the butterfly conservatory

suffering

April 11, 2024

hey! remember that whole covid thing? well—I suffer from selective memory loss so I don’t. some of you may and that must really suck for you. must have been a bad time if I decided to forget about it. one thing that echoes back to me, though I can’t remember exactly who or when the phrase comes from, was a sentence along the theme of “I have to do _____? during a pandemic??”

we start each day as one thousand individual atrocities bloom. while I brush my teeth a husband is beating his wife down the street. when I get into my car a child dies of cancer. as I write this in an exceedingly cold air-conditioned office ten thousand Gazans are starving. one day an adolescent will be taking their driving test while I take my final breath. life has a significant amount of detail and much of that is horror¹²

“pandemic” in the final phrase of the first paragraph may be substituted for any number of horrors; regardless of which the answer to the question is yes, for you must keep living.

I suspect many of those who write lines like that are wealthier than the global average and live in the west, where the realities of living still exist but our experiences of them are far abstracted from the central concept. as an example substitution: “you’re telling me I have to work? during a genocide?” well, yes. regardless of time, the majority of people who have ever lived have had to exert effort to survive. though we no longer look for berries all day, we now trade our time for money with which we may purchase out-of-season salmonberries from the overpriced berry store³. this is far preferable to antiquity – almost everyone experiences less precarity (in terms of closeness to dying) than they would in a Neolithic situation.

“you’re telling me I have to act like everything is normal? during a famine?” yes! because normalcy includes the state of famine. terrible things have, are, and will continue, and throughout, people have lived, loved, and continue on. to throw one’s hands up and say that they cannot go on like this does a disservice to everyone who has done exactly that⁴.

when you look into anything you will find a fractal of pain and suffering. oftentimes one cannot abstain from these issues. I like to think that there is a middle ground between a lack of reaction to the world’s suffering and immersing yourself in pain such that you lose any sense of self.

what can you change? for example, I don’t think that posting another video of Israeli war crimes is going to make them stop doing that, nor will it change anyone’s minds on the topic. all it does is make you miserable. if you want to do something that matters, donate to a Palestinian children’s’ charity⁵. if working makes you miserable, consider other jobs. if the idea of doing anything at all sounds excruciating consider that you may be suffering from depression and act accordingly⁶. attack the things you can.

we will not see an end to suffering in our lifetimes nor our children’s’ and so on. through this, life persists again and again. live it to its fullest. when one points to discrete instances of suffering, they fail to see an emergent property past these instances that makes it all worth it.