The Perfect Setup
As Goethe put it, maybe life is just “diseased matter.”
I’m not one given to believing in supernatural entities, but when I consider the perfect setup we find ourselves in, it seems it could only have come about as a deliberate act by some malignant god. The perfect setup looks like this: we strive with all our being to continue our existence, knowing all the time that we die. During our lives, we get very familiar with ourselves, maybe we even come to love ourselves. Death is the end of this lifelong love affair and the destruction of everything that we would normally consider to constitute a person. But our survival drive means we will nurture and grow even more intimate with the inner person that is ultimately destroyed.
The act of striving to continue our existence is usually not a walk in the park. Most people become wage slaves to pay for their continued existence and will know illness, betrayal, financial difficulties, loneliness, violence, and many other aspects of life’s delicacies. There are pleasures, but they tend to be quite short-lived - food and sex being the most immediate and shortest-lived. Pain, on the other hand, can persist for long periods, and as people age, they will be left with an increasing number of sources of pain, from the death of loved ones through to physical ailments.
On further reflection, the setup is so negative that it does look like a deliberate act. Pain outstrips pleasure by an order of magnitude; the striving and efforts made to continue existence all come to nothing, and everything, including ourselves, that we have come to love is destroyed. Perfect, hats off to the monster that brought about this setup.
But more frightening than the deliberate creation of our hellish situation is the realization that maybe it has all just “come about.” As Goethe put it, maybe life is just “diseased matter.” In this massive machine called the universe, maybe the juggling of atoms and molecules brought about life, with the insistence that no species will persist unless it strives to do so through its strength and deceit.
The only way to deal with all of this is not to deny it; it is to stare the beast in the eyes and to understand how awful it is. Oddly enough, there is a perverse kind of pleasure that comes from understanding reality even though it is the stuff of nightmares.
The problem is that we want it not to be so, for reality to be different. The problem is only in our perception of this situation. But it cannot be otherwise. If we lived in another possible world (we would have a different experience), we would not be us. The fact that we have such a rich inner life is due to how terrible the world we live in is. If everything were simple, our consciousness would have evolved into something very primitive, there would be no need to be an extremely complex thinking machine. We ask why life is so terrible and why we would rather not live in some paradise. We want to have our rich inner life (a sense of beauty, love, art, science, philosophy, entertainment, etc.) and at the same time live in an imaginary paradise where there is no pain or death. But these things do not go together, our rich inner life (and the fact that we ask ourselves these questions and have fundamental reservations about reality) could only have arisen thanks to the horror in which we live. And if we hypothetically managed to create some kind of paradise, our mind would slowly simplify over some time of existence in such a paradise (the absence of problems means that we don't need to think so much) and we would no longer be the same person we are now. And moreover, as for the idea of eternal bliss, that is also an illusion. Bliss exists only in relation to pain, as a contrast. If pain were to disappear completely, bliss would also disappear. To be in paradise means to become a stone. So the answer to the question: "why this world?" is the following: other worlds may exist, but this question is not in them.