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Life is inherently just suffering. Everything you do to prevent suffering simply prolongs it. Coupled with the fact that most forms of life need to consume other forms of life just to survive.
Even in the most beautiful ecosystem you could find it's a constant war between species just for basic survival with no real meaning behind it
I've been grappling this for a while now, and how to think about it. It's so sad that just about every being has to constantly work and suffer to prolong their existence (which only consists of work and suffering).
To what extent should we avoid the suffering? To what extent should we embrace it? Prolong it? Are there different types of suffering? Are some more preferable to others? Is suffering to produce art, or other creative work, better than the suffering of menial labour or going hungry?
How much should your children suffer? Should they suffer rigorous education and studying, or should you only occupy yourself with providing for them? Should you provide them a wealth of knowledge of life lessons and wisdom, or try to build up the largest pile of inheritance you can?
you can do everything "right" in life and still lose.
Physically painful chronic diseases
Life is fleeting, it's short, and some people seem to only exist to make it as horrible for others as possible.
I'm struggling to think of an answer, but I guess the injustice of life in many forms. Some bad people have more success and luck than some good people. Alzheimers can make us forget the love of our lives after a long, happy life.
We die too quickly and not all of us experience all facets of life due to increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility.
I strongly believe life would be better for everyone due to these two factors alone
Lord of the flies was a thinly-veiled allegory for how the world actually works. There's no growup keeping it in check, we're on our own, and we're not great at it.
The many ways people try to make it not that. Like just lying to themselves. Or scapegoating some subset of humanity they're not in for it (which happens equally across the political spectrum).
Lack of agency
Becoming old
For me it's the nature of time. As you get older the amount of time you have had experienced grows, so new time feels quicker in comparison. So time speeds up just as you learn to enjoy it.
There is no karma, evil assholes get away with it and live to ripe old ages far more often than they should
The fact that I'm stuck in a human body. I'm a wolf, dammit.
-- Frost
You gotta get food. Like every day. Even when you can't or don't want to.
That eventually you have to say goodbye to parents, grandparents, animals, and loved ones - and there will always be a void you can't fill that they filled.
Grief is the price of love. 🥲
Having a pattern finding machine between your ears that desperately tries to find meaning/reason/purpose in a meaningless universe
3 years I had a normal blood pressure.
5 years and 2 months ago I had a back.
10 years ago I had knees.
Oh, and I haven't slept more than 5 or 6 hours a night in several years and most of the time I'm lucky to get 4.
I truly do not mind getting older. It has a lot of benefits, but damn... I'd like there be enough of my body left to enjoy it.
People are very selective about who to empathize with. Not everyone, but enough people. I feel like almost all of my problems stem from that, somewhere down the line.
In 1994, I didn't own a computer yet, smartphones weren't a thing yet, I was 12 years old and learning to fix and rebuild lawnmowers and go-karts.
Age 13, I got my first computer, and promptly learned how to crash it that evening. Turned out it had a DriveSpace compressed hard drive, 125 whopping megabytes, and I didn't understand any of that yet on that very evening. But I had the manuals and the disks, and gradually learned the basics over the next 2 weeks to reformat and reinstall everything my uncle gave me.
By age 15 they were starting to shut down the local parts shops for small engine parts. Now mind you, that was way before online ordering was the big thing, and I was still running Windows 3.11, which I later upgraded to Windows 95, via floppy disk of course, because who in 1995 got a donor hand-me-down computer with a CD-ROM drive?
So, I started learning more about computers, and gradually learning automotive repair, the whole time building custom bicycles, because I had way too many spare junkyard bicycle parts.
But today, I dunno what the fuck to do. People don't really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.
I get by fixing older vehicles like from 2005 and before, wondering what the fuck done happened to society over all these years?
I'm sorry, I could go on and on, there's soo many things I can maintain and rebuild even, if only you could get parts and tools for modern stuff.
Right To Repair!
because repair doesn't make economical sense when it is cheaper to replace.
for most people, repair is expensive, time consuming, and difficult. It is not enjoyable or rewarding in any way. Replacement is far more immediate outside of very expensive long lasting items, like cars, homes, etc.
I do a lot of DIY, but the vast majority of people do not have the skills, patience, or time to spend hours figuring things out and then sourcing replacement parts to save a few bucks. They just want something that works asap, and replacement is almost always the faster option.
And that's half of how we ended up in the era of enshittification.
Let's say one of the control knobs on your 15 year old dumb stove fails, shorted out, where as soon as you turn it to low heat the eye is blazing hot at full heat. Do you?...
We went with option B, way cheaper than a new stove, plus none of the headaches of modern digital technology. Like, why do appliances need modern digital technology? A stove heats food, plain and simple, and that's all it needs to do.
