The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

by David Benatar

Sometimes, the variation within a person depends on the moment, and sometimes, it depends on the stage of life. Somebody who fears death in youth may eagerly await it while suffering the final stages of a terminal condition. Alternatively, somebody who is indifferent while young may come to dread it as his remaining life expectancy reduces and the prospect of death becomes more vivid.

A more realistic and reasonable response is to retain a keen awareness of death’s shadow but not to dwell on it all the time. One presses on with one’s life, doing what one can to enhance its quality and meaning. Because meaning involves transcending one’s own limits, such an enterprise may—if it has meaning worth pursuing—also involve enhancing the quality and sometimes the meaning of others’ lives.

Old age, it is said, is where everybody wants to get but nobody wants to be.

Death is bad, but it does not follow from this that being immortal would be good. It is possible that death is bad, but that eternal life would be worse. Thus, we need to ask whether the human predicament would be meliorated or whether it would be exacerbated if we were immortal.

Nor would we be immortal if we could end all accidents and murders. The planet that sustains us will someday become either too cold or too hot to do so. Eventually, the earth will be absorbed by the sun, and the sun will collapse. In the face of these cosmic projections, belief in immortality is outrageously delusional. This has led some to distinguish between “medical immortality” and “true immortality.”13 The former applies when one cannot die from natural causes, while the latter applies when one cannot die from any cause whatsoever.

In other words, mortality is only one feature of the human predicament. Substituting mortality with immortality, while holding other features of the human predicament constant, would extend the predicament temporally and would also introduce novel features unless we imposed the kinds of conditions I have discussed. However, if we imagine immortal lives under these stipulated conditions, it would be much better than our current mortal condition, or so I have argued.

It is possible that we are damned if we die and damned if we don’t. Some predicaments are that intractable. Perhaps it would have been best, as I believe, never to have been at all. After all, those who never exist are in no condition, let alone any predicament. They are not doomed to die. And if one thinks that an eternal life under the best conditions constitutes a kind of doom, they are also not doomed to live for eternity. 7 | Suicide There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. —ALBERT CAMUS

One cannot undo a suicide. One annihilates oneself. Yet, contrary to what some have thought, suicide cannot for this reason be ruled out categorically. There are some fates that are both worse than and only avoidable by death. We cannot state baldly that the human predicament is such a fate,1 and thus suicide cannot be recommended to all people at all times as a solution to the human predicament. One reason for this, as we saw in chapter 5, is that death (which obviously includes death by one’s own hand) is part of the human predicament. One’s death obviously does not solve the problem of one’s mortality. Second, suicide, like death more generally, does not typically solve the problem of meaninglessness. Indeed, it often exacerbates that problem. Death can solve the problem of felt meaninglessness. Once one is dead, one can no longer suffer the feeling that one’s life lacks meaning. However, as I shall argue, there are often other, less drastic responses to that problem.

Once we recognize that courage should not be confused with its simulacra, the possibility arises that some of life’s burdens may be so great and the point of bearing them so tenuous that enduring them further is not courageous at all and may even be foolish.

Those who accuse suicides of cowardice fail to see just how demanding the task of killing oneself can be. Suicide is difficult because of the formidable life drive that animates most people, even most of those who eventually take their own lives. Even if some people lose all will to live, many others who kill themselves would like to continue living if it were not so burdensome. They have to overcome their will to live in order to take their lives. This is not easy at all. It is thus unsurprising that more people contemplate suicide than attempt it, and there are more attempted suicides than successful ones. Given the resolve that some people have to muster in order to take their own lives, combined with the futility or severity of their circumstances, it may well be that suicide is—at least sometimes—the more courageous option than remaining alive.

would be indecent, for example, for family members to expect a loved one to remain alive in conditions of extreme pain or degradation. In such circumstances, it is unlikely that she would be able, even if she remained alive, to fulfill many or most of her duties to them. Although they will miss her presence if she dies, her condition is too burdensome to require her continued presence. In such circumstances, what is selfish is the insistence that the prospective suicide remain alive, not that she seeks her own demise.

