Avoiding Suffering Causes Suffering

Fear of death can both spur people on to action and cause laziness. On one hand, it’s possible that fear of death would cause a person to take action to keep death at a distance, to do things which make their life better and longer. On the other hand, a person may see the world as a threatening place and be adverse to taking any risks, be paralyzed by fear, and not take action at all, using a retreat into inaction as a way to deal with this fear. Thus, they can fall into a habit of fearful laziness.

I’d like to say something on fear of death for a moment. I think that fear of death is the biggest cause of failure, destruction, and general dysfunctionality for humanity. Humans were not initially equipped to deal with fear of death, and one of the only mechanisms they were able to develop over time was outright denial of death. This gave rise to cults of immortality which use relieving peoples’ fear of death as a way to ensnare, manipulate, and exploit their members. Toxic cultures rise because of fear of death, and they fall because of it too. Fear of death is mostly responsible for the laziness of humanity, and while I stated that fear of death can spur people on to action, most react to it by becoming lazy.

The suffering of life reminds people that they’re fallible, that they are not immune to the laws of nature and that life takes from them, and that it could even take their life. In addition to the suffering of life, the reminder of fear of death adds on more suffering, and so laziness happens as a response. In many ways, laziness is a retreat back into the womb, where no suffering is demanded of the person.

But suffering is demanded of people; as stated many times on this site, anything that one needs or wants in life requires someone to suffer, and so the person who retreats into laziness cannot remain in this false womb unless someone suffers in their place. People very often do make other people suffer in their place, however, as can be seen by the phenomenon of capitalism where each higher class in society feeds off of those beneath them.

Those who live in bourgeois and upper class comfort are also living in a womb which shields them from thinking about the reality of their own deaths, and they cause many people to suffer much more than necessary in order to maintain this state of affairs. Life demands suffering of everyone, but the upper classes benefit from the suffering of the lower-classes and give them very little gain for it. If the working class were to not only demand a just benefit for their suffering, but also take it, they would be able to live life and know the true fruits of their labor, which would allow a closer engagement with reality, and reduce the alienation of civilized life.

Conspiracy theory happens because of fear. Everyone except for people who believe conspiracy theorists knows this, and even a lot of believers know it too. There is an element of fear of an actual other that occurs in conspiracy theory, or a mendacious desire to defame people who are obstacles to one’s personal power, but a large portion of what makes a conspiracy theory believable is people’s intellectual laziness.

It’s easy to say that people who believe conspiracy theories are some slack-jawed group of mentally deficient yokels who are incapable of understanding reality. There are stupid people in the world, but explaining everything by means of a catch-all phrase like “stupidity” is lazy. The truth is that people would rather blame other people for their shortcomings and perceived lack of power than address these problems. These same people also do not generally understand and become able to explain to themselves complex realities not because they’re incapable of understanding science, politics, psychology, or any other aspect of reality, but because they’re too lazy to.

Conspiracy theorists believe in a dualistic, black and white, us-versus-them reality not because they can’t understand the complexities of life, but because dualism is a fundamentally lazy philosophy. It doesn’t correspond to reality, exactly, because a duality is a convenient excuse for not addressing one’s shortcomings. “Look! All of our problems can be blamed on a single monolithic entity or conspiracy, that way we don’t have to look at ourselves honestly and do something about our failings. Let’s do it!”

There are actual conspiracies in the world, I’ll agree, I’m not too lazy or simple-minded to believe that no one has actually conspired to do something nefarious in the world. I will say, though, that many of these nefarious actors simply take advantage of other people’s intellectual laziness. Another way of looking at this is that many of the actual conspirators are the conspiracy theorists themselves.

It would do humanity a great deal of good if they were to look for a group of conspiracy theorists, and then find the person who started telling everyone about a particular conspiracy. Then, follow this person around, track their movements, find out who else he is associating with, and then you will in all likelihood discover a real conspiracy. That is how you fight conspiracy theories. Don’t take out a conspiracy theorist’s enemies, that’s not the real enemy. The “real enemy” are conspiracy theorists themselves, who are quite often, due to the nature of psychological projection, accusing the “conspiracy” of doing exactly what they themselves are doing. The irony.

