Panic Attack

I feel an itch, sort of a panic attack with no cause. If there is a cause, it must be not a cause, but a void. Why mustn’t I have known it before, or have seen it for what it is?

Escapism in every direction except the direction in which I should have been going, the direction my innermost being knows is true. But is avoiding, maybe due to cowardice, laziness, ignorance? I think not.

I believe it was simpler. It was ease. Simple, dumb ease. A moment of discomfort turned to pleasure with a click or a tap. The quenching was instant, a phenomenon like jumping in a pool on a hot day.

We rationalize, don’t we? Yes, we rationalize! Like a pig to the trough, we rationalize. We lie to ourselves. We steal from ourselves.

We sometimes believe it’s true, especially in the moment. If the fire comes to burn us, we will hide away to yet again, “rationalize”. We will say to ourselves, “Just another click, just another tap, but it’s productive… I’m learning.” Oh, how we rationalize!

It’s not for lack of willpower that we miss our mark. We all want to exercise the behaviors we admire, those behaviors we desire to stake our identity in.

So how irrational is it to rationalize the behaviors that take away from our desired identities? Very.

So then, why do we participate in those behaviors that dilute us? “Don’t you know, bro? You just need more discipline!”

It’s not true. We’ve been hijacked.

We Are Much, Much Sicker Than We Realize

The hours you are awake are all that count. That is the only time you’re conscious, the only time you have any potential agency. And we all have no time.

You are a slave to technology. You serve it. It does not serve you. I promise.

Here’s the math:

You’re awake 16 hours a day.

Americans now average 12 hours of it on a screen. (computer, smartphone, TV, etc.)

Necessities take 2 -3 hours: A shower, your commute, eating.

You have 1 hour left.

1 hour! The other 15 gone, and screens took 12 of them.

You can plug in your own numbers here, but I don’t think it’ll look pretty no matter what. It’s a sad trap we’ve got ourselves in.

Now stretch that one hour across a lifetime.

1 hour out of 24 hours.

1/24th of the average 77 year life expectancy is 3 years.

That’s your life. You were told you get 77 years. The truth is you get 3 years.

3 Steps to fixing your life

Discipline does not equal freedom. It’s all about your environment, not your discipline.

You will ultimately react to the environment you are in. So, what we must do is design our environments according to our truest desires.

Here are the steps for the system I am proposing.

Step 1: List out all your desires. (If it didn’t come to your mind quickly, it’s not important, get rid of it.)

Step 2: Cross out every desire you don’t absolutely need. (Ideally, you come down to 1, 2, or 3 desires.)

This does two helpful things:

1. It puts into perspective what actually matters. (You’re welcome. You have far less desires now. Doesn’t that feel good? Instantly less anxiety, and a nice happiness and gratitude boost.)

2. It makes it a lot easier to design your environment. We’re only optimizing for 1, 2, or 3 things.

Step 3: It is not about what you put in, it about what you take out. (The Enemies section below is a guide to finish Step 3)

Elimination of alternatives leads to inevitability of desired action. No willpower or hating yourself needed here.

What is Profound Boredom?

This is a system and applicable life philosophy that I am calling Profound Boredom: The act of eliminating or making what is not serving your desires so boring or burdensome that serving your desires automatically becomes the inevitable choice.

The Enemies

These are the primary enemies you are already facing, and will need to confront. Design your environment to work for you instead of you being a slave to it.

Enemy 1: Technology

The greatest of them all. This will be your biggest lever, and you will be a slave to it, or it will be an incredible tool to you.

This will also be the biggest thing you try to rationalize and justify. But let’s be honest. You are a zombie and a slave to your phone, to your desktop, and to your TV. You serve it. It does not serve you, I promise.

At best, you might currently have 1 to 2 hours a day that serve you. Check your screen time, I probably just found you a few hours.

How to defeat technology

I’m not being hyperbolic here. This is dead serious, and you could do it. Be bold and be honest with yourself.

Take that TV out of your wall. Go get the TV in the living room, the TV in the bedroom, the TV in your kids’ rooms, any TV in that damn house. Unplug it, and throw that monster in the trash. It is killing you and stealing your life.

Smartphones are insane. They have been eroding society for far too long already. They are also killing you and stealing your life. You will heavily try to rationalize this smartphone. You will say you need it so badly. The truth is, for all of human history, nobody needed it. There are workarounds.

