James Brobin

This is a crosspost from my blog post. It's meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview. We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our world looks a bit better than purgatory. It has its ups and its downs, but the ups certainly outweigh the downs, and there’s almost always enough hope to go around. But, despite this, we must remember that our world contains hell. Every year, five million children under the age of five pass away. This means that, every six seconds, parents have the worst thing that could ever happen to a person happen to them. They have the most special and important thing in their entire life irreversibly and permanently taken away. And, as much as we want to help them, we know that there’s nothing we can do to lessen their grief. For another example, currently, there are three million adults worldwide who live with cluster headaches, which are widely regarded as the most painful experience one can have in their entire lifetime, far exceeding the pain of breaking a bone, getting shot, or giving birth. On a scale from one to ten, sufferers, on average, rate them a 9.7/10. And, because sufferers often attempt to kill themselves while experiencing them to escape the pain, they’re often colloquially known as “suicide headaches.” And, that’s just within the realm of human suffering. If we’re focusing on animals, things look even worse. Each year, more than 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, where they are given less space than a single sheet of paper to move around. Because they’re so severely confined, they live in a constant state of distress. And, worse, because they can’t exercise, they bones becomes brittle, causing extraordinarily painful keel bone fractures. Th