the disease of inconvenience

throughout my entire life, i've always been suspicious of the human condition. why is being alive such an unnecessarily inconvenient business? you wake up tired, spend the day attempting to become less tired, become hungry, eat, become tired again, and eventually go to sleep so that you may repeat the entire process with slightly different complications, and this is considered a perfectly successful day. "but life is supposed to be difficult," cries the amateur stoic, having mistaken an observation for an argument. if something is sufficiently unpleasant and sufficiently common, we are expected to stop questioning it. i call this the disease of inconvenience: the peculiar condition of being conscious enough to want things to be different, but not sufficiently powerful to make them so.

the first problem is that suffering appears to be treated as an unavoidable consequence of consciousness. in order to experience pleasure, one must also experience its absence; to love something, one must be capable of missing it; to desire something, one must be capable of being dissatisfied without it. this argument sounds good on the surface, but it falls apart if you ask for a reason. why should recognising that something is absent require an unpleasant experience of its absence? why should the brain communicate an unmet preference through distress rather than simple awareness? "but suffering serves a purpose!" cries the evolutionary apologist, having discovered that hunger encourages eating and fear discourages danger. wonderful. natural selection has successfully kept us alive, although nobody seems to have asked whether we particularly enjoy the arrangement. evolution selects for reproductive success, not happiness. a creature can be miserable and biologically successful; one can still have sex while miserable. the fact that suffering is useful does not establish that it is desirable, and the fact that something helped our ancestors reproduce is hardly a compelling moral endorsement. congratulations to evolution for producing an organism that wishes it had been produced differently.

then there is hedonism, which proposes that pleasure is good and suffering is bad. rather straightforward, really. if suffering is intrinsically undesirable, why should we preserve it merely because it occasionally accompanies something valuable? "but hardship builds character!" cries the motivational philosopher, having decided that character is best manufactured through unnecessary inconvenience. does humiliation become desirable because somebody develops confidence afterwards? does heartbreak become necessary because somebody subsequently learns to appreciate companionship? a person can learn through curiosity, develop through encouragement, and recognise danger without necessarily experiencing terror. of course, some challenges are valuable precisely because they are difficult, but difficulty and suffering are not interchangeable. enjoying a complicated puzzle is not the same as being miserable because somebody has confiscated the instructions. if a desirable outcome can be achieved without an unpleasant experience, the existence of that unpleasant experience deserves considerably more scrutiny than it usually receives.

however, hedonism has its own rather unfortunate complications. imagine a machine that provides uninterrupted pleasure, eliminates every unpleasant experience, and satisfies every desire. would you enter it? "but the happiness isn't real!" cries the authenticity enthusiast, having somehow discovered that feeling good is insufficient when one suspects the circumstances responsible for feeling good. fair enough. obviously, we do not merely want pleasure; we also want meaningful relationships, genuine achievements, autonomy, and the knowledge that our experiences correspond to reality, but notice that none of these things necessarily requires suffering. authenticity is not synonymous with misery, autonomy is not synonymous with disappointment, and meaningful relationships do not need to involve misunderstandings. perhaps pleasure is not the entirety of wellbeing, but this does not make suffering an essential ingredient of it. we have successfully established that happiness is not everything and somehow expect this to constitute a defence of unhappiness.

the more interesting problem is desire itself. we want something, obtain it, become accustomed to it, and begin wanting something else. the thing that once represented the culmination of our happiness becomes an ordinary component of our daily circumstances. "but you should learn to want less!" cries the more mature stoic, having discovered that dissatisfaction can be reduced by reducing the number of things one is dissatisfied about. buddhist philosophy and stoicism have considerably more sophisticated arguments concerning attachment and desire, but there is a distinction between abandoning unnecessary wants and convincing oneself that legitimate needs are unnecessary. a hungry person does not need a lecture on the impermanence of desire. a lonely person does not necessarily need to transcend their attachment to companionship. you can slip in the argument of just fucking dying of starvation, but i'm choosing to ignore that as i don't think there's much i need to argue against it. nevertheless, not every desire deserves fulfilment either. if i want to fly, reality is not obligated to provide me with wings, which is terribly inconsiderate of it.

and perhaps this is where the argument becomes considerably less convenient. suffering is not always meaningless, and eliminating every unpleasant emotion might mean eliminating some of the capacities through which we recognise what matters to us. grief is connected to attachment, fear can protect us from danger, and frustration can motivate us to change circumstances that genuinely ought to change. why does recognising this require defending every possible degree of suffering? the usefulness of fear does not establish that every fear is reasonable; the significance of grief does not establish that every instance of grief must be endured at its full intensity. "but suffering is what makes us human!" cries the romantic, having apparently forgotten that being human also involves paying taxes. perhaps vulnerability is inseparable from consciousness. perhaps some unpleasantness is unavoidable. inevitability and necessity are not identical, and neither is a synonym for justification.

there is also the rather inconvenient question of whether suffering is even unjustified. the universe never promised us happiness, which is rude, yes, but it doesn't have any intentions, obligations, and presumably strong opinions about whether this november is going to be pleasant. yet, this is only refuting an argument that nobody made, because the absence of an obligation doesn't establish the desirability of an outcome. a river wouldn't be considered responsible for drowning somebody, but we would still consider preventing that drowning a rather good idea. suffering does not need to be the consequence of somebody's wrongdoing to be worth reducing.

the problem is not that existence is morally unjust, but that we have become so accustomed to its unpleasant features that we stopped questioning them. and so we continue waking up, becoming hungry, becoming tired, develop attachments, experience disappointment, discover temporary pleasure, and die.