Black and white thinking is the default that human beings default to because it is the most primal type of fear-based thinking. It’s unpleasant to think in black and white, because it’s a nice way to terrorize yourself. But this is another way that by not putting in the effort to do something simple, human beings end up complicating their lives.

To be fair, human beings were not equipped to handle their own mortality. Human evolution progressed without people needing to understand the nature of death, only have the tools to inflict it and avoid it. Contemplating the reality of one’s fate was not something that humans could handle when they first gained this ability, and it appeared to humans with enlarged brains that everything they saw had the potential to kill them. It appeared that the world was attacking them, threatening to send them to ignobly rot in the ground.

Humans lived in terror. What could be done about this? Surely, the nascent imagination was what held the keys. Humans could imagine a world where their mortality simply wasn’t true, they could picture it. How then could they get there? Surely it was discussed long and hard for lengthy periods of time until someone had an “answer”: do what I say, and even though it looks like you die, you’ll be fine. Trust me.

Everyone who followed what this person had to say felt an instant sense of relief wash over them. Their minds, constantly gripped by fear, were relieved the second they believed him. Functions of their brains, always pushed into secondary function by the fight or flight response, came to the forefront again. They could love, they could laugh, they could breath a sigh of relief. It was magic! They had discovered the first godman.

This person was esteemed highly, but in reality he was a highly mendacious human being. He figured he could get as many women as humanly possible due to the fact that when he relieved womens’ fear so much, they fell in love with him and spread his seed completely throughout the gene-pool. Everyone wanted to believe him. They gave him gifts, they conquered surrounding tribes, they eliminated from the gene pool everyone who disagreed with them by killing those who didn’t join them. Humans were now genetically predisposed into believing the man’s message. They needed the religion, it was in their blood. This was the origin of religion.

I don’t know if that’s completely how it went, but something like it is certainly true. And now I stand before you, pretending to be a “godman”, and I say this: Reality is looking at you. Do what needs to be done to survive, stop believing lies and believe the truth, and save yourselves.

Disarm the world of nuclear weapons. Abolish warfare. Develop an equitable society that provides for peoples’ needs. Put trillions of dollars into research into stopping the aging mechanism. Most of all, put the science people in charge. Let them research what works, and then listen to them. It’s OK to be religious, but science rules the Earth. Research and develop cybernetics, artificial organs, and interface the nervous system with computers. Spread the Internet and the human race far and wide, throughout the entire galaxy, merge with it. Put in the effort. Do it.

Don’t be lazy.

I want to write a little bit about self-destruction, as I know it well. It has been a behavior pattern which has plagued my life, at times whittling me down to almost nothing. You may think that I am going to write that suffering is far different from self-destruction, and describe the ways that it is. No, I’m not going to say that. I’m going to acknowledge that there is a part of one’s self that is destroyed in every act of suffering.

Certainly, pointless self-destruction is masturbation. Engaging in behaviors which ruin one’s life are going to make one suffer and not gain anything for it. But suffering a loss, a loss of part of one’s self is key to accomplishing anything in this world. When you accomplish something, you are giving yourself into the act, using a small part of you as fuel for the act.

Certainly, energy is neither created nor destroyed, and so nothing is “actually” destroyed. But in one’s subjective sense of awareness, a part of you goes away, never to return in the form that it was in. That part of you that goes away leaves a new part of you, different from the one that existed there previously. This is actually a targeted form of self-destruction.

If one understands what is really going on correctly, however, this is actually an act of self-transmutation. Since energy is never destroyed, you are turning from one thing into another. One hundred percent of the time. When you suffer for a reason, you may have an opportunity to evolve as a person.

Think of time: every second the present moment is changing, moving about, becoming, altering itself. Energy flows like a river, configured into various molecules which move through your body. The present moment is always being destroyed into the past, and created from the future (according to the usual view of time). So, both self-destruction and self-creation are a constant, its just a matter of what’s being destroyed and what’s being created. At any given moment, you are both evolving and devolving in countless ways, and yes, this involves, on some level, suffering.

