It all comes down to luck. For example: I was born in a first world country as a white male. I have a home with a comfortable bed and air conditioning. I have videogames, movies, books, and the internet to distract myself with. I have parents who care about me and friends to spend time with. None of this is guaranteed.

The fact the so much of the world is suffering much greater than I is of no comfort to me. I am constantly aware that all the things that bring me comfort are not inherently good things, but rather that they are preventing or protecting me from further suffering. My home protects me from the weather and from potentially dangerous non-human animals. Games and movies prevent boredom. Friends and family prevent loneliness.

And most of these things take effort to obtain and to maintain. Suffering is easy, just sit and do nothing. You will soon feel the blistering heat or the sharp cold, intense hunger, loneliness, and unbearable pain as hungry animals and insects rip apart your flesh. I am extremely lucky that my suffering in these areas is relatively small.

Though I might have a life where, for now, my most urgent needs are easy to meet, there are ways in which I suffer more intensely. The boredom and monotony of daily life, the dread of going to work, the frustration of being around and interacting with other people, the lack of meaning, the sadness of loss, the fear of death, the melancholy of looking at the world.

People often scoff at someone complaining about something like a flat tire or a store being out of stock of our favorite snacks because they are first world problems. But is it not tragic that even when our urgent needs are met, the universe still finds ways to remind us of its indifference? In the abstract a flat tire seems like nothing compared to a starving child. But when we look at the felt experience, both cause suffering. One is certainly leagues more intense than the other. But is that not the problem? That no matter how "good" we have it, we still experience pain?

And such lives are extremely fragile. It can all fall apart very easily and very quickly.

The country I live in is crumbling and I and everyone around me can already feel the effects. And it will only get worse over the coming years through climate change and growing political tensions around the world.

Beyond all that, good things in life also cause suffering in others. Eating meat brings joy to most people, yet it causes suffering, exploitation, and death of non-human animals. Having a child creates meaning, yet now someone has been ripped out of the peaceful void to suffer in order to make someone happy. Landing a job prevents someone else from getting that job. Purchasing things we like creates demand and can cause inflation. Staying home to watch a movie can disappoint our friends. Now obviously we shouldn't feel guilty about such things (aside from eating meat or having a child) but the point remains that no matter how good something is, suffering comes along with it, whether directly or indirectly.

People say to appreciate what you have because you could always have it worse. I always see this sentiment as a lack of empathy or a massive cope.

If you had to explain pessimism to someone without scaring them off and without using the word 'pessimism', how would you do it?

Does anyone here feel, that we are living a life, neither we asked for, and neither we are interested in living.

years and years as an autistic outsider and a failed artist have lead me to view the world as an inescapable trap, a convoluted fantasy, constructed by the accretion of thousands of years of bizarre, compulsive behaviour. i hate cell phones; i hate AI; i hate cars; i hate industry; i hate concrete; i hate rent; i hate war; i hate disease; i hate jobs; i hate money; i hate that everywhere i look, wherever i go, there are fucking humans, and none of us know one another.

all we do is consume. there are too many of us by about a factor of a thousand, and the future - the completely artificial, fabricated human future, that appears nowhere else in nature, is bearing down on us, always, because some cunt owns everything. in fact, no, because we AGREE he owns everything! well enough. farming was the beginning of all this exorbitant living beyond our means. agriculture was the worst fucking mistake this species ever made.

i don’t want artistic success anymore. i don’t want to prosper by the standards of this indescribably unfair system of endless torture and punishment. i don’t want to elevate myself above the 210,000 homeless people in my city alone. i watch nature documentaries and i am jealous. i see creatures living the way they were designed for: no jobs; no financial obligation…just food, sleep, sex, rest - purpose. i don’t care how hard it is. it’s not hard like this is. it’s not fucking fantastical, illusory, meaningless, make believe, made-up hard.

none of this is real. i’m sick of all of it.

"Life is sacred", that has been earnestly implied by many philosophers and sages.

If life is living, living is life...

Is it the mind, that forms/grasps/scrutinizes the source of patterns,

which forms as "meanings", adding conformity to it,

and thus, when there is another pattern, that acts as an adversary to any of these manufactured patterns/meanings, that go against,

is what triggers the anguish?

Is it the meaning(s), that is antagonistic to the meaning(s), certainly the cause of suffering?

