I often think of a conversation I had early on in my time in the field. I was talking to a peasant, in a village somewhere in the third world. A morning greeting really, “Hi there, Juan, how are you today?” To which he looked at me, breathed deeply, thought for a moment and responded, “Today, I feel good.” It was an honest answer, a real answer, and came from the reality of peasant life. For Juan life was hard; toothaches without a dentist; constipation product of bad food, and without a laxative; back-ache after too long bent over with a broken hoe working land that no longer responds generously to the overtures of man. He was surprised, because that day his body was not complaining about the suffering of existence.

We don’t want to hear this, not one little bit. Most of life in America is a desperate attempt to pretend that suffering is not the natural state of man, as Schopenhauer says, “If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony…”

A colony we spend our whole lives trying to escape.

We take drugs and drugs and harder drugs: starting with beer and moving through wine to whiskey. Marijuana and on to crack and fentanyl — a lot of it doctor prescribed as we try to escape the pain of our bodies not really very well made at all. Product of accidental evolution that glitches or creation with so many ghosts in the machine that if we humans were for sale in a cosmic Walmart we would be subject to a full recall.

In America especially we try to consume our way out of it; credit cards and new watches and new houses and new cars and new cheap Chinese shit delivered next day by Amazon. Piles of garbage, mountains of garbage; fast fashion and TikTok trends, so much stuff that it would require five earths for everyone to live as we live. But are we happier? Did we escape the suffering? “Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.”

My wife likes to say often that it is her fullest desire in life to have the chance to “opt out”. This comes from the middle school system, where teachers whose minds are mostly empty save for the increasingly anxious utopianism of the progressives use their captive class to push misery in the form of a misguided gender or sexual confusion (the courses which, thankfully, we as parents are still able to “opt out” of in our desperate attempts to preserve our children’s innocence). Dionysus of the classroom responding to the same impulse that gives us orgies and overdoses — the unrelenting hope that we can fill the suffering with something, anything!! It is that suffering my wife wants to opt out of — she has had plenty of her own already; a broken home, the heartlessness of one parent seeking fulfillment in another family and the abandonment of the other who responded by giving up, and the poverty and death that ensued. Deaths of despair it is fashionable to call them nowadays; dying of a broken heart, the Victorian description. “I want to opt out” of the suffering, she often says.

But there is no “opting out”. “We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.”

So mankind mostly invents religion, in the face of this bleakness. And there are enough religions to choose from, all of them trying to offer some sort of meaning to the screams echoing all around us. But none of them fully satisfies. There are two ideas, however, that provide a little bit of solace; and I suggest them here as an olive branch to those who find my musings at best misguided and at worst heretical. First, I think that whoever “The Teacher” is who wrote Ecclesiastes (some people say it was King Solomon, I doubt it); I think he and Schopenhauer would have gotten along swimmingly: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief…” The second is the idea that Brahma (in an echo of the Jesus story) is said to have brought the world forth as a sort of fall or mistake, and now must atone for that by being captured in it while working through its redemption. Which is essentially the same story as Jesus’s incarnation; he came to earth to make common cause with man, as his own act of penance or atonement for the mess created inadvertently and about which he feels quite bad. Dr. Moreau’s island. And there is comfort in that.

I’m reminded of the Guns and Roses song “Knocking on Heavens Door”, and with this I will leave you:

“You just better start sniffin’ your own rank subjugation jack
‘Cause it’s just you against your tattered libido
The bank and the mortician, forever man
And it wouldn’t be luck if you could get out of life alive”