Why do we suffer? How do we find relief?

For all of our science and technology, we still have no definitive explanation for suffering.

As long as suffering has existed, humans have been driven by it, and the need to make sense of it. Perhaps that drive is itself an answer. But, like many other theories, it is not altogether satisfactory. Even if we can scientifically explain the cause of suffering, it would only be half the story. There is still the problem of curing, escaping, or at least coping with it.

The impulse behind all myths and religions is to explain the inexplainable fact of human existence and consciousness. It’s well and good that life has its joys. But the miseries are what cause us to question whether it was all worth it; and to wonder what strange force or intelligence found motivation to inflict such horrors upon us poor souls.

For each aspect of suffering, we seek different answers using different methods. They question of “why” also has two aspects, as usual: the mechanical and the intentional.

Most people take it for granted that the universe has a mechanical aspect. But many also believe that the material world is subordinate to an immaterial plane, populated by supernatural beings. These beings have obscure intentions. But their actions override the mechanisms which rule over base matter. People disagree about the nature and residents of the spiritual plane, but they believe its existence is undeniable. It is an unshakeable intuition.

It is not surprising that believers see in this metaphysical reality an origin of human suffering. Though in many cases, they simply replace one unsatisfactory explanation with another one. Ultimately, most mythologies and religions put the answer into the category of the unknowable. It is the province of the great creator, whose mind is infinitely remote from ours. It is a means of achieving acceptance, and in that way, calms the anguished need to know and understand.

That the desire to understand suffering itself leads to suffering is just one of those ironies of being alive, conscious, and able to contrive such questions.

The more important of the two basic questions is the second. (The former—and its unanswerability—is mostly a substitute to keep the mind busy, or a means of buttressing one’s will to endure.) At least, if science and technology have any justification, it is likely its promise of reducing, if not wholly eliminating, suffering. Especially pointless suffering, if one can make such a distinction. The only “pointful” suffering would be the kind one experiences by choice, as a cost of achieving some other desire—which, in turn, probably exists to address the pointless variety.

The human world can be, if one is so inclined, reduced completely to a complex and complicated collection of attempts, by each person, to reduce their own suffering. The basic idea of a living thing is that it is, at least conceptually, singular and self-interested. It is so by necessity. We each only really know what we can understand through our own mind and senses. Whether this is too trivial a definition, I leave to the reader.

But we can put it in different terms: we can only make decisions based on the knowledge and information that we have. That includes a finite set of recognizable options. We each have finite resources of time, energy, materials, and information. We each must combine these, and translate them into actions. We are motivated only by the emotions and sensations of which we are aware, even if those might be pale reflections of the emotions of other beings, which we might infer from external signs: sounds; words; expressions; gestures; and other behaviours.

If one person empathizes with another, and feels, to some degree, an echo of that other’s pain and suffering, it becomes, to that same degree, their own. Only then is the first person motivated to address it. If you cannot recognize another’s suffering, how can you realize it needs attending?

We could, if we wanted, try to enumerate the types and varieties of pain and suffering. But it would not especially alter the nature of this argument. Briefly, however, we can at least recognize that they are too many to list.

In the most general, there are the needs: physical—nutritious food, clean water, breathable air, and suitable climate—social—family, friendship, sex, community, recognition—and existential, as described by the likes of Maslow.

Aside from appetites, there are also the negative needs: to avoid physical and emotional harms, which are countless, but generally reduce to varieties of loss: bodily injury, severed relationships, and confidence in the future.

Attempting to document and organize the endless list of the causes of suffering might be a suitable distraction to help us forget our own suffering, in the moment.

Instead, I am interested in whether and how to realize the holy grail of utilitarianism, despite the practical impossibility of such an effort.

Suffering is subjective. Attempting to make it objective is, for now at least, a hopeless endeavour. Possibly, if neuroscience achieves its goals, we might learn to produce a prescription of treatments to relieve the suffering of any person—while leaving their personality intact. But even then, “personality” itself is irreducibly subjective. If suffering is an intrinsic element of one’s personality, then such aims are also fruitless.

Mental pain is not like physical pain. Mental pain is a product of beliefs as much as anything. It is intrinsically linked to our perception of our place in time: our memories of the past; our understanding of the present; and our expectations for the future. These are all constructs. If you change them too much, the person—the personality—will also change so much that, aside from physical similarity, they would become unrecognizable.

