Our Damaging Narratives of Suffering and Purpose

Life comes with many struggles. One of the most powerful methods of coping with struggles we can do nothing about is to tell ourselves a narrative: that this struggle, and the suffering it causes, gives our lives meaning in a way that we may not understand, but is precious and we would not want to live without. This narrative can be powerful enough to keep us hopeful and grateful, even in circumstances which by all logic should drive us to despair.

But there is a danger to it; when a narrative gives us purpose, we tend to cling to it, even when the circumstances that give birth to it no longer apply. When we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, everyone had to contribute to the survival of the tribe. This was a struggle against nature, an unchangeable fact of the human condition. By working together as a community, we survived, and that gave us purpose. And so the narrative that the struggle to survive is what gives us purpose was born.

However, over the course of history, things have changed. Industry has made food, comforts, and luxuries abundant. Many people struggle much less than ever before. We are coming closer to—and some would argue we have already arrived at—a place where it would be possible to construct an economy so that people do not need to struggle for survival.

Yet many of us still cling to the narrative that without a struggle for survival, there can be no purpose in life. This is, of course, false. When we are not struggling for survival there are plenty of things we can do that give us purpose, like training ourselves in athletic activities, pursuing scientific research, contemplating philosophy, traveling the world, creating art, competing in games, and striving to further improve the world. Being free from the struggle for survival gives us new opportunities for fulfillment and purpose, albeit of a different flavor from the struggle, but without the downsides of the suffering the struggle imposes upon us.

And that is where the problem lies. We could be so much, and have such fulfilling lives by eliminating the struggle for survival. But the narrative that there would be no purpose to life if the struggle did not exist holds us back. People who cling to this narrative not only don’t help, but sometimes they actively sabotage those who work to mitigate the struggle, by spreading the narrative with their voices, or by voting for those who would impose the struggle upon us.

It is one thing when life is hard because there is no other choice. But if we feel that the struggle is unnecessary and is being imposed upon us by others, all purpose that would have been found in it vanishes.

Another narrative we tell ourselves of the meaning in suffering regards the inevitability of death. For our entire history, death by old age has been one of the most significant limitations of the human condition. We have many myths of the fruitlessness of chasing immortality, and have come to terms with it by telling ourselves that without the ticking clock in our lives, we would not be able to enjoy the time we have, because we would never be motivated to do anything.

However, with modern science, we may soon have the ability to reverse aging . . . if the right research gets funded. And something which has always been with us, the briefness of life, may no longer be an unchangeable fact of existence. And thus, the narrative that death gives life meaning, which once gave us solace and helped us accept the inevitable, turns on us and holds us back from reaching for a greater existence.

There are legitimate concerns regarding anti-aging research, such as how would we feed everyone, and worries about exacerbating inequality by creating a new class of rich immortals while everyone else is stuck working for subsistence. But the narrative that the briefness of life is an essential ingredient for meaning in life is not one of them.

In this era of increasing technology and understanding, we must not cling to narratives of purpose in suffering. When there is nothing we can do about it, these narratives can help us cope and find meaning in life. However, we must set aside a corner of our minds for the knowledge that we are empowered to find meaning despite our suffering, not because of it. Then, if it becomes possible to eliminate that suffering, through technology or the economy, we will not be held back from working toward it by narratives of acceptance that we no longer need.

Earth: Eternal or Vulnerable?

Earth. For most of our history, we have thought of it as The World. The place created for life. The canvas upon which the drama of history takes place. As far as we knew or cared, Earth was pretty much the whole Universe. Sure, the sun, moon, stars, and planets were out there, but they were there to serve as signs and sources of light, and to mark the passage of time. There was a purpose to the world; it was there for us. It was eternal. Sure, we supposed it had been created some time in the forgotten past, and would end sometime in the inscrutable future, but for us, for our grandparents, and for our grandchildren, it was what it was.

Only recently have we begun to wake up from this fantastic dream. New methods of observing the heavens and Earth opened our eyes to the vast context of space and time we exist within. We learned that the Earth and the Universe are not anywhere near as close in size as we thought. The Earth is a planet, one among an uncountable number; the sun, merely another star. And we learned that for every star we can see, there are billions upon billions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy is just one among billions upon billions. In universal time, all of human history is but a fraction of an eyeblink. And in the eons before us, the world has changed dramatically, many times.

We still usually think of the world as what is real. We say that all that stuff about stars and galaxies is real too, but it feels distant, like it’s somehow less real than the ground we stand on. This is put into words by the phrase, “down-to-Earth,” which describes someone who is focused on the tangible present. It is our natural inclination to pay the most attention to things we can see and touch, and treat everything else as if it is less real. We talk about “the real world,” meaning the place we find ourselves in, with an emphasis on our social and economic environment. And even though we know objectively that Earth is one tiny planet around one middle-sized star, we struggle to break away from the narrative of The World upon which we stand as the foundation of the universe.

From Voyager 1, amongst a background of stars and the glare from the sun, Earth appears as merely a fraction of a pixel.

