Thursday, October 19, 2006
Another One Of My Existential Ponderings
Life is full of pain and frustration and distress. Every single person has problems that, to them, seem huge and devastating. Yet, at the same time, there is a hierarchy of suffering: my self-inflicted, neurotic distress is nothing compared to the problems of a starving AIDS orphan in Africa. But knowing that there are people in the world that have it worse than you doesn't seem to actually make anyone feel any better or make their problems seem more manageable. So where does one draw the line between sympathy (to others or to one's self) and saying, "Oh, for God's sake, buck up!"?
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2 comments:
Hi Frank, I am back to playing agony aunt :)
I dont think you are right when you say that X's suffering is smaller than Y's, just because on first sight, Y's looks bigger. People don't value themselves through the prism of others' expectation of how they should hurt. The operative word here is perspective. Perhaps an AIDS patient in South Africa does actually experience lesser existential angst than a well-to-do college going kid in downtown America. And each would be right in feeling that way, given their socialization and experiences. You can't really look at it in terms of a larger moral/ethical question.
A good way to dispel this is to put it in an historical perspective. Countless wars, there's the Black Death, all manner of ingenious forms of torture and execution and even religious human sacrifice.... and so on...
And eventually you have to give up and get on with whatever you're doing. Or embrace Buddhism.
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