I had a conversation with a psychotherapist today about hopelessness and at what point is it just not worth continuing on in this life. Because without there a chance of something better or a reason to keep on trying, it is not just a pointless life and waste of energy, but it is also a worse life.
Pretty much everything we do as a species is busywork and pointless, but once upon a time when we were in small tribes, the purpose was to keep the tribe going. And in order to do that, everyone had their role, everyone was active, from the oldest to the youngest, all individuals working together for each other. The individual was possible, because of the group.
But that is not the case now, where a person can live without contributing anything to the group and often, just taking, milking the resources of others to survive and expand. But the thing with individualism and this continued isolationist push of the individual means that the group is no longer a reason to contribute and is just a hinderance, or a competing force.
Others get in the way of me getting what I want, or they take what I want.
What is the point of surviving a nuclear holocaust or a zombie apocalypse? It might make for good television, but the reality would be very different. Living in an underground bunker for years, or stabbing the walking dead through the skull whilst trying to forage for food.
Drop the bomb on me, please.
But we as humans have this thing called "hope" which is part of our mental survival instinct that keeps us going, even when things are terrible. Keeps us struggling pointlessly against an environment that doesn't want us and to be honest, would probably be better off without us. Not just us as a species, but if a whole lot of us just disappeared. During WWII around 85M are estimated to have died, most of them coming from a relative handful of countries. But that accounted for almost 4% of the entire global population. This opened up a lot of opportunity.
If 10% disappeared from each nation today?
800,000,000 people gone globally.
Housing issues solved. Cost of living reduced. Unemployment fixed.
As horrible as it might seem, wouldn't the overall good be better than the collective struggle? What if it was voluntary, or paid selection? For instance, if I volunteer to be one of the euthanised, my family would get an endowment, property and some additional opportunities.
How much is my life worth?
Seems like an interesting question, but it really isn't. Because no one's life is really worth that much relatively. And being no one special with no great talents to offer the world but still taking resources to live, my life is really not worth much at all. Worse, it is a net cost. And the more we isolate, the more we do not provide for the group and species, the lower our personal value becomes. Sure, our wealth might go up, it might be very high even - but that doesn't mean we have improved the species and often means, we have reduced the species instead, since wealth is largely built on what harms us or is useless. It might be different if wealth was built on improving human existence, but it isn't.
But we have hope.
We have hope that things will improve. We have hope that there will be a cure for our disease. We have hope that there won't be war in our region. We have hope that we will earn enough and that our children will be happy, and the environment won't collapse... lots of hope.
Animals have survival instincts, as do we. And hope seems to be one of the skills we have developed in order to trick our brain into not giving up, even as we are being mauled to death by the world, or a tiger. But why fight for inevitable failure? Why fight to survive in a world where the climate is going to change in ways that makes life even harder? Why fight against a government that will see us incarcerated or killed before they will give up power? Why fight so corporations can maximise their profits and shareholders can become wealthier?
What is the point?
In the past, the point was to keep the tribe going, but now that we have destroyed tribal life, communities and even family life, the meaning to keep fighting has been largely reduced to the individual, which in the grand scheme of a species, makes no sense. Our evolutionary changes were to keep us advancing as a species, but we advanced to a point that instead of advancing as a species, we are competing as individuals.
Is there really any hope for any of us?
Unfortunately, survival is not enough to make a life worth living.
Taraz
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