So what I say is: Get the dumbest phone you can. That is actually a phone, something you could call humans with, which is what a phone is.

If you absolutely need your smartphone for some reason (and there are very few, but some legitimate reasons, you probably don’t have any of them, but let’s say you do, hypothetically), you better block that thing as intensely as you can and give someone else the passcodes to unlock it.

You don’t get to try to have more discipline by overcoming the phone. Your technology overlords in Silicon Valley will beat you. They know how to hijack the most chimp-like areas of your brain, dummy.

Everything that is done on that smartphone could be done on a desktop. Yes, it might be annoying and cumbersome from time to time, but I assure you, it is a net positive.

This might sound like I’m anti-technology, but I’m not. I think it is a tremendous tool, and we’d be foolish to completely shut it off, but it needs to work for us. We cannot be a slave to it.

Take your desktop or laptop and repeat again: Restrict it as heavily as you can, give someone else the passcodes to unlock the restrictions.

Enemy 2: Overconsumption and Your Monkey Brain Desire for Status

How to defeat over-consumerism

You do not need all of these things. Again, you usually serve the things and become a slave to them. They usually don’t serve you.

If you examine it, oftentimes these material desires you have are not your desires, but instead your monkey brain’s desires for status. You want the fancy house because you want to show everyone that you have the fancy house. You want that good feeling. You don’t need a second dining room. You want the fancy sleek car because other people can’t have the fancy sleek car, and you’re a big shot, woohoo! You’re going to die. And just imagine, you could have been the guy without the cool car.

You have to ask yourself with anything you buy: “If I couldn’t show it to anybody, would it still be as exciting?”

I’m asking you to deeply ask yourself: “How little material possessions can I get away with?” Because I assure you that lightening that load to as little as possible is incredibly freeing.

You are getting crushed by the weight of the things you choose to own. If you can’t move houses in a day, ask yourself: “Do I have too much stuff? And why did I choose to get all this stuff?”

To the best of your abilities, regard only your opinion of yourself, and the opinion of the people you truly respect. It’s now becoming trite, but it’s trite because it’s true. In 100 years, you’ll be dead, and everyone you know will be dead, so do what you want.

Enemy 3: Your City, Your Physical Environment, Your Family, and Your Friends

You want to increase the surface area for good things to happen, and surround yourself with like-minded people.

If you want to be in film or music, you should probably be in LA. If you want to be in tech, you should probably be in the Bay. If you want to be in finance, you should probably be in New York. If you want to be an academic, you should probably be in London. If you want to be an artist, you should probably be in Paris.

There is an ideal place for you to be that has the highest density of people you admire, and the greatest probability of making something extremely difficult to achieve a bit more feasible. Your physical, location is a huge lever to living a great day-to-day life, as well as eventually reaching these desires.

How to defeat your environment, family, and friends

If you’re trying to quit drinking and you don’t want to be lonely, and all your friends only like to go to the bar every weekend, you’re probably not going to quit drinking.

You actually need to do the harsh thing and examine your friends deeply. There is a higher level of friends you could reach that are thinking the same thoughts you are.

You have to cut these friends that aren’t for you and replace them. It will be harsh. There will be a lonely period, but you could do this.

That cringe phrase that “you are the five people you hang around” rings true in almost every case. Just believe it and be brave enough to take the leap.

This one is tricky, were talking family. There is a wide range here, so do your own examining.

They often love you (hopefully) and do not mean to manipulate you or keep you down. They want to know that you will remain safe and okay. They would rather you just be getting by rather than trying to excel, fail, and falling into a deep pit. This isn’t a bug from your family, but instead a feature. They want to protect you.

But you have to have a serious talk with them and get them under control and backing you.

It’s also an amazing way to instantly have at least a small group of cheerleaders, and people keeping you accountable to what you say you want. You’d be surprised the respect you will garner if you’re able to sit down and have this hard conversation just one time with them and let them know what you’re all about.

That all for this rant. Here’s the system in a nutshell, extremely simplified. Lets call it Profound Boredom.

I recently got a puppy. His name is Knox, he is the best dog I could imagine… and he is in desperate need of a new home.

Am I the only one who’s gone for a walk lately and thought, “Geez, there sure are a lot of dogs”?

Hmm. I haven’t seen a kid for a while. Remember those things? The young humans?

My intuitions about dogs being linked to almost every major issue we are facing currently in society has been sitting on the stove, but now reached its boiling point and boiled over. I once and for all got tired of getting barked at by the small, mangy Chihuahua with boogers in its eyes, so I dove into the data.