We have plenty of stories of the world coming to an end, from the gods and demons of mythology, to invasions from aliens, to nuclear war, to giant asteroids, to plagues, to just about anything we can imagine. Yet we know these are just stories—or at least most of us do, anyway—and at the end of the day, The World will still be here. Always has been, always will be.

Except that isn’t so. The sun is heating up, and in about a billion years this will cause Earth to follow in Venus’ footsteps with a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling away the oceans and making the planet inhospitable to any life. Unless our descendants are around for some planetary engineering, The World will end.

In our planet’s history, life has faced several major extinction events and survived. First, there was the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago, when photosynthesis evolved and gave our atmosphere the large amounts of oxygen that keeps us alive today. While that was good for the life that evolved later on, it was toxic to the life at the time, and killed most of it off. During the past billion years, there have been five famous mass extinction events, each of which killed off more than half the species on Earth. And right now, we’re in the middle of another mass extinction, this time caused by a fun little species called homo sapiens, first by lots and lots of hunting, and nowadays by irresponsible pollution.

In the past, despite toxic atmospheres, ice ages, supervolcanoes, and mountain-sized meteorites, life has always bounced back. This has led to the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that Earth is a self-regulating system, which always brings itself back to equilibrium when the balance is disturbed, like a living body keeping itself in homeostasis. The Gaia Hypothesis is a prominent theme in David Brin’s 1990 near-future science fiction novel, Earth, which is really good and I highly recommend it.

While the Gaia Hypothesis might help us sleep easier with the belief that we will solve our current global problems and The World is going to be okay, much of the evidence supporting it may be an illusion. Take the Fermi Paradox; the universe has been around long enough that alien civilizations could have gotten billions of years’ head start on us, and enveloped noticeable chunks of the galaxy in Dyson spheres. Yet when we look out into the universe, we don’t see big empty spaces in the Milky Way, nor in any of the other thousands of galaxies we have looked at, suggesting technological life is extremely rare.

One answer for why we see no signs of alien civilizations is the idea of filters, events standing between non-replicating matter and technological civilizations, which most planets never get past. Perhaps it is unimaginably rare for non-replicating matter to form replicating molecules. Perhaps it’s the leap from single-cells to multicellular life. Or maybe, most mass extinctions in the universe wipe out all life on their planet, and we happen to be the one place where life got lucky six times in a row.

This implication of the Fermi Paradox suggests that maybe we shouldn’t let ourselves become complacent about the continuation of the Earth. In addition, we have something today the Earth has never seen before in its 4.5 billion year history: rapid technological progress. Through science and economics, more and more power has become available to the average person. For example, the internet is only a few decades old, and now almost anyone can view the vast stores of human knowledge stored on it, to which the great libraries of the past pale in comparison.

The present-day philosopher Nick Bostrom put forth a thought experiment: imagine the set of all possible inventions as an urn full of balls on a scale from white to black, white being something that can only be used for good, and black being something that can destroy the world. Throughout human history, we have been pulling balls from this urn with varying shades of gray, from airplanes to vaccines to nuclear bombs. But there may be, unknown to us, a possible technology that would be extremely easy for anyone to make and destroy the world with. A black ball technology. Perhaps a self-replicating swarm of drones tasked with destroying all humans, or an unstoppable virus, or an easy method of creating black holes. The fact that we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of a black ball technology 100% has led to an alternative to the Gaia Hypothesis, the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.

The fact that neither humanity nor life on Earth has been wiped out in the past is not sufficient to say it won’t happen in the future. That would be survivorship bias. We cannot rule out the possibility that a large-scale natural disaster or a powerful technology could end it all. However, there is a bright side. The fact that it is possible for The World to end does not mean it is guaranteed. Taking the Vulnerable World Hypothesis seriously could make it a self-defeating prophecy. If we accept that our choices could mean the difference between fading away into nothing and a legacy of life that goes on into the deep future of the universe, then we will be spurred to reduce our existential risks as much as possible. Just like technology has given us more power to destroy the world than ever before, it has also given us unprecedented power to save it.

We need not despair at our impending doom, but neither should we live on as usual, casting our faith blindly at Nature or Fate or God or aliens. We are the caretakers of this world, the sole beings with the ability to rationally assess the risks and design methods to mitigate them. We have strong narrative attachment to The World. But if we want to be faithful to truth, we must treat it analytically, just like everything else. It is our responsibility to learn, to gather information, and to work to preserve our precious home in this vast, empty universe.

How We Choose what to Believe – Narratives and Rationality

Every moment we find ourselves alive, two questions drive us: What should we do, and what should we believe? When looking for answers, we find narratives, stories about existence and right and wrong. Many narratives gel with one another, and many contradict. Our natural method for evaluating narratives is by our narrative senses, coherence and fidelity.

If that sounded like Greek, let me explain with a type of narrative that is easy to understand: fiction. Despite fictional stories being made-up, there are things about them that “ring true,” specifically the parts that are coherent and fidelitous. Coherence is how well the elements of the story fit together and remain true to themselves, like the believability of the characters and the consistency of the science and magic. The fidelity of the story is how well it resonates with our values, like when the characters act heroically, or when its exploration of the themes includes views we sympathize with.