Based on this rationale, the mind is like an extension that is added to a life form, that is capable of inducing perpetuating conflict to itself and others.

Or can this vulnerable mind, that is bereft of comprehending the actuality of reality, of what is, and what is not, contemplate on what or how the life is sacred?

Link to other invasion take on the same post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1x6ewnn/a_malevolent_invasion_theory/

"I've read, heard, and invented a thousand solutions to my state of misery. They all failed and then I realized the misery is just fine." -Martin Butler

The concept of freedom exists only for subjects capable of conceptualising it. It does not exist for non-human animals, microbes, and so on and so forth.

For humanity, ego is what conceives freedom, but also makes absolute freedom universally, implacably unattainable.

Before you are born, freedom doesn't exist for you, not even as a concept. But as soon as you're old enough for introduction to the ego, your ego invents freedom, determines what it looks like, and says, 'Go get it'.

But your ego does something underneath that, too: it moves freedom's goalposts when you aren't looking.

And this is why humans die wanting – wanting more time, more money, more chances, more whatever.

And death is not freedom.

In death, all things are not and nothing is deficient; there is no freedom to have or lack of it to be felt.

What freedom means to me is to live with consciousness but without ego.

I could say, 'None of my problems are mine; nothing affects me; I want nothing and experience no lack of anything; and I am neither here nor there about whether this existence is a good thing'.

Suffice it to say, my definition and wanting of freedom are exactly why I can't ever have it.

I also stop myself short of being certain that egoless consciousness exists. In fact, I'm more certain that consciousness and ego are inseparable, maybe even one and the same. That consciousness can exist without ego is more wishful thinking on my part.

Moreover, without my ego, I would not be able to experience the preferability of not having it. But that would be fine by me. But then again, who's 'me'? The ego-founded person writing this post?

You can see how self-replicating this problem is.

Because we cannot escape our egos, we are prisoners.

Every single human being is a prisoner.

Which means that our prison is not so much a courtyard and four walls as it is our entire waking worlds.

The best we can do is paint as precise a picture of what freedom looks like to each of us, but even then, those pictures would fall short of being substantive.

Our ability to describe and attempt to manifest freedom only goes as far as our restrictive, ego-founded subjectivity lets us. In other words, even the wildest, most attractive conceptions of freedom are necessarily and knowably, yet non-experientially, insufficient.

Not sure how common this kind of story is, but I'm curious. I was raised to believe in the God of Abraham. Then I studied the Bible and Quran, and especially the internal inconsistencies in those scriptures combined with the total lack of any acceptable explanation for them from friends, family, and experts caused me to doubt and finally to basically lose my faith.

However, for the longest time, I was resistant to actually taking that step in my mind. For years, even decades, I thought to myself that I'd rather believe in a lie than face a meaningless universe. Yet those religious inconsistencies weren't going away, and when I sought out secular alternatives to the meaning given by religion (or attempted to be given at least) I felt I was just having optimism constantly shoved down my throat ("you can make your own meaning, it's liberating!" etc. etc.) Completely brushing aside all the suffering in the world, it seemed to me like these people were in some sense just as mistaken as the religious believers they sometimes denigrated.

Having just recently discovered pessimism as a cohesive philosophy, finally, I understand how I was lied to both by religious and by many secular "authorities." I won't even accuse them of maliciously lying to me -- it seems more like they were and are lying to themselves, keeping up a facade. I'd never mock anyone for taking refuge in religion or whatever secular philosophy makes them feel better about the painful reality of being alive, but I can't find any refuge in them anymore if I ever really could. I also can't fear a Hell that I can no longer believe in, so at least that's a plus, but I still find the prospect of a meaningless universe extremely depressing.

I guess I'm wondering whether anyone here can relate to the path I've taken. I'm partly pissed off that I wasted so much of my life grappling with these issues when it seems like pessimism was "hidden" from me as an option, though it's obviously understandable why it's not a popular one. Reading Zapffe and Ligotti felt like finally being told "no, you're not alone in feeling this way," which is maybe the only other comfort I can take anymore.

P.S.: if it sounds strange that I recognized lies for so long but still tried to believe in them despite knowing better, it's strange to me too. Having heard the accounts of others who fell out of faith, I think it might just be that a religious upbringing does some weird things to your thought processes. No shock there, I guess.