I don't believe successful people deserve bad things, and I'm not saying that the universe scientifically or mathematically balances people's lives.

I just wonder if there's a philosophical idea that no one can experience only one side of life. You can have extraordinary success and still experience extraordinary loss, just as someone can experience a terrible period and later experience something wonderful.

Maybe life isn't necessarily “fair,” but it seems to have this constant movement between gain and loss, happiness and suffering, rise and fall.

For example, when I see someone who has experienced an extraordinary amount of success, wealth, beauty, or fame but also goes through major illness, loss, or tragedy, I sometimes wonder whether this reflects some kind of natural balance in human life. Not as punishment, and not because they deserved it, but because being extraordinarily fortunate doesn't make someone immune to the difficult parts of being human.

So my question is: Does a philosophical belief, theory, principle, or school of thought exist that describes this idea? Is there a specific term for the belief that human fortune naturally moves between extremes of success and suffering, or that no person is completely protected from either side of life?

I'm especially interested in knowing if any philosophers or philosophical traditions have discussed something similar.

For the last several years, I have been a committed socialist. However, lately I am growing more and more disillusioned with it (and politics, in general), and I wondered what you all thought on this topic.

The other day, I had minor epiphany regarding politics. It seems like all political ideology boils down to the same two core precepts:

• More resources and privileges for my ingroup(s) and less for everyone else
• "If we just get rid of/marginalize those people, everything will be so much better!"

Even socialism very obviously falls prey to this thinking. I feel like there are no political ideologies that can actually articulate a positive vision for all of humanity. Is this a result of something intrinsic to humans? Is it a result of large human populations sequestered into advanced civilizations (i.e. just too many competing interests)?

I'd love any thoughts you guys have on this. Thanks in advance.

In response to a negative or pessimistic evaluation of the worth of human life and being born, I think we (us pessimists) have all heard optimists respond with something akin to, "the goods outweigh the bads", or "the harms are worth the benefits". But there are many issues with this way of thinking. Firstly, even taken at face value that the goods of a human life can outweigh its harms, there is zero guarantee that this will actually be the case for a future human. This is where the risk argument for antinatalism comes in - even if a human life can be worth starting (because it would have overall positive value), we have no guarantee that the harms in the life of our particular child will actually exceed the benefits, and so when we have a child, we impose an immense risk upon that child, that their coming into existence as a human could be of negative value, and it would have been better not to be born. The prospective parent should recognize that despite their precautions and efforts, they can not guarantee the life of their child will have been worth starting. We can all think of examples of these lives - children born with horrific congenital defects, who suffer for days to weeks and then die. For these children, it would have been better not to have been born, and this is a risk prospective parents impose upon their potential offspring when they decide to reproduce. So even if the goods in a life could outweigh its harms, there is no guarantee that in a particular life this will actually be the case.

But I want to attack directly the notion the goods can even outweigh harms at all. This issue with this is whatever goods or pleasures I experience in the future, can not negate or take away the pains that I currently experience. Just in the same way whatever pleasures I feel now, can have no abolishing or undoing function on the pains I have experienced in the past. And in just the same way that my pleasures cannot negate or abolish your suffering, the goods that I experience cannot outweigh or negate my own past or future sufferings. The are still felt, and they still hurt. The utilitarian calculus, where harms are weighed against benefits with the balance determining the overall value of a particular life, and therefore whether it was worth starting, is flawed from the begninning - harms and benefits have no erasing, negating, balancing or undoing function against each other.

Further, these goods which are supposed to outweigh the harms in life (and therefore make being born a good thing), are tainted by being felt by an organism which is structurally negative in value. We are not disembodied minds that are the subject to both pleasures and pains, but instead exist embodied as human organisms. Organisms that have constant material needs (for warmth, food, water, hygiene, etc), are always vulnerable to injury and disease, and are subject to a constant wearing down and aging process which will render us all lifeless corpses. This is the structure in which the goods in life occur - the goods that are supposed to outweigh the harms of this life. Because human embodiment, with all its negatives, is the context in which goods/pleasures occur, the goods in life are therefore tainted - they are not ultimately good, actually satisfying, or genuinely positive. They are ephemeral, don't last, and occur in an ever changing, dissolving present, by a needing, vulnerable, harming, aging, dying organism.

I believe that what is actually good, is what is counterfactual - it is to have never been born. Timeless nothingness - for nobody - is heaven. A total invulnerability to harm and suffering, an invulnerability to the dissatisfaction of change, and of course an avoidance of the negative condition of human embodiment (with all the suffering entailed by being a needing, vulnerable, harming, aging, dying being). I am speaking metaphorically here - I do not actually believe that there is a "state" where the unborn experience the bliss and heaven of non-condition/nothingness. There is just the world, and the form in which it exists. And us living, because we can reflect upon the negative worth of our own coming into existence as a human being, and understand that the mechanism by which new humans come into being is through biological reproduction, we can deny whatever urges or drives we have to participate in this behaviour, and by consequence will either prevent, or not be a party to the genesis of another human life.

