Review
Did people seem to find shit getting on everything deep? Did serious writings explore the experiences of all manner of shit, and the nuances of the feces and piss involved?
It doesn’t seem like it? Maybe read Gargantua and Pantagruel for ideas…
Some types of suffering, like chronic pain exacerbated by a shitty repetitive .annual labor job, have never gotten much attention. I think that's like the mundane happiness you describe.
Literature lingers on complex emotional suffering, I think, because it's actually more interesting by virtue of being complex but understandable with effort.
It is like a mind tied in complex knots, partly connected to the structure of the world.
I think there are complex joys as well, and literature can have as much fun with those.
I think we focus on suffering because it benefits from our negativity bias, and it seems more virtuous to spend our time understanding suffering than joy.
I think a careful unwrapping of the complexity of a joyful experience, like attending a party and interacting with people in ways they individually appreciate, or the beauty and strangeness of the walk in your other post, ultimately hold just as much interest and virtue, once we don't need to deal with so much shit.
The above just goes to show just how abnormal true 100% contentedness is seen by this society, esp. for someone to even think that such a state would be "boring and empty", or that the individual(s) in question are somehow repressing their pain and/or dualities.
My prediction is that if humanity survives, it will cling onto suffering in each context only until its meaning and profundity is sufficiently recreated by other means.
Intense pain will go first, then annoying and inconvenient pain, then distracting pain, and gradually people will adjust to higher valence landscapes until the whole spectrum is above our current default line.
In fact, it might not be that difficult a transition. Even today many people spend hours a day browsing social media, watching YouTube videos, playing video games, or meditating, all in the pursuit of higher valence. Legal prohibitions might turn out to be the main force slowing down the eradication of suffering from daily life.
I say often that the fundamental unit of human experience is the story. We love stories. And the best stories are the ones with a sprinkle of drama in them. A story about a rich kid who never struggled? Boring! A story of riches-to-rags-to-riches? Sign me up!
Why? Because stories are a form of Supernormal Stimuli. We like to live vicariously through the lives of more interesting people. And it just so happens that the lives of interesting people are usually filled with some amount of suffering that they're able to transcend. That's why people like superhero movies. We relate to the struggle and rejoice when the hero wins the battle (for maybe we, too, can overcome our struggles).
There will be plenty of new sufferings that we haven't imagined yet. And if we are wildly successful at avoiding all kinds of suffering, we'll all be bored.
Every new human advancement solves a problem but creates new baseline expectations, which are new opportunities for disappointment.
People seem to find suffering deep. Serious writings explore the experiences of all manner of misfortunes, and the nuances of trauma and torment involved. It’s hard to write an essay about a really good holiday that seems as profound as an essay about a really unjust abuse. A dark past can be plumbed for all manner of meaning, whereas a slew of happy years is boring and empty, unless perhaps they are too happy and suggest something dark below the surface. (More thoughts in the vicinity of this here.)
I wonder if one day suffering will be so avoidable that the myriad hurts of present-day existence will seem to future people like the problem of excrement getting on everything. Presumably a real issue in 1100 AD, but now irrelevant, unrelatable, decidedly not fascinating or in need of deep analysis.