That’s fine for stories, but what about real life? We might naively believe we see the world in terms of facts. On the contrary, our view of the world is colored by layer upon layer of narrative, with facts getting only the smallest amount of our attention. It is our first instinct to apply our narrative senses to everything we hear, from religion to politics to science. We think we’re good at determining what is true, that we and those who believe as we do have a knack for common sense.

But this “common sense” is really just our narrative senses telling us what feels true. If we want to know what is true, we need to change the way we evaluate narratives. A method that keeps us focused on our goals and the relevant facts. We need rationality.

Rationality is the practice of forming beliefs through observation and logic. By anchoring ourselves to evidence and mathematical thinking, we can overcome the pull of narratives, and follow truth wherever it leads. Rational thinkers recognize that almost everything is more complicated than they know. They arrive at their beliefs by knowing their values, and assessing facts and possibilities to best act in accordance with those values. They keep their minds open to be changed by good counter-arguments, recognizing the difference between having a solid foundation for their beliefs and being stubborn.

I’m sure this came as no surprise. Of course we should be rational, not chase after what feels true. But knowing this in our heads and putting it into practice are very different things. It is human nature to believe ourselves much more rational than we really are. Rationality is a skill, requiring constant exercise. Our natural method of determining truth is our narrative senses, and unless we admit this about ourselves, it is likely we are not very rational at all.

I grew up believing the Earth was created six thousand years ago. I also believed myself to be rational. My mind changed a few years after I started college, and I became obsessed with the question, “Why do people believe things when there is clear and easily accessible evidence to the contrary?” You could say it has been one of the overarching themes of this blog. And now, I’ve found a narrative that just might be the answer: Rationality is not natural. The only reason anyone is rational is because they stumbled upon the rationality narrative, and it appealed to their narrative senses.

If you truly understand this, if comprehension sinks into your bones, then you see how profound the implications of this statement are. Narratives are everywhere, and their persuasive power does not necessarily have anything to do with how truthful or rational they are. Our views of the world are shaped by narratives about morality, human nature, religion, science, the nature of reality, the structure of society, justice, honor, history, and the list goes on and on. Many of these narratives use dirty tactics to appeal to our narrative senses and shield us from the rationality that would show us how hollow they are. Here are some to watch out for.

1. Trying to take control of the space of ideas allowed by language. Narratives do this by changing the meanings of words, making words taboo, or introducing new ideas in such a way as to feed the narrative. For instance, they might fiddle around with the definitions of “truth” and “rationality” to confuse people into believing the narrative is rational when it is not.

2. Pointing to individuals or groups as scapegoats. This is an effective tactic to redirect doubt and discomfort from the narrative. After all, if you’re convinced the immigrants, or the homosexuals, or the straight white men are the ones causing you problems, then you feel less need to question the narrative.

3. Treating faith in and loyalty to the narrative as virtues. If something doesn’t make sense, this kind of narrative would say, don’t worry, it’s still true; it’s just beyond your comprehension right now. This makes people feel small and insignificant, and it can be especially depressing when one believes everyone around them understands, and they are the only one who does not.

4. Using guilt and shame. Making people feel they are bad or worthless unless they espouse the views of the narrative and act in accordance with its rules. Double points if the rules are vague and contradictory.

5. Viewing interactions with people who disagree with the narrative as fights. This attitude stimulates our deep-seated light versus dark mentality, where the light is the Truth (i.e. the narrative) and the darkness is doubt, questioning, and the hearts of those who would lead you astray. Less dramatically, it manifests in the idea of using arguments to “defend your beliefs.” Discussions about beliefs should be had with an open mind and a desire to learn, not to further cement yourself into what you already believe.

6. Presenting themselves as the only alternative to another narrative which is clearly bogus. If you see the world as us versus them, and realize the “us” part has problems, the “them” starts to look pretty good. It’s the false dichotomy fallacy. If you look, you will find plenty of other narratives to choose from, and perhaps even forge your own.

Some people craft and perpetuate narratives like this for the sake of power. Others spread these narratives because they honestly believe them to be true. We find ourselves in a world full of narratives that have almost taken on a life of their own, competing with each other for dominance. Being pulled to and fro from every direction, it is so easy to get lost in the currents of narrative, forgetting our skepticism and rationality. Nevertheless, it is worth it to remain steadfast to yourself, even when the path of reason seems to disappear.

If you find your own way, forming your own narrative, observing the world around you and taking the rational and good parts from other narratives, then you will find a kind of confidence that cannot be found any other way. It won’t be a straight shot to the truth. In fact, you will constantly be making adjustments as new information comes in or you see connections or contradictions you missed before. But the goal is not to have the “right” view of things, it is to get ever closer to truth and wisdom. And having a solid structure you built yourself, which you keep crafting and tweaking and making more beautiful, is so much more satisfying than merely trusting in the stories you have been told.