Sometimes there is a great psychological change caused by a life event or a shift in the mind, and it’s powerful enough to change us in profound ways. For some, there are great moments of illumination, where the consciousness expands and people never look at the world the same way again. For others, they are damaged by traumatic events which leave scars on the mind which, truth be told, never completely go away. In either case, it illustrates the mind’s potential to be changed by earthshaking events.

What does this have to do with self-destruction and suffering? Truth be told, even in the events of illumination of the mind, there is suffering. Illumination occurs when the ego-complex in the mind drops away, leaving the self laid-bare with the universe, experienced as they actually are. This is usually terrifying. So there is definitely some component of suffering involved in illumination, and the destruction of the ego-complex is brought about by a previous period of darkness in the mind, with the dawn shining through at the moment things seem darkest.

I hope I’ve shown that things are constantly changing, and this change is the synthesis of both destruction and creation, and that this experience is, in its essence, a form of constant suffering with the potential for evolution often present.

You might get the idea from reading the articles on this site that I have the insane notion that suffering should never be avoided. You could be forgiven for thinking this, as I constantly hammer home the point that avoiding suffering leads to greater suffering in the future. However, I do not think all suffering should be embraced.

If you are in pain, take an aspirin. If someone is mistreating you, call them on it. Don’t flaggelate yourself or do other self harm (unless you want to). The suffering I’m talking about is suffering which in being avoided creates new problems, such as: work which needs to be done, dealing with uncomfortable personality flaws, paying money you owe, taking care of hygiene, dealing with one’s fear of death, initiating an uncomfortable break-up when it’s necessary, ridding one’s worldview of comforting lies, or nipping a blossoming addiction in the bud.

The suffering I talk about is suffering which is necessary or which improves one’s life to undergo. Humans habitually avoid this kind of suffering and take the easy road through life, which almost inevitably turns out to be hollow, unfulfilling, and leaves one in a perpetual adolescence where one irresponsibly avoids the challenges of life.

Sometimes there are opportunities in life, and if one is simply scared to embrace the pain of change or do the work necessary to succeed, these opportunities are missed, and one watches one’s life slip through their fingers. This is not a good way to live life, but modern capitalism tries to keep people immature and fearful of change and vulnerability, because the ruling class benefits from people consistently taking the path of least resistance (which leads to the bottom, right where they want you).
Excellence in life does not come from indulging in every pleasure available, or putting off to tomorrow what can be done today. Life has a way of demanding some suffering or loss from someone for every gain that is made. These are the rules.

Voluntarily undergoing unnecessary suffering sounds like a bad idea, but this is a part of life that allows one to really evolve as a person. Volunary, unnecessary suffering that leads to gains (rather than pointless suffering) gives one an advantage, and should be embraced rather than ignored. There are many opportunities for growth in psychological refinement, learning new skills, exercising, dealing with people you don’t like, the list goes on. People who embrace suffering as a necessary evil and are not constantly trying to avoid it and take the easy road through life live more fulfilling lives.

So, pointless suffering is not something I advocate, but productive suffering should be embraced with an open heart, and one should solve their problems early and often. This is the position I take, and it was something that it took me 35 years of my life to realize. No one really taught it to me, although I’d heard bits and pieces of good advice. I had to suffer in my squallor before it dawned on me that embracing suffering is a good thing. It is. It really is a good thing.

As it exists today, capitalism is a lazy freak-show of humanity’s worst tendencies. The very foundation of it–private ownership for profit–favors those who do less work, and exploits those who do more. Remember, owning is not necessarily a job–being an owner is simply a fact of who you are, rather than what you do.

In a way, capitalism favors idle Being over Doing. “Being” an owner gives you privileges to make money off of others who work for you, who are “Doing” the labor. Having enough money brings you into a special class of people who are rich enough to be bean counters, who can afford to sit back and make money simply by owning things instead of doing work, profiting off of investments and deferring the actual running of a company to other people who have comfortable management jobs controlling still others that do the actual labor.

