The Burden Of Consciousness

To exist as a consciousness is to have the capacity to suffer, and the many great metaphysical and epistemological limitations of human life allow for very particular forms of suffering.  Limitations of memory, the senses, and the ability to know what other minds are thinking, if they exist at all, allow for a great deal of suffering through manipulation, forgetfulness, or deception.  Even aside from navigating the events of life with these limits, the existential agony they can lead to might be even greater: what cannot be known about moral obligations, the sensory environment, other minds, or oneself can be terrifying to the right person.

It is possible to exist and not suffer even if some people would idiotically scoff at the idea due to their own experiences.  Just because one person has a difficult life does not mean life cannot have its respites or its pleasures, and even if every person was in extreme, unrelenting psychological and physical pain, it would of course still be logically possible for the suffering to disappear or for it to have never happened.  There is nothing logically necessary about the trials that can devastate us or prompt, for irrationalists, a journey towards reason, self-awareness, God, and moralism.

Still, by simply having a mind that is not within a dreamless sleep, there is always the possibility that someone who is not experiencing pain will suddenly have to confront it.  No matter where it originates or whether it afflicts the mind or the body, the possibility of enduring pain is there, and the only way to escape the capacity for suffering is to have never existed as a consciousness at all or to fully cease to exist (and even a dreamless sleep could be interrupted by intrusive nightmares or by waking to trials).  There is no such thing as another logically possible escape.  Even the best happenstance or intentional reliefs from pain in life are not fully within a person's control.

To trivialize or to deny either suffering or the possibility of it is irrational; the same is true of thinking that it gives a person an excuse to fall or remain in emotionalism, hedonism, or any other example of irrationalism on the level of belief or behavior.  The burden of consciousness has been tasted or could be tasted by us all, and yet no desire for joy changes the nature of reason or anything else about reality.  How we will live while suffering and why, in the sense of what worldview will be adhered to and on what basis, are what humans can dictate.  Suffering is one of the things that an irrational mind would likely think excuses them to disregard whichever of these truths it finds inconvenient.