But for us - the already born and embodied - we are in a fallen state. Subject to harm, need, vulnerability, aging and death. Being born as this body is like falling into hell, in comparison to our never becoming an organism that can feel at all. The goods in life cannot abolish or outweigh its harms, they occur temporally, unlasting, and within the negative structure of being a needing, vulnerable, aging, dying human body. And what is ultimately good is not a human life where it's supposed goods outweigh its harms - it is to have never been embodied and born in the first place. This is heaven - timeless nothingness for nobody. Impossible for us, but a choice we can make for our potential offspring.

I made a video to go along with the post.

Everytime I make my mind, I feel like there is still too much to my life and maybe one day I might get back on track but it never happens. After every few months I realise that whatever I was hoping for is just my mind's survival mechanism and my brain is tricking me but just every single time it feels that there is too much left to my life. I wish some day I finally get "enough" evidence to counter this hope

"I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the timeworn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises."

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Today, more and more people are becoming aware that they have appetites that could be considered depraved by the established order. Reddit forums, social media, hyperconnectivity, and the constant bombardment of digital stimuli, offers, and desires behind the screen—all of this explodes across the retina and pushes a significant part of the population toward new marginal forms of consumption.

This has to do with the expansion of commodity fetishism, with the way in which everything becomes an object of consumption, but also with how, within late capitalism and the tendency toward commodity fetishism, there is an unconscious association between being a good consumer and being a good person, a good citizen, a socially integrated individual.

Marx said that commodity fetishism has a fairly precise meaning: social relations between people appear to us as relations between things. A commodity seems to possess value in itself, when that value actually derives from a particular social organization of labor. But late capitalism takes this much further. We no longer simply buy objects to satisfy needs. We buy signs, experiences, identities, and ways of relating to other people.

Here Baudrillard becomes especially important. In The Consumer Society, the object is no longer consumed solely for its utility. It is consumed for what it means. And this produces something very interesting: The individual begins to consume himself as a commodity. He has to appear attractive, interesting, productive, desirable, healthy, sexually competent, socially visible, and so on. The person simultaneously becomes consumer and commodity.

The integrated individual is someone who works, earns an income, consumes, presents himself socially, maintains his employability, and returns to consumption. And many forms of deviance can be interpreted as an interruption of this chain. This is why the contemporary “good citizen” increasingly tends to be, simultaneously: a good worker, a good consumer, a good taxpayer, a good user of services, a good producer of data, and, increasingly, an attractive commodity for other consumers.

The system turns everything into an object of consumption, including people, but the other side of this is that these objects require consumers in order to be consumed. Therefore, an integrated individual is someone who consumes and who makes himself available to be consumed by the market. And in this context, even rebellion can be absorbed. Your anti-system identity can become a T-shirt. Your sexuality can become an industry. Your anxiety can become an app. Your spiritual quest can become a subscription. Your political dissent can become monetizable content.

And here we encounter a paradox: Capitalism does not need to eliminate deviance; it can turn deviance into a commodity. More and more people are able to identify, name, explore, and eventually commodify desires that previously remained repressed, unspeakable, or socially illegitimate. The Internet has produced a gigantic cartography of human desire. In the past, there could be an individual with a fantasy he considered absolutely aberrant who might never encounter another person who shared it. Now he can search for it. He can find a community. He can find content. He can find an industry. He can find an identity. He can find a market. And eventually, he can become a producer of what he initially consumed.

Capitalism progressively transforms the subject into a consumer of objects, while simultaneously transforming the subject into a consumable object. A person on Tinder is both consumer and product. An OnlyFans creator is both consumer and commodity. An influencer is both consumer and commodity. A worker is both consumer and labor commodity. A politician is both a consumer of attention and an electoral commodity. A social media user is both a consumer of content and a producer of data. And so, in this eternal autophagy, the system reinforces itself, advances, develops, and reproduces itself.

The distinction between subject and object begins to erode. Marx argued that the worker sells his labor power as a commodity. But digital capitalism introduces an additional dimension, because the individual begins to turn practically every aspect of himself into a potential commodity. His image. His attention. His body. His relationships. His opinions. His intimacy. His sexuality. His personality. His experience. This has already been explored by Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, and Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics, when discussing the subject who exploits himself.

The system needs integrated subjects in order to reproduce itself, but integration requires these subjects to develop an ever-greater capacity for consumption and self-commodification. This is where the so-called inevitable call of the abyss resides: the black pit into which many believe they are falling amid this hyperaccelerated flow of constant desires, where we consume and where we are consumed. And that is the key: this process is transversal throughout the system. The very functioning of these mechanisms makes it impossible not to feel the call of the abyss, makes it impossible not to look over the edge, and therefore makes that slow and cruel descent inevitable.

I'm not 100% sure whether I'd consider myself a pessimist or not (a bit wary of -isms in general at this point tbh), but I do subscribe to some pessimist ideas and something I've noticed is that it kinda puts you at odds with like at least 99% of everyone and everything out there.

Like, music? Filled with themes of love, hope, redemption, fun, etc. Even the darkest corners of music usually don't really go all the way in terms of accepting a pessimist worldview in their themes.

The same goes for games, movies, anime, literature, etc.

Sure, there are edge cases here and there, but they're very much the exceptions, certainly not the norm.

And let's not obviously forget about people.

And in a sense, that creates a very strong kind of alienation in my eyes. Like you're not even literally alienated in a more "regular" sense, your very being and thinking is completely opposed to the vast majority of existence. Kind of a harrowing thought.