And it’s much worse than I thought.

In this essay, I am going to lay out the case that dogs are ruining the world. And it’s not our fluffy friend’s fault.

It’s our fault. And it’s us coping with the real issues we’re all facing.

Dogs are intimately tied to the declining birth rate, the crisis of meaning, the loneliness epidemic, our inability to focus, and our cognitive decline at mass.

More Dogs Than Children

There are more dogs than children in San Francisco.

Yes, the city that the world views as distinctly anti-human has more dogs than humans under 18 living in it. Perhaps a bit alarming?

But this isn’t actually unique to our Silicon Valley dog stroller-pushing AI overlord power couples raking in 7-figures a year. This is a worldwide epidemic.

Over 20 years ago, in 2003, Japan’s number of pets officially outnumbered the children. 20 million pets to 17 million children.

In the US, there are 135 million dogs and cats versus 73 million children. That’s about two pets for every child.

70% of childless millennial women with a pet call their pet their child, unironically.

Basically, anywhere where you see declining birth rates, you see increased pet birth rates. The incessant human need of childbearing that is built into us has not gone away, but has instead been replaced with a flashy career, a breath-work routine, and picking up dog turds.

Dogs Get All The Love

The negative impact from dogs is far more than a coping mechanism, though. It’s genuinely frightening and I have actually never heard it considered. The level of care and attention we give to a dog versus ourselves or our fellow human beings.

The majority of people prioritize spending on their pets over themselves. About a third of pet owners have gone into debt for their dog. Not only are they willing to go into debt, but they already have gone into debt.

People are almost 100% reliable when giving their dogs their medications, but this will never be the case for themselves. You better believe your dog is going to finish those antibiotics, but you probably won’t.

In the last five years, the pet industry has increased from $60 billion to $160 billion.

Your dog’s food has been meticulously researched. It often gets shipped to your front door in a styrofoam ice chest with dry ice in it to ensure its freshness and quality, as you go through the fast food drive-through again to put down another double burger.

Your dog is well-groomed with a bow tie, while you haven’t shaved your neck or gotten rid of that unibrow that you know you have.

The Dog Ate My Consciousness

What frightens me the most is the philosophical angle: the idea of stolen consciousness and constantly being distracted.

We spend all day at a job we hate. After we clock out, our remaining time is spent doomscrolling and taking care of an animal.

There is data that shows millions of people will stay at a job they hate because it lets them keep their dog, or gives some sort of benefit to the dog. They would end a relationship with a romantic partner simply because that person stated their disdain for the dog.

But it is much worse than this…

Here’s the math:

A dog needs 1-2 hours of care per day. Walking, feeding, cleaning, training. Let’s split the difference and call it 90 minutes a day.

90 minutes a day, every day, for a year, is about 550 hours.

Your little fluffy angel is going to live around 12 years.

550 hours a year, times 12 years, is roughly 6,500 hours.

That’s 6,500 hours of your life spent going on distracted walks, picking up crap, scooping food into a bowl, and saying “good boy” as you pet the little monster’s head.

We’ve all heard the idea that it takes about 10,000 hours to master almost anything. A language. An instrument. A craft. Your dog will cost you 6,500. You can learn French. You can learn to play the piano. You can write the book. But instead, you’re choosing to be elite with a lint roller and mastering the art of opening a poop bag. So the choice is yours.

And it isn’t just the hours. It’s the constant ambient distraction. It’s the fact that your lifes whole orbit centers around a dog. Where will you go? How long will you stay? What can you say yes to? Can I go on the trip? You say no to the thing you want because “puppy’s gotta make a poo-poo and go potty”.

Now… if you have life all figured out, and you have perfect relationships, and you have all this extra spare time, then go for it.

But everyone reports the opposite. Nobody has any time for anyone else or anything else.

We don’t have the extra money, but we find it to spend on this dog. We don’t have any extra time to call grandpa, see mom, or check in on a friend. But we have time for an animal.

It’s all a lie, and it’s all cope.

A Cheap Substitute

These dogs are distracting us from the things that are most human, most beautiful, and most important. They are cheap substitutes that we are getting instead.

Your best ideas don’t come on a distracted walk with your dog.

Your best conversations with a friend don’t happen with your dog present.

