I’ve had a lot of unhappiness in life, to the point of having spent a large part of it wishing that I had never come to be, and all in spite of my being quite sure that my life has gone much better than many or even most other people’s. You might ask — and would be right to ask — why in light of this experience I don’t just become completely pessimistic about sentience — do the full Ligotti, so to speak.
The answer would have to be that not all of my experience has been all that negative. When I reflect back on my life so far, I can point to at least a few periods that seem to me to be consistently happy, some lasting months, and in one case one that lasted almost a year. By my count, 22 months in all. And when I think further about these segments of my life and in particular why they ended, their failure seems to be less a matter of happiness inevitably decaying, in the way that heavy nuclei or human bodies inevitably decay, and more a matter of circumstances changing for the worse. And nothing in human circumstances seems to have a per se necessity. In some counterfactual world, those circumstances need not have changed.
Some obvious caveats:
- All of these times happened before I was 25 years old, and I am now 44. “…only the very young and very foolish…” I do not expect there to be any extended period like them in the rest of my life.
- Related to (1): The happiness I experienced then might have been the result of irrational optimism associated with youth. If I could somehow have understood then what I understand now I would not have been as cheery.
- I might be suffering from recall bias and looking at certain parts of my past through rose-colored glasses. That’s certainly possible, although if I do suffer from recall bias I can at least say I don’t suffer from it systematically, since I remember far more unhappy parts of my life (and more vividly, generally) than happy ones.
- Am I just kidding myself? Even if I’m right about my own life, 22 months out of what, 315 or so of anything that might plausibly be called adulthood? That’s something like seven percent (and falling).
Well, okay. It’s a weak case against pessimism. But it’s not a non case, and in my mind it at least opens the possibility that sentient (though probably not human) existence may be salvageable…