Life is Suffering

Buddha said it. Life is suffering. Perhaps a bit of overstatement, but for sure life contains suffering. It is a bitch to be on a diet, hungry and all around us is food, good food. So perhaps it is not overstatement but reality; life is suffering.

All religions are coping mechanism, something to do and think to avoid thinking about the more unpleasant reality of now. Overpopulation. Pollution of our atmosphere, our waste exhaled carbon dioxide, and the waste of ever oxidation process that we depend on, and the earth scrubs the atmosphere, but has not been able to keep up since 1960 or about then. Oh well. in the end we all die. Death. Other unpleasantness. Overstatement can be a form of negative visualization, or we can use positive visualization rather than reality. Both are, well, self deception.

Buddha said the cause was delusion, aversions, expectations, and the like. The Stoics said some things are up to us and some are not, and provided a list of things that are up to us, our opinions, our beliefs, our thoughts, our motivations. It is those vary things when wrong that cause us suffering... more or less. Buddha gave us a prescriptive method of getting on with life, while the stoics provided an objective coarse out of the dilemmas. Both work, just do it verse build a plan and then do it. Both allow time to pass, the situation can change or not, and in the end we just die anyway. Depressing or freeing, I will chose freeing, for it is all about living until we die. Nothing more. Pass on information to the next generation, create the next generation. There will be a sixth extinctions. Will humans survive?

Yes, our beliefs are up to us. We have the power of assent too or rejection of any proposition. It all can be reduced to a series of propositions to assent too or reject. The problem arises when we are young and assent too something that is wrong, often religion, because we are told to, not because it is right. We base everything after that on what we believe, and is pushed onto us in our youth. We, as adults, need to clean our beliefs of all wrong concepts. That is the responsibility of becoming adult and taking responsibility for our selves. The computers do not make that easy to do; the generations growing up with computers and too much information will have the big problems. Oh well.

The only thing that can "save the human race", long term, is population control; a world wide one child policy. The population will age and die off, but the young will be enough to keep things going, more or less, and know that one child policy is required to maintain earth, until the Co2 level returns to below 300 ppm. But it does not matter, the earth will survive after man is gone... be it super-humans, germs, or nothings... or the next random survivors of sixth extinction. It does not mater, I will not be here. And if I cannot stop eating, it will not be long.