The little tyrant wants to chase after that bird. Sniff the other dog mom’s puppy’s butthole. Take a pee in an innocent stranger’s yard. And will inevitably have a poo in the middle of a busy intersection, while you are honked and laughed at. Oh, the price we’ll pay for the ones we love.

And I actually don’t care how well-trained your dog is and how good he is on a leash. He’s a distraction.

Your best ideas, your therapy you’re so into and tell everyone about, often happens on a walk alone. Not a half-ass walk with the mangy dog.

“Oh, but my dog helps me not feel so lonely.”

Yes, this is the point. You shouldn’t cope with a dog. You should actually call or text a friend. You should put yourself in an uncomfortable situation and meet that romantic partner.

I agree, you are lonely. And the dog being there, giving you the delusion of not being lonely is not the answer.

Every benefit that you think your dog actually gives you would be better if you actually leaned on a human to reach this benefit, instead of an animal with no ability to reason or relate with any human things.

Bark, Bark

This might be hard to believe, but I genuinely do love dogs. I just don’t see a coherent argument that shows the juice is worth the squeeze.

None of this is accidental or coincidence. It’s a drug to deal with the real underlying issues in our society and how we are relating with each other. The gap is real. The void needs to be filled. And dogs are the ones doing it.

I’m just encouraging you to fill that gap with boldness. With taking on your issues directly and supporting your fellow human above your optional animal friend.

Throw away the leash, pick up the poop for one last time, buy a flip phone, put your shoulders back and your chin up.

Life is happening right now.

Tick, tick, bark, bark.

I was walking through downtown San Diego the other day and saw a girl walking toward me, then past me, with a “Self-Made” T-shirt on. A plain T-shirt that just says the words “Self-Made.” Unironically.

As she passed by, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed contemplating the absolute absurdity of it. The ignorance is unintentional, I think, but consider the presuppositions that must be accounted for in order to wear that T-shirt unironically and genuinely believe it.

Now, maybe I’m taking this way too far. But let’s do just that. Let’s take it too far. This shirt is straight silly.

For starters, we have to grant free will for “self-made” to have any potential viability. Let’s go ahead and do that, because this argument isn’t about determinism or free will. But if you’re determined, the shirt is even more nonsensical. Of course you aren’t “self-made.” By definition quite the opposite. We’ll park that thought. Free will granted. A pass for this girl and anyone in the “self-made” mindset.

I think this mindset needs to be completely eradicated. What we need is the polar opposite of it: We need to exercise complete gratitude for everyone else’s toil and suffering that led to you unironically wearing a “Self-Made” T-shirt.

Now, I don’t think these people mean anything bad by it. I just don’t think they ever go one layer deeper, past the surface level, past their ego getting a nice little pat on the back. It feels good to have ownership, to have agency, to have this amazing free will to exercise. I believe I do “it” at a higher level than anyone, or at least a high level with these other people who are also “self-made,” because we’re “getting after it, man”.

And that’s fair enough. It’s okay to feel good about consciously improving yourself. But “self-made” just isn’t it.

What Being “Self-Made” Actually Implies

Think about what this implicates. This is what instantly hit me the moment this girl walked by me.

We have to start from the ground up. But before the absolute ground up, let’s just take the irony that she’s wearing a T-shirt she didn’t make. She didn’t pull the cotton out of the ground. She didn’t plant the cotton. She didn’t weave it, or do whatever the process is these days. She doesn’t have a cotton loom in the craft room of her studio apartment. She didn’t press the plastic “self-made” graphic on the front. The T-shirt itself was not “self-made.”

And this irony can be traced all the way back to Genesis, or the Big Bang, or whatever you believe was the start of the universe. All of these factors, obviously out of your control, led to you being born. Then you were born into an environment you didn’t choose, to parents you didn’t choose. And if your parents hadn’t had sex, and had the ability to have children, in that exact moment, you would have never been born. Not that you would have existed some other time. You would have never been born, because the sperm and egg combo that created you would have never existed again.

Not very “self-made” up to this point, considering almost every factor that made you who you are was out of your control.

The Miracle That You Even Exist

There’s a tremendous lack of gratitude here as well. Your ancestors died, suffered, and overcame, and it is an absolute, unbelievable miracle that you even exist. There’s a stat for this. Dr. Ali Binazir calculated the odds of you being born as you: about 1 in 10^2,685,000. That’s a 10 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes. The number of atoms in the known universe is about 10^80.

But you do exist now. Here you are on Earth. Again, all by factors out of your control.

