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What is it about modern society that has given rise to this absolutely overblown concern for “suffering?” We live in the most hedonic times imaginable in all of human history, and so the idea that anything less than total hedonic pleasure, or even less than net (50%+1) hedonic pleasure makes life not worth living is utterly bizarre to me. Millennia of people, intellectuals and not, passed through life experiencing plague, famine, short life expectancies, unanesthetized surgeries and dying of untreated cancers without coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stop having kids, kill themselves early, or kill everyone.
This doesn’t even get into the issues surrounding this anti-life thinking and the hedonic treadmill. If my Oreo is good today, should I live? If it is slightly less good tomorrow, should I propose panicide?
I don't think it is the main reason (except for EAs), but if you believe that
then the rise of factory farming means that the amount of suffering for which the average human (and even more so the average lower-middle-class American) can be held responsible really has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 50 years or so.
Concern for animal suffering became a big deal within a generation of avoidable human-blameable animal suffering becoming a big deal. Charity prohibits us from psychoanalysing why people hold true beliefs.
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The Course of Empire, cyclical history, decadence, hedonic treadmill, luxury beliefs...
Around here, when you see someone do something that is both stupidly destructive and utterly unnecessary, you cry out "Ich glaub dir gehts zu gut!", i.e., "I think you're doing too well!". Bad ideas invent themselves, but normally they fizzle out before being put into action because of practical constraints. When someone is doing too well for their own good, they lack those exact practical constraints that would nip bad ideas in the bud. Instead, they can go down the most ridiculous rabbit holes and never be called out for it.
There are no atheists in foxholes, women who are busy keeping house don't go around preaching feminism, men who are one paycheck away from actual starvation don't preach anti-work, liberals do a 180° on blank-slatism when it comes to choosing a school for their own kids, and right-wingers do the same when it comes to picking cheap enough contractors to build their houses for them without whom they couldn't afford it.
It's all the same idea. If you're sufficiently well-off, materially and otherwise, you can afford to engage in stupid behavior and take it much too far. And given the near-infinite production of stupidities, someone will find some very stupid and highly infectious meme that never would have survived in a more resource-starved environment, but does just fine and makes the headlines in our age of undeserved prosperity.
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I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.
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It makes it difficult for me to take it seriously. The demonstrated violence helps a little, but still difficult.
Humanity of all types at all times, creed, race, culture, and ideological persuasion has faced and examined suffering. We have thousand year investigations into what the condition of suffering is, what it means if anything, what we can or should do with it. Yet only now a culture of fat, bored consumers lands on a decadent despair. As we all know, there is nothing sacred, there is no meaning, but we are definitely not related to stupid nihilists. We, good people, are compassionate. We care. We've also done the math. Every discomfort, every ounce of pain, can be refunded by merely removing all sentience.
Don't worry, you don't need to commit suicide or harm anyone else, as one redditor explains:
Yes, it is a moral imperative to stop existing as soon as possible to reduce suffering, but don't forget about your compassion for others in the calculation. You might have other considerations on your utilitarian spreadsheet. We can't just round up all the dolphins to exterminate them. Despite their silly clicking noises and hijinks they suffer quite a lot, but we can't drive them extinct. We definitely don't endorse someone taking our beliefs to their logical ends in the extreme. No, that's very naughty. Bad, very bad indeed.
Sorry for not answering your question. I vote a combination of time to think, access to ideas to think about, and personal mental state. We create a lot of depressed people for various reasons. Give them all girlfriends/boyfriends, compensate them decently for picking and packing oranges 8 hours a day, have them live by the beach or somewhere with lots of sun, and force them to share drinks at the end of the day. Voila! Only the most serious of believers are left.
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I think it's just personal deep depression compared with some form of a myopia that makes you think everyone else is suffering and joyless all the time too and is just faking otherwise. Psychological condition expressed as a figleaf ethical view.
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I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?
Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.
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