And look at these new refrigerators coming out, that fail within weeks to months, maybe at best a couple or few years. When your grandma's old fridge was passed down from her mom and has been kicking strong for 50 years, save for that new door seal installed like 15 years ago..
Sigh, we live in a disposable dystopia anymore ☹️
People don't really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.
God damn do I feel that.
I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.
I'm a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.
And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn't really hard, just time-consuming)
I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there's a good chance the others weren't far behind)
For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.
And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.
So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics
So that's what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn't make financial sense to fix it.
This wasn't a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it's an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn't a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that's pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic "3 inch roller wheel" for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.
But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn't find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.
They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I'd have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.
Getting older and watching loved ones get older
Not being able to live multiple timelines. I.e. having to make choices between one thing and another.
Egoistic people. Too many just see their own needs, and I'm not talking about basic needs. They are stressed and drive recklessly, don't think about others when making decisions and so on. And in the end, we all pay a higher price for insignificant or no benefit of individuals. Life would be way easier if we could just slow down and stop having all those unrealistic expectations about what should be and started appreciate what is.
And yes I know that the world is a shitshow right now. I'm not saying you should ignore that.
agree with you. egotism is run rampant. especially in regard to politics, lifestyle etc. everyone seems to think anyone who doesn't reflect their immediate needs or views is evil and awful.
people simple can't tolerate anyone being different than them, because it's a challenge to their ego because it might mean they are wrong.
i remember when social media was fun and people celebrated differences, now they just tear each other apart over ever minor difference. i used to me allowed to do stuff and enjoy my life... now everything I do or don't do is 'problematic' or 'oppressive'. 10 years ago nobody cared what car I drove, now I get lectures/speeches about how 'evil' i am for not buying an EV and keeping my 10 year old ICE.
It's the fact that the easier options are bad choices.
It's easier to sit around the house than it is to exercise. It's easier to order pizza than it is to cook something. It's easier to be ignorant than actually learn and change.
The easy choice should be the good one. Making a bad choice should take effort.
The monotony. Life has wonderful moments, and there is joy and love. There is also the constant grind. Buying groceries, cooking meals, doing laundry, cleaning. Things that we never thought of as children, but it takes so much time just to continue living and filling basic needs. That's when you start to really appreciate the replicators in Star Trek. Sure at first it's like "I could have takeout anytime", but then you realize oh my god if I didn't have to shop, get groceries, cook, put them away, move them home, the whole thing, we'd have so much more time.
What if you like doing those things? I don't regard any of those things as a grind. I find them liberating and I hate it when I life gets in the way of me doing my chores.
I can't say I enjoy those things, but you're right, it's far from a grind. Those tasks are a part of daily life, they need to be done so best crack on and get them done. Anyone who sees those things as an inconvenience or a hindrance to the extent it makes them hate life are not mature enough for the gift of life.
It's so long. Like holy shit, I get the picture already. This is egregious.
Every time I think about my cats I get so envious.
Childhood that's gone in what feels like an instant before you had the chance to appreciate it, and by the time you do enjoy it after the fact, from memory, the moment is already long gone, no matter how hard you cling onto the memory, its already in the past, you have no time machine to go back and re-do that again.
Probably humans. I said it.
Nothing truly sucks about life. We could literally not exist, but instead we do. Existing is the coolest fucking thing ever. I'm glad I exist. Nothing truly sucks about existing compared to what not existing would be like.
"It's a wonder to be alive. If you don't understand that, how can you search for anything deeper?" - Liu Cixin
Mostly I love being physically embodied, I love seeing and feeling, eating, sex, lived being pregnant, I love having a physical body and consciousness.
What sucks to me is not necessarily physical decline - in general I've been able to handle what is thrown at me. I do hate time though. Hate the way we experience it in one direction. Hate the irreversible past that leads to the unavoidable future, it seems to just all be rolling out with no way to change it, every action came from some past action. Not just a big ship to turn, more like it will turn or it won't but we can't make anything happen that wasn't already going to happen. Our present the irreversible past of tomorrow's unavoidable future.
Seemin unability to truly live in the current moment. Always have to be thinking about the past or worrying about the future. With a decade of experience in meditation I've seen glimpses of what it could be like when you just are and everything is okay. It's all just so fleeting.
The worst part is isolation. I think most of us are suffering from lack of community
Gestures broadly at everything
When you hit a certain age, you'll wake up with a new pain and that will be your new normal. Then, your life will be nothing but physical and emotional pain. You'll just have more of a threshold.
Sounds like you had a nice childhood and don't like getting older?
For those of us who had bad childhoods, getting older is liberating and joyful. My life gets better and better every year and the worst years of my life were my youth.