Now you’re being formed as a toddler. You’re having these experiences, you’re growing, you’re learning. Every piece of knowledge you have was built on the scaffolding of knowledge before you, knowledge that people struggled for and built up over a tremendous amount of time. That workout equipment you use, you didn’t make, but it makes you feel so “self-made.” That concrete you’re walking on in a big major US city, you didn’t have any labor in constructing. Not “self-made.”

So what is actually left to be “self-made”? The idea you had to go on a walk through the city? The early morning workout you showed up for? The career you’ve worked hard for and are proud of?

So Don’t Be Self-Made: Be Grateful

You can be proud of yourself, but remember “you” are just a thin layer on a massive inheritance that you did nothing to earn.

So instead of being so proud of yourself, instead share the things that worked for you in improving your own life and the lives of those around you.

Clearly, you believe you’re “self-made,” so you think you’re on to something in your unique enlightened journey. You’re announcing this fact loud and proud, with that damn T-shirt… So, maybe instead of believing you’re “self-made,” give us your secrets. They worked for you. They made you happier. They made you, hopefully, more integrated, more understanding, and, yes, even though it’s hard to believe with that T-shirt on, perhaps a more grateful person.

But gosh, the idea that you are “self-made” is absolutely insane, and a tremendous disservice and disrespect to everyone around you currently, and to all those who came before you.

So please, don’t be “self-made.”

Be grateful.

Take off the headphones, invite a friend on the walk next time, and burn that T-shirt.

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question." -Orson Scott Card

If you prefer to live in a blissfully ignorant world, please do not read this. Seriously, don’t read it. Because the same painful incurable virus that has latched onto me may also spread to you. If you’re still reading, then…

Welcome to Philosophy. To start, let’s blow up everything that you think you know.

The sky isn’t blue. Air scatters wavelengths of light, and your brain turns it into blue. A little deeper in this essay I’ll explain why color doesn’t actually exist.

Imagine a unicorn. You can see it right now in your head. You could turn it and twist it. You could make it run. You could make it lie down. So what are you actually experiencing? I don’t believe if I cut your skull open and dug around in your brain, I would find a physical unicorn. But it exists, doesn’t it? It exists, perhaps more than anything because your own consciousness is generating it. And it wouldn’t deceive me, would it?

Think about nothing. You simply can’t. As soon as you try to get to nothing, something fills the void. You’re probably trying to imagine pure darkness. But that is still imagining something. Nothing cannot exist, but saying “nothing cannot exist” is itself a paradox.

The problem of other minds: You can't prove that anyone but yourself is conscious. From your perspective, a real conscious being and a perfect projection with no true inner experience would look exactly the same.

2+2=4. But what is “2”? There is no “2” sitting out in the physical world. Numbers are a tool we invented. Useful, but not real. And 2+2=4 only once you grant every assumption. Math itself is broken in many places. Do me a favor… write the smallest possible number. You start 0.000 and keep adding zeros, chasing the 1 at the paradoxical end of infinity. A smallest value can’t exist.

Cause and effect. Imagine you had no memory. You would still see the present moment, “the effect”, exactly as it is. But you could never tie it to a cause, because the cause is already gone. It happened in the past, and the past doesn’t exist anywhere except for your memory and assumptions. In the present moment, the cause doesn’t exist. The only place it still exists is your memory. So cause and effect isn’t something out in the world. It’s your memory linking the present to a nonexistent cause.

If you ask “why” enough times, the entire world falls apart.

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve as a child (and still) is when my mom would tell me, “Because I told you so”, when I asked her “Why?” But I’ll explain below my reasoning for forgiving my mom. Because “because I told you so” might actually be as valid of a response as any.

Here’s an example of how this parent-child interaction typically goes (assuming you have a very patient and philosophical mom):

"Mom, why is the sky blue?"

"Because the air scatters sunlight."

"Why?"

"Because shorter wavelengths scatter more than longer ones."

"Why does that matter?"

"Because light travels as a wave."

"Why?"

"Because of how electric and magnetic fields move through space."

"Why do they do that?"

…At this point, Mom (and every physicist) runs out of road and blurts out:

"Because I told you so! Now eat your fries."

It gets even worse than this for the poor kid: blue doesn't actually exist in the physical world. Most color is just different wavelengths of light. Your brain takes these different wavelengths and gives you the illusion of blue. At no point does any actual blue exist. Magenta doesn't even have a wavelength. Your brain just invents it…

So What Do We Do With This?