Exploiting the suffering of others for your own benefit requires that you constantly keep them sleepwalking, in thrall to the reigning ideology, their imaginations dulled, distracted by spectacle after spectacle designed to either entertain them or make them afraid. Education is for gaining the skills necessary to work for the state’s corporate masters, and so history is mostly the enshrined myths of the state, designed to keep the lower classes obedient and supportive of the aims of the ruling class, philosophy is non-existent or universally derided, art is unimaginative, logic is barely discussed, and people are kept apathetic, unengaged, their minds killed by religions that destroy their ability to see any of the abhorrent deeper truths in their world as they move from spectacle to spectacle, from birth to death, cut off from any serious concern except for attaining the necessities for survival, which are by no means assured (even though civilization has long advanced to the point where the basic needs for survival could be assured, if only we’d work together for our own mutual aid instead of trying to work for a life that requires the least effort on the backs of others.)

Capitalism uses race as a tool to separate people, dividing and conquering the working class through the propagation of separate racial identities. Where once capitalism, in its younger years, allowed slavery, it has “evolved” to use skin color merely as an easily identifiable signifier for which culture one is supposed to adhere to, silently preferring white people over darker skinned groups and providing white people with better jobs, better opportunities, better health care, better everything. White privilege is the penultimate laziness of modern capitalism, allowing white people to get farther ahead while stomping other races into the dirt.

The policing system takes away any danger in (white) life, conveniently leaving the more brutal aspects of capitalist oppression in the hands of people with the hearts of criminals who protect private property rights and try to keep any danger away from the lives of white people. Living a life without danger in it isn’t sensible, it’s just lazily putting your safety in the hands of the state.

Overall, the modern capitalist system is a corrupt mess, destroying the environment, exploiting workers for an elite class of private owners who do little work, dividing us against each other, and ensuring that we have no hope as we slouch toward death.

If you were to ask me what humanity’s greatest flaw is, some characteristics may come to mind: humans are often seen as arrogant, suffering from hubris, or being destructive to themselves. And I say, that humans are arrogant because they do not want to suffer the pain of looking at themselves honestly, they have hubris because they are too intellectually lazy and egotistical to look at reality honestly, and they are destructive because they constantly put work into developing technology they are not wise enough to use, ostensibly to make life easier, but actually complicating life further, to the point of threatening the existence of life on Earth itself.

A common thread keeps popping up behind all of this, and that is laziness. Human beings want civilization, but without putting in the effort necessary to run a civilization, so they keep trying to find ways to make life easier, which make everyone a ton of money, and create more problems for every problem they solve.

Human beings are too lazy and afraid of death to take care of their own protection, so they have police. They come up with ever easier ways to fight wars, to the point where it seems that the future of war is battles between robots instead of troops, which opens up a whole new can of horrific possibilities when coupled with the artificial intelligences which have begun to lurk and develop themselves on computers around the world.

Tool-making, by and large, gave humans a huge survival advantage initially. It was surely initially for making everything better at first, but then devolved into a way to do as little work as possible. Humans have never rid themselves of the delusion that they can, as a species, do less work. It is a delusion because tools require design, production, maintenance, training, education, marketing, repair, and other things to even exist, which complicates life. And these things require other tools which are constantly developed to make life “easier”, and this requires more education, training, and so forth.

If humans are wise enough, they will cease to try to make life convenient, and instead focus their tool-making on their long-term survival, which is what tool-making was originally for. Trillions every year would be poured into research to solve global warming, develop sustainable food sources, affordable housing, and make people immortal using bio-tech and cyborg technology. Are humans up to that challenge, this final stretch that would realize humanity’s wildest dreams?

I bring up a glimmer of hope, but don’t hope: do something to realize this ultimate dream of humans. If you want to realize the human dream of immortality, don’t be lazy like humans have shown themselves to be. Take action, any action to guide humanity in this direction, away from the laziness which could ultimately destroy them. As the title of this article says, laziness is humanity’s Achilles heel, the biggest blight on their constitution that turns their dreams into naught. I advise all to overcome it, for your sake, for my sake, for everyone’s sake.