(Ultimately, even if not proximately, one’s parents are responsible for one’s human predicament. It was they who placed one in it. Yet many people, even those who resent their predicaments, are not inclined to bear any resentment toward their parents. This may be because of a close, loving relationship between parent and offspring, or because the offspring recognize that the parents did not know better when they procreated.)

Our self-assessments of our wellbeing are indeed unreliable, but almost always because we think that the quality of our lives is better than it really is, rather than because we think it is worse.

If the norm is to have an inflated sense of how well one’s life goes, then those who have either an accurate view of their wellbeing or merely a view that is less exaggerated than the norm will appear to most people as underestimating the quality of their lives. The optimistic biases are so deeply ingrained in people (not least because of the evolutionary roots of these biases) that most people will simply deny that humans have them.

Many of those who are pessimistic, depressed, or otherwise unhappy may actually have a much more accurate view of the quality of their lives than the cheery optimists who constitute the bulk of humanity.17 The views of the unhappy may well be harder to have and to live with, but they may be more accurate and, in that sense, more rational.

It is bad enough that prospective parents see fit to create people who, as a consequence, will suffer. It is worse still, once these people are created, to condemn a decision they might make to terminate their lives. To deny people the moral freedom to kill themselves is to deny them control over a decision of immense importance to them.

Those with a lower tolerance for the burdens of life may think it would be stupid for them to persevere when the end of those burdens is achievable. Thus, it might be the case that we should be less averse to suicide (and death more generally) not because the Epicureans are correct that death is not bad, but rather because life is much worse than we think.

For example, a young person in good health and not in any special danger would usually be misguided in being pessimistic about his prospects for surviving to his next birthday. It is possible but unlikely that he will die before then. By contrast, the same young person would be rightly pessimistic about becoming a centenarian. It is possible but not likely that he will reach that age. Thus, there can be no generalized defense of either optimism or pessimism. We should be optimistic about some matters and pessimistic about others.

How should one respond to the human predicament? One obvious response is to desist from perpetuating it by creating new humans who will inevitably be in the same predicament. Every birth is a death in waiting. When one hears of a birth, one must know that it is but a matter of time before that new human dies. Sandwiched between birth and death is a struggle for meaning and a desperate attempt to ward off life’s suffering. This is why a pessimistic view about the human condition leads to the anti-natalist conclusion that we ought not to procreate.

These may be mitigated, but not entirely avoided, if the pragmatic argument is employed in defense of a kind of compartmentalized optimism. The optimist might say: “I recognize the human predicament. It is horrible, but I want to adopt an optimistic view to help me cope. I shall continue, at the back of my mind, to be aware of the predicament, but I can compartmentalize those thoughts—or at least try to.”

If, for example, one loses sight of the human predicament, one might create more people. The contrasting danger is that if the pessimism is kept sufficiently in mind to avoid the risks of unchecked optimism, it will negate the positive effects of optimism.

This strategy, which I call pragmatic pessimism, also enables one to cope. Like pragmatic optimism, it also attempts to mitigate rather than exacerbate the human predicament. However, it is preferable to pragmatic optimism because it retains an unequivocal recognition of the predicament by not compartmentalizing it to coexist along with optimism. It allows for distractions from reality, but not denials of it. It makes one’s life less bad than it would be if one allowed the predicament to overwhelm one to the point where one was perpetually gloomy and dysfunctional, although it is also compatible with moments or periods of despair, protest, or rage about being forced to accept the unacceptable.

If we take a cold, hard look at the human condition, we see an unpleasant picture. However, there are powerful biological drives against fully recognizing the awfulness of the human predicament that explain why so many people succeed in putting it out of their minds for much of the time. This is a mixed blessing. Ignorance is an existential analgesic, but those who do not sufficiently feel the weight of the human predicament are also vectors for its transmission to new generations. NOTES Preface 1.