My point here is, there’s a pattern. If you take anything and continue asking the question, “Why?”, when asked enough times, you reach the same conclusion: Nothing can be truly known.

But even this itself is a paradox. If I claim that nothing can be known, then I am making a claim with certainty. And one thing is certain: Your certainty cannot be certain, but I cannot be certain about that (and around and around we go on the paradoxical merry-go-round)

If you are living in a blissfully ignorant bubble and I just burst it, I do offer an empty apology, but I am not sorry. It is best that we try our best to pursue knowledge, even if we might not ever fully reach it.

Just because we cannot reach absolute knowledge does not mean we can’t put more knowledge into things, and more knowledge inside of things is a more contextualized world. I believe that is a good thing.

I’m hoping something actionable can be taken away from this reading, which is to check your ego, your pride, and to not idolize people. This is something our world is in desperate need of.

You don’t know everything. You actually don’t know anything.

Your political candidate isn’t the best political candidate, you just prefer them. The physicist that is “so smart” cannot tell you what gravity is. The neuroscientist can’t explain consciousness. But we’re here and we are conscious.

So, give some grace today to the “other guy”, because they know the same amount of things you know, which is nothing. This world can use a lot more empathy, and a lot less “know-it-alls”. We’re all floating through this rock in space together, knowing nothing. Let’s at least try our best and be kind.

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The problem of evil is usually proposed as the strongest argument against God’s existence. I, myself, also believed this was the sharpest arrow in the atheist’s quiver, but after writing this, I’m doubtful at best. The version of the problem of evil most people hear goes something like this: If an all-powerful, all-loving God exists, why is there suffering? An all-powerful God could prevent it. An all-good God would want to prevent it. So either God isn’t all-powerful, isn’t all-good, or doesn’t exist…

If I may, let me propose a metaphysical (I defined tricky terms at the bottom of the article, so just scroll down there if you need help… no shame here) argument. My goal is not to prove the existence of God, but to at least eliminate the idea that if evil exists then God isn’t all-powerful or actually just is much less likely to exist at all. Is suffering a requirement for a conscious world to exist? Whether you’re a theist or an atheist, I think it’s important to always give both sides a chance in order to hopefully find truths and not just confirm your own biases. But as always, I’ll try my best to be Switzerland here.

Fair enough? Let’s begin!

The Burden of Proof

The first hole is the burden of proof. The atheist usually frames the problem as a series of questions for the theist:

• Why would a perfect God allow suffering?

• If God is all-powerful, why didn’t He create a world without suffering?

• If God is all-loving, why does He permit evil and suffering?

• If God could intervene at any moment, why doesn’t He stop the suffering?

These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers. They’ve moved more people toward atheism than perhaps any other argument in the history of philosophy. I want to give the questions their full weight before responding.

But notice what every version of these questions assumes: that a conscious world without suffering is possible, and that God should have made such a world.

The atheist never defends this assumption. They treat the assumption as obvious. Of course a world without suffering is possible. Of course God could have made one. The entire force of the argument depends on this being true. I don’t think it is… And I think the atheist needs to defend the assumption before the “problem of evil” question can do the work they want it to do.

The move for the theist is to turn the question back on the atheists and use their own strongest argument against them. The burden of proof is not only on the theist to make sense of the problem of evil, but also on the atheist to explain to the theist the world, with no suffering, that they are envisioning.

The atheist owes the theist an answer here. If their argument lives on the assumption that a suffering-free conscious world is possible, the atheist needs to describe such a world. Not a vague gesture toward one, but an actual account.

Can consciousness exist without something to act upon?

I don’t think so. Consciousness, at minimum, is the ability to distinguish. The ability to distinguish requires two or more things to distinguish between. Distinction introduces preference. The moment preference is introduced, there is now a most-preferred thing and a least-preferred thing. The least-preferred thing, by definition, is the most evil thing in existence and is the highest-level of suffering.

How do you define suffering without consciousness? Can something without consciousness suffer? Of course not.

We are no longer asking why God would allow suffering. We are asking what consciousness actually requires in order to exist at all.

The Core Argument

Here is the positive case, built in steps.

First, consciousness requires something to be conscious of. There can be no awareness of nothing.

Second, conscious experience requires preference. Some things must be preferred over others, otherwise consciousness has nothing to act on, nothing to evaluate, nothing to distinguish. A thinking thing that experiences everything as identical is not a thinking thing.

