A Higher Level of Suffering

 The other day on his Substack, the blogger Noah Smith was warning that the availability of endless short-form video content on our smartphones risks trapping us in a kind of hedonistic dystopia: a place where reward-chemicals have become so readily accessible that much of the meaning is drained from life—since meaning can only be derived from struggle. 

He writes with despair: "Perhaps it’s in the fundamental nature of intelligence to hack its own reward function — to find a way to give up striving and building and loving, and to simply hit the dopamine button until it starves itself ecstatically to death."

I thought it was interesting and surprising to see this argument coming from Smith, since he has written at length before in opposition to precisely this thesis that "struggle" and suffering are necessary to human flourishing. 

In fact, he has argued explicitly that we should reject this "romantic" thesis, and attempt instead to find new forms of meaning under conditions of abundance and happiness. (Viz. his essay "Toward a shallower future.")

But now, here he is seeming to imply that life does indeed need some friction—some barrier between desire and gratification—in order to retain a semblance of meaning. Is this not precisely the "dark romantic" hypothesis about human nature that he had earlier rejected? 

My own guess is that the "dark romantic" hypothesis is perfectly true, so far as it goes. It is indeed impossible to imagine a form of human happiness that is not made up in large part of alternations between suffering and relief. 

This is why, as Orwell wrote, it's impossible to imagine anyone being happy in heaven, or in a socialist utopia. As he puts it: "happiness derives mainly from contrast."

As Leopardi writes in his "Calm After the Storm": Pleasure, child of suffering,/ empty joy, effect/ of dread that’s past [...] O gentle Nature,/ these are what you give us,/ these are the delights / you offer mortals. Surcease from suffering / is happiness for us. (Galassi trans.)

This is why, according to Orwell, "All efforts to describe permanent happiness [...] have been failures."

Indeed, permanent happiness is doubtless impossible for human beings. But this is precisely why—unlike the romantics who fear we are creating a hedonistic or "ecstatic" dystopia of technological abundance—I don't actually worry that we will somehow reach such a state. 

Given that dissatisfaction is inevitable, I feel confident that we can continue to try to increase happiness to the best of our ability—knowing full well that we will never arrive at the total elimination of suffering and striving from human life. 

As Walter Pater writes in his Marius the Epicurean: 

“That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or the dream of some, in every period. Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all preventible accidents. Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings, which have something of its sting, he must necessarily leave untouched. And, methinks, that were all the rest of man’s life framed entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself, over the fate—say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to be since Numa lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all the growth, alike of the individual and of the race, in intellectual delicacy and power, and which will find its aliment."

The purpose, then, of all our striving for a better and more just world is not ultimately to eliminate suffering. The purpose, rather, is to "raise mankind to a higher level of suffering," as a character puts it in Norman Mailer's novel of socialism, Barbary Shore; "for given the hypothesis that man has certain tragic contradictions, the alternative is between a hungry belly and a hungry mind, but fulfillment there is never."

As Philip Larkin would put it: "fulfillment" is always a "desolate attic" at last. 

Given that repletion of human desire is not on the table as an option, then, I think we need not fear achieving it. I think we can say as a matter of common ground that it is better to suffer from a hungry mind than a hungry belly, and aim for that much—at least as a starting point.

Making it too easy to "hack our reward chemicals" will inevitably lead on to new longings, new dissatisfactions, new strivings. People will suffer from a surfeit of short-form video content. They will taste that distinct ennui that only comes, as Byron put it, from the "fulness of satiety." 

And so humankind will go out to seek new adventures and new strivings and new sufferings. But they will do so on a higher plane—and that will be the historic achievement of our efforts to share abundance. 

They will reach a higher standard of suffering.