would assume that Salisbury steak was it because it tastes better than gruel, even though you may not even like it that much. I would imagine that there are many people who consider themselves happy, but who are not really enjoying themselves; they simply don’t realize that other people have more positive mental states.
2011-03-23 at 08:57:57
CM:
“I would imagine that there are many people who consider themselves happy, but who are not really enjoying themselves; they simply don’t realize that other people have more positive mental states.”
Yes, but those who experience a greater number of positive mental states are not “happy”; they’re simply more happy than the person in question. This is a relative statement, and as such, deals moreso with quantities than qualities. Until the quality of suffering can be absolutely removed from the scenario, all options will simply be quantitative differences in the quality of “happiness,” or “lack of discomfort.” In an extremely abstract example, “I am neutral plus one” may be a declaration of happiness, but so is “I am neutral plus two.” In the broader context of whether people are ever satisfied or absolutely and continuously comfortable, this quantitative difference is meaningless, as the quality of suffering acts as an obstruction to that state. Removing suffering altogether, then, should be the goal, though we’d need a new word for this “happiness” — nonexistence.
2011-03-23 at 08:59:40 |
Tim:
“Do not discount current or past painful periods as ‘just a passing phase’, they are no different from your comfortable or pleasurable periods in this regard.”
Another thing to keep in mind is that one does not need to experience a state requiring repulsion or egress in order to be uncomfortable; one can simply be deprived of an attractive substance. From this perspective, not only is it silly to write off suffering as “just a passing phase” (because pleasure is also fleeting), it’s more or less not true. Your examples of being uncomfortable are great and do an excellent job of demonstrating just how uncomfortable everyday life can be, but let us not forget baser deprivations which bring about states like hunger, thirst, fatigue, itching, etc. For how long is anyone not tired or hungry? When you’re neither tired nor hungry, are you being still? No, you’re usually doing something that you enjoy — in an effort to relieve yourself of the burden of boredom, or something else. For example, if you’re “craving” a piece of music at a particular moment, the only reason for why you will ultimately listen to it is because you currently feel uncomfortable with the fact that you are not yet doing so. Everything that we do is a consequence of periods of discomfort, varying in intensity, which sometimes occur mere minutes or seconds beforehand.
And just as you’re getting into whatever it is that you think is making you happy, it’s either time for dinner or time for bed, and you have to take a break in order to relieve yourself, lest you starve to death or enter a state of psychosis and impaired cognitive function.
2011-03-25 at 22:39:36 |
You are right, of course, but I wanted this post to be accessible. I want to be able to point people to it when I claim that they overrate their lives. I want to be able to tell them to read this short blurb and realize that there’s more to it than meets the eye, and especially that it isn’t just something some crazy academic wasting away underneath a desk in some forgotten university came up with.
I hope the last paragraph sticks as well as I intended it to. That next time the reader is frustrated with something — anything — they will realize that yes, they are frustrated, and that it is not at that moment “beautiful” or whatchamacallit, and that this frustration has a cost. If it sticks, it might change some people.
2011-03-28 at 05:04:14 |
Leaving Society-
I didn’t mean to imply that people who have more positive mental states than others are necessarily happy. I’m very skeptical of the whole concept of happiness, actually (due to its vagueness). It probably has as many definitions as the word “god”.
Much like theology, theories of well-being usually rely on the assumption that their subject exists in reality. I would agree that god, as defined by pantheism, is real. I would also agree that happiness, defined as “the condition of n% of the population who have the best mental states/have the best balance of satisfied over unsatisfied preferences/report being happy”, is real. That, of course, doesn’t imply that that anyone’s lives were worth starting in the first place, or that using the term “happy” to refer to people is any less pointless than using the term “god” to refer to the universe.
2011-04-01 at 18:57:44 |
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