Third, preference requires contrast. To prefer something is to prefer it over something else. This produces a structure: a most-preferred thing and a least-preferred thing, with a range of options between them.

Fourth, the least-preferred thing in any conscious world is, by definition, the greatest evil within that world. Not because there is anything inherently bad about that thing, but because preference creates the categories of better and worse.

Suffering is necessary for consciousness. Suffering is fully relative and fully subjective.

A Pure White World Thought Experiment

Imagine a world of only whiteness. All you have ever known is white. You couldn’t even know you were conscious, because you have nothing to compare anything to. But let’s grant, for the sake of the argument, that you somehow do.

In this world of pure white, your consciousness has nothing to act on. There is no preference because there is no contrast. Everything is the same. You can’t choose, evaluate, want, or refuse. You just are, indistinguishably, surrounded by white.

Now introduce black.

If you prefer white over black, black is now the greatest evil in your world. Not because black is inherently bad. Not because black causes physical suffering. But because a preference has been introduced, and black is on the less-preferred side of that preference. Black is the greatest evil you can experience, simply because it’s the only thing other than white, and you prefer white.

Now keep filling in the world. Add color, add more colors. Add shapes. Add complexity. Eventually, you arrive at something like our world, with its enormous range of experiences and its corresponding enormous range of preferred and less-preferred things. Or you arrive at a different world, with a different range, different worst things, different best things. The structure holds regardless. Every conscious world has its greatest good and its greatest evil, with everything else fitting somewhere on the spectrum between them.

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God Cannot Make a Square Circle

If God cannot create consciousness without suffering, doesn’t that mean God is not all-powerful? No.

God also has the inability to create a square circle, this does not mean God is not all-powerful. A square circle is not something God refuses to make. A square circle is not a thing at all. The words “square” and “circle” describe properties that exclude each other. The phrase is incoherent.

Consciousness without preference is the same kind of phrase. Consciousness requires preference, and preference creates a range of better (less suffering) and worse (more suffering). To strip preference from consciousness is not to find a purer form of consciousness. It is to find nothing left at all.

So when we ask why God allows suffering, we are not asking why God chose this option from a menu of possibilities. The menu has one item and if you want to eat you have to order. God created consciousness with the only structure consciousness can have.

Preference is fundamental to consciousness. To prefer, by definition, is to experience good and bad. Some degree of suffering must therefore exist in any conscious world. And because suffering is fully relative, every conscious world will have its worst imaginable suffering and its highest imaginable bliss. You’d be asking for existence without the thing that fundamentally makes you aware of your existence.

Objections and Responses

The argument has a few natural objections. Each one needs an answer.

The first objection is about degree. Sure, maybe some suffering is necessary for consciousness. But why this much? Why the Holocaust, why bone cancer in children, why billions of years of animal predation? Doesn’t the sheer intensity of suffering in our world go beyond anything a structural argument can justify?

The response: suffering is fully relative to the worst available thing in any conscious world. There is no absolute scale. Every conscious world has its greatest evil, and that greatest evil is, within that world, the worst thing imaginable. Our world has Earth-level suffering. A different world might have far less. Another might have far more. In each world, the worst thing is the worst thing.

The question “why this much?” assumes an external scale that does not exist.

Here is another way to see it. When would the stripping away of suffering ever be enough? Imagine removing the worst thing from our world. We are left with a new worst thing. Remove that. A new worst thing rises in its place. Keep going.

At some point we arrive at near-nothing. Just a small handful of things left. One of them is still the greatest imaginable suffering. Another is still the greatest imaginable bliss. The structure has not changed. Only the contents.

Strip away further. Eventually only two things remain. One is still the worst. One is still the best.

Strip away one more. Now there is only a single thing. And at that moment, consciousness collapses, because there is no longer anything to distinguish, anything to prefer, anything to be aware of.

There is no version of this exercise that produces a conscious world without suffering. Every stopping point along the way still has a worst-thing within it. The only world without suffering is the world without consciousness. And the world without consciousness is not a world at all.

The question “why this much suffering?” is not a hard question. It is the wrong question. There is no amount of suffering reduction that would ever satisfy the questioner, because no such world exists.

The second objection is about Heaven, or any conception of a perfect afterlife. Don’t most religions describe a state of pure bliss without suffering? If suffering is necessary for consciousness, isn’t this incoherent?