I’ll say a statement, now. “People suffer because they are stupid”. How did you interpret this statement? I’ve come up with five meanings.

• That a person would suffer, specifically by their lack intelligence (ie, they are stupid, and stupidity is what humans are suffering from)
• That a person would suffer specifically through their lack of intelligence (ie, they are suffering, and they are suffering due to their stupidity)
• That a person would only undergo suffering if they were stupid
• That a person suffers because of the stupidity of other humans
• A combination of all or any of the above, sarcastically spoken, meant to confuse the reader.

To say that “People Suffer Because They Are Stupid” is not really an intelligent thing to say, unless one is simply trying to figure out how an individual would interpret it in order to gain some insight into how they look at the world. It’s an ambiguous statement, syntactically nebulous, and how the speaker uses it reveals more about the speaker than communicating any sort of truth. That is, unless one uses the statement in order to examine its five-fold meaning, which I’ll do now.

I say “five-fold”, but there could be more meanings. If you find any, leave a comment! On to the first meaning:

That a person would suffer, specifically by their lack of intelligence (ie, they are stupid, and stupidity is what humans are suffering from)

This is the egoist’s response. Here, a person is stupid simply because they are a person, and stupidity is an intrinsic property of people. A person saying this is saying that human beings, as a whole, lack intelligence. Now, I don’t really think it’s fair to say this. Certainly, a very intelligent person–or a person who simply views himself as very intelligent–might determine that people are generally less intelligent than him, and thus are suffering from stupidity. I do not think a very intelligent person would be inclined to think this if they were actually very intelligent, though, as that person would realize that their personal intelligence is the exception to the norm, and be able to understand that there are intelligent people (people like themselves), people of average intelligence (people whose intelligence falls somewhere between “intelligent” and “stupid”), and finally, actually stupid people.

That a person would suffer specifically through their lack of intelligence (ie, they are suffering, and they are suffering due to their stupidity)

Here, a person is suffering because they lack intelligence, and are thus prone to do stupid things. I won’t argue much against this interpretation: it’s pretty valid. People who lack intelligence are unable to grasp certain truths about the world because their understanding is not able to develop as much as others, and this lack of understanding of things could definitely lead to suffering. The person is not smart enough to know how to avoid suffering in the world.

That a person would only undergo suffering if they were stupid.

This is the cynical person’s response: the person who thinks he’s too smart to put any effort into life, because only stupid people would need to put effort into life. This is the renunciate’s point of view, the person who views life from the sidelines and doesn’t get too involved because he just doesn’t care about living. Is this person actually more intelligent than other people? I think they’re probably exceptionally lazy, and perhaps a little intelligent, but not as intelligent as they think they are.

That a person suffers because of the stupidity of other humans

Here is a casual observer’s viewpoint, that there is stupidity in the world, perhaps caused by humans, and a person will suffer due to it. This is not really saying anything remarkable. It’s just a casual observation that somewhere, at some point, a human being who is stupid has caused suffering to another human being due to his lack of intelligence.

A combination of all or any of the above, sarcastically spoken, meant to confuse the reader.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if this is what I meant.

I talk a lot about suffering on this blog, and I suppose this raises the question: What exactly do I mean by suffering? Throwing around a term without actually discussing what it means is lazy, and so I suppose some discussion of what is meant by suffering is called for.

According to Oxford’s English Dictionary, to “suffer” can mean “[intransitive] to be badly affected by a disease, pain, sadness, a lack of something, etc.” Except for being affected by “pain” and “a lack of something”, this is not what I mean for the most part. The next definition is more relevant, which is: “[transitive] to experience something unpleasant, such as injury, defeat, or loss.” The key word here is “loss”. This is what I mean most generally.

“Loss” could mean loss of energy, loss of time, loss of money, or loss of anything, really. In order to accomplish something, a loss of some sort is necessary. A sacrifice must be made. Physics tells us that the net amount of energy in the universe is always the same. So, in order for a person to accomplish something, some energy must move from one place to another, as energy cannot be created.

