Our biological purpose is to procreate with no means to an end. We suffer throughout for no reason. Intelligent life is even more cope in an already cope filled system. There is no reason for us to suffer even more with our existential thoughts yet we do and try to make ourselves smarter as well. Our main aim is to make our lives “easier” which in turn leads to more suffering because you have more time to think about meaninglessness. Think Wall-E. Even the singularity is a meaningless goal since our problems are inherent in our intelligence and the nature of reality itself. If anything our goal should be to return to a state where we are unable to think these thoughts, ie a hunger gatherer society.
They have interviewed people from the hunter gathereer societies in Africa and they are the happiest people on Earth. That is until surrounding tribes introduced them to civilization.
Im convinced no one feels true pleasure not even Chads or Stacie’s. Because of the hedonic treadmill sex itself gets boring and repetitive. Case in point, people with enormous sums of wealth especially in a historical perspective commit suicide all the time.
To live is to cope. And life is cope. It’s all cope.
While I can see where you are coming from, I think you are getting the details wrong.
The difference between what truly happy people aka chads&stacies have and what we have is big enough to matter. "True" pleasure is not clearly defined. You mean unending, unwavering bliss? 'Cause yeah, nobody's got that. But they have a sense of safety because life hasn't taught them to expect disappointment and misery around every corner, a sense of self-worth that is hard to shake because it hasn't been broken down into small little pieces by constant failure, they don't have to cringe or feel nervous when looking at themselfs, both in the physical and in the metaphorical sense, because both their looks and their lifes up to this point are nothing to be ashamed of. Combine that with them having sex, the most engaging and enjoyable activity outside certain drugs and sex on drugs. Combine it with them waking up next to the warm body of their lover. With them having friends and family they like and socialise with regularly.
There is some real truth to the whole "we are all kind of feeling the same" idea, in that humans simply get used to their baseline quality of life, and the gap between our lifes and their lifes is less enormous than it would otherwise be because of that. But that does not mean those lifes are close to equal or even similar in how it feels to live through them. Imagine going back in time to the worst moment of your life and telling your past self that "ultimately, I guess the pain you are feeling right now doesn't really matter, because people who get laid all the time might start to find the act of sex itself to become a bit
boring over time." My past self would try to kill me if I did that.
The idea that because fortunate people sometimes kill themselfs, they must be in the same situation as everyone else who kills themselfs also doesn't follow. Reminds me of that chad actor who caught a stroke of bad luck + stupid descisions, got in trouble with the law and tried to kill himself soon after. He wasn't unhappy like we are our entire lifes, he got a taste of hell for seconds after a lifetime of success and pleasure and instantly opted out.
I suspect many of us would have been way happier in a tech free hunter gatherer society, where we were part of a stable social net and got a wife and kids and could display some of the qualities no longer relevant in the modern world. Though there are many obvious trade-offs to that, from sickness to life expectancy to a lack of luxury and comfort.
The technological singularity has the potential to get you to live till the heat death of the universe in some perfect simulation that offers a procedurally generated, constant variation in stimuli, perfectly personalized to your personal tastes and needs in order to keep you engaged and satisfied forever.
Or maybe we just rework the human brain and hack into a state of permanent euphoria. The indifference of the universe runs both ways, it doesn't care how bad things get for us, but it also couldn't care if humans broke the evolutionary wheel and just became permanently superhumanly happy forever.
I'm a soft antinatalist, so I obvious agree that life is often not worth living and offers far more suffering than joy on average, but I do also believe that this is potentially not going to be the case much longer, assuming technology either wipes us out or allows us to enter through the pearly gates of heaven into utopia.
The time where these kinds of philosophical considerations loose all meaning is approaching and the solution will not be more philosophizing, it will be technological progress allowing us to take absolute control of either the world around us or our own internal experience or both. The question of "does it make a difference" will seem hilarious in retrospect, if we ever get that far.