The argument does not depend on any particular view of the afterlife. If Heaven exists and is a state of pure bliss, the contrast required for consciousness could come from memory of Earth. Every being in Heaven would carry the memory of suffering that gave them their preference scale during life. Pure bliss is possible because the worst is remembered, not lived.

A natural follow-up: why couldn’t God have just given us the intrinsic understanding of evil and suffering at birth, allowing us to skip Earth and go straight to Heaven?

Because intrinsic, built-in knowledge of suffering would itself be a form of suffering. If you carried the awareness of evil in your very being from the moment of consciousness, that awareness would be the worst thing in your world. It would be lived suffering, not remembered suffering. The contrast would be built into the fabric of your being rather than sitting safely behind you in memory.

PTSD bears this out. Most of the lasting suffering of trauma comes not from the event itself, but from the awareness it revealed of what evil can do.

The reason Heaven works as pure bliss is precisely because we physically lived through the suffering and now exist in memory of it. We are removed from the suffering, not carrying it in our essence. The lived experience is what allows the eventual removal.

Heaven could also be a kind of consciousness very different from ours, in which case our intuitions about what it would feel like may simply be wrong. The argument here does not require settling that question.

The third objection comes from contemplative traditions. Don’t Buddhist monks, mystics, and certain meditative practitioners describe states of consciousness without preference? Pure awareness, equanimity, the witness state?

The contemplative reporting such a state is doing so from inside the preference-having framework. Memory, language, and imagination are all preference-based. The contemplative’s report is built entirely from tools that depend on the framework they claim to have escaped.

What we have is anecdote, not evidence. The contemplative cannot describe a state of consciousness without preference, because doing so would require referring to something that, by the argument in this essay, does not exist. Something interesting is happening in these states. They are altered modes of preference, not preference-free consciousness.

A Note Toward Meaning

This framework isn’t a justification for cruelty or an instruction to accept suffering passively. We still suffer when we suffer. The pain is real. The losses are real. None of this is dismissed by saying that suffering is structural rather than aberrational.

But the reframing matters. If suffering is the cost of being conscious at all, then suffering is not a defect in existence, not a sign that something has gone wrong, not evidence that the universe is broken or that God is absent or cruel. It is the price of awareness. The same structure that produces the worst experiences produces the best ones. You cannot have joy without the possibility of sorrow, fulfillment without the possibility of disappointment, love without the possibility of loss. The same range that makes the worst possible also makes everything else possible.

For the theist, this dissolves a major objection without requiring any specific apologetic move. For the atheist or agnostic, it offers a perspective in which suffering is not absurd, not meaningless, not a cosmic accident. It is structurally tied to the awareness that makes any experience possible.

In a Nutshell

The problem of evil assumes a conscious world without suffering is possible. It isn’t.

Consciousness requires preference. To be conscious is to distinguish one thing from another, and to distinguish is to prefer. The moment preference exists, there is a most-preferred thing and a least-preferred thing. That least-preferred thing, whatever it happens to be, is the greatest imaginable suffering of that world.

Strip away that worst thing and a new worst thing takes its place. Strip that one away, and another rises behind it. Keep going, and you eventually arrive at a single thing left, with nothing to distinguish it against, which means no consciousness at all.

The only world without suffering is the world without consciousness. And the world without consciousness is not a world at all.

God cannot create consciousness without suffering for the same reason God cannot create a square circle. The phrase doesn’t describe a thing God refuses to make. It doesn’t describe a thing.

Suffering is the cost of self-aware conscious existence.

Definitions

• Metaphysical // Concerning the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and being. Asks what is real and what kinds of things exist.

• Consciousness // The state of being aware. The ability to experience, perceive, and distinguish one thing from another.

• Preference // The experience of finding one thing more desirable than another. The mental act of choosing or favoring.

• Apologetic // An argument or defense made in support of a position, especially a religious one. Not the same as apologizing.

• Contemplative traditions // Spiritual and meditative practices, often within Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and other religions, that focus on direct experience of reality through stillness and inner observation.

• Suffering // In this essay, used broadly to mean any experience a conscious being would prefer not to have. Not limited to physical pain.

• Switzerland // Used metaphorically to mean neutral. Switzerland is famous for staying out of international conflicts.

• Theist // Someone who believes in the existence of God or gods.

• Atheist // Someone who does not believe in the existence of God or gods.

• Burden of proof // The responsibility to provide evidence for a claim. The person making a claim is generally expected to support it.

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