Here, we enter into a difficult—perhaps impossible—ethical conundrum. Such ethical issues are also mental products of beliefs, but in the observer, not the subject. But the point of this essay is that we are all subjects, and the problem involves us all. In truth, the roles of “subject” and “observer” are fragile constructs—we all take on both roles, to varying degrees.

Every person asks, at least implicitly, “How can I reduce my own suffering?” But the person who choses to empathize—at least theoretically—with the entire world—or even the entire biosphere—asks, “How can I reduce the whole world’s collective suffering?” As stated above, such a goal is no less selfish or self-interested. It is only that the person has—perhaps foolishly—extended their sense or definition of “self” to include an imaginary construct of “the world”.

If we take such a claim literally, it is of course preposterous. One person cannot empathize with more than a few dozen other people (be they human people, or anthropomorphized animals, plants, other organisms, ecosystems, bodies of water, weather systems, or the entire Earthly biosphere). But neither can a person literally understand “a billion” (or even “a thousand”).

And yet we can use words and symbols to write functions and formulae which can make statements and draw inferences from the otherwise incomprehensible, albeit at the cost of reducing those individuals to generalizations. If the generalizations are themselves sufficiently sophisticated, it should still possible to limit unknowing harm while attempting to address the known. I hope.

In fact, the real aim of this contemplation is to consider how one might do the seemingly impossible: consider and address the suffering of every living being on Earth. With the help of computers, in practise, since they have more than sufficient memory capacity to hold a detailed discription of every complex organism on Earth. We can reduce insect populations, and similar species, to generalized probabilities and statistical distributions, without any risk of hurting their feelings.

We shouldn’t need computers to devise a working theory that can account for trillions of living beings, even if the theory itself would not recognize and enumerate them.

The question is, how would the average person respond to such a theory? Since, for the average person, even the principle of considering everyone’s subjective experience beggars the imagination. Most people are innately predisposed—whether genetically or culturally, or by some arcane mixture—to dismiss the subjective significance of nearly everyone else. If you are not explicitly on “their side”, then you are at best an obstacle, at worst an enemy.

Humans are typically binary and hierarchical thinkers. They simplify every continuum into three camps—their end, opposite end, and wishy-washy middle—and prioritize such dichotomies according to a power law distribution. One dichotomy is primary, a few more are notable in edge cases, and from there on they are ranked in rapidly diminishing significance, most being completely ignored and forgotten.

So, any theory of universal utilitarianism has not only to face the intractable subjectivity problem, but also the difficulty that few people—if any—will even consider such a goal as worthy of attempting in the first place. It’s aim is not just impossible, but wrong, even evil. It would reward those who deserve punishment.

There’s the rub: most people believe that most other people—the ones not like them—do not deserve consideration, unless it be to guarantee their suffering. Most people want to punish someone else—too often, they seek righteous, torturous vengeance upon entire groups. You will be climbing a steep hill—one almost indistinguishable from a sheer cliff face—to attempt to change their minds. Revenge is yet another one of those problematic intrinsic human qualities. Because it is believed, at a deeply subconscious level, that the suffering of others is a necessary solution to their own suffering.

Is it then hopeless to consider a universal solution to suffering? Undoubtedly. At least, in anything like the near term—or even any kind of medium-scale timeline. That is, in the end, the irony of human suffering. We not only create most of it for ourselves—often as a side effect of attempting to address it—but it seems we are hard pressed to even imagine a world in which it is markedly reduced, let alone one that is free from it. Or if we do have fantasies of freedom from suffering, it is only in worlds that are much smaller, and much simpler, than the world we live in now.

Still, impressive numbers of people devote themselves to the reduction of suffering in various ways. Generally they are focused—as can be expected from a society based on specialization—on specific forms of suffering, usually acute. For every variety of suffering, you will find a practitioner selling promises of relief. That many such practises only delay suffering, or shift it onto someone less powerful, is usually quietly ignored.

We are a species of mostly near horizons. Except for those loony long-termists, who are obsessed with reducing the potential suffering of imaginary people living in a distant future. Since it is so much easier to deal with than the suffering of real people in the here and now.