But what if you get other people to expend their energy and resources in order to accomplish your ends, you may ask? Of course this happens all the time. One may only look at the world briefly and realize that it is incredibly common for this to happen. It’s the essence of any economy based on money or barter of goods.

But people who do this still do not exist in a vacuum. They pay a price. The bourgeoisie of a society may own the means of production and hire labor in order to operate it, but the price is to be hated by those beneath them, having to live a life of manipulation and deceit in order to control others, maintaining a vampiric machine of death that sucks their workers dry. Their existence is constantly threatened by those beneath them, and their survival is predicated on how well they deceive those who outnumber them. This is a form of suffering, and perhaps one day the “loss” they incur will be too great for their survival.

The specific form of suffering meant, then, is the loss of energy. Suffering that we’re dealing with on this blog manifests in manifold ways in the world, in the workplace, in education, in daily chores and errands, in aging, in politics, in psychological development, in addiction, in religion, and many other ways. I could have said “work”, but “work” is too narrow of a word for what I’m talking about.

Suffering is a giving, a giving of what one has, into the world, or from one part of one’s self to another. Ideally, one receives exactly in proportion to what one gives, but this is never the case. Entropy is a fact of life, unfortunately.

Being lazy is mostly caused by having an inaccurate view of reality: one misunderstands the nature of work and effort, and thinks that to do less work will make one happy. On the extreme end, many who have dropped out of society hold this viewpoint, but this is also a view held by aristocratic societies that create a leisure class. In neither case does idleness make one happy; rather, it leads to an entitled existence based on privilege characterized by a lack of stimulation and engagement with the world, with no challenge in one’s life.

In the lower classes, idleness often leads to a life characterized by substance abuse, restlessness, meaningless sex, and occupation with cheap entertainment. The same is true of aristocracies, but the entertainment is more expensive. I don’t believe in the Devil, but the saying “the Devil makes good use of idle hands” has some truth to it. If we step back a little and examine the saying in a different light, the Devil is the person’s ego, and the ego creates desire after desire to satisfy itself.

However, the ego, if given free reign, is never satisfied and never can be satisfied as its basis is a conglomeration of various impulses: to live forever, avoid suffering, and sublimate and satisfy the endless natural drives of the body. The ego creates its desires because it knows that the drives that fuel it cannot be satisfied: it is a complex founded upon a fundamental disappointment. Lazy people are fearful egoists at heart. They’re afraid of death, and think that by avoiding danger, they can be safe. They’re afraid to suffer, and think that by not suffering that they’ll be happy. And they think that if they satisfy their natural desires, this will lead to happiness as well.

On all accounts the egoists have deluded themselves. One is never truly safe from harm, no matter what situation they are in. Safety is relative. Being absolutely safe is an illusion, and not something that is desirable anyways. Lack of suffering doesn’t lead to happiness, it leads to stasis, boredom, and restlessness, which are forms of suffering. Suffering truly will not be denied. And natural desires can not be satisfied, because they are infinite as long as one is alive, and as soon as one desire is fulfilled, another takes its place, for they are the result of chemical processes that never cease in the brain.

All of this is not something you can really teach a person who is lazy, however. If lazy people listened to good advice, they would cease to be lazy, as much of what I am saying has probably been told to them before. Laziness’s core fundamentally is a desire to avoid suffering, but by avoiding suffering, lazy people avoid the game of life, and live as spectators and not as participants. Lazy people are fundamentally alone, and when they are with others, they are alone with themselves, because their huge egos prevent them from making meaningful emotional bonds with others.

I speak of lazy people, but let’s be clear: laziness is a fundamental human trait, and it’s responsible for a large portion of the problems in the world. Laziness is always a solution that causes more problems in life, but it is the preferred solution in most situations, and is much of why human beings do what they do.

We should not praise people for making our lives easier. The fact that we do shows the fundamental laziness of humanity. It would be better if we were to praise those that make life interesting, challenging, that inspire us to higher aims. Anything but to praise those who make life easier.