Pursuing a Good Life in a Bad World

Some personal reflections on maintaining a positive attitude in this sad and broken place. (2,500 words.)

First, some news: I was recently quoted in a Wired article about how tech billionaires have "already captured the White House." You can read the article here (or, if you don’t have a subscription, you can find a non-paywall archived version here). Here's an excerpt:

While the Obama administration made itself a friend of the tech industry more broadly, not everyone in Silicon Valley was on board. For some, says Émile Torres, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Human Extinction, the urgency to “exit” is rooted in a belief that technological progress is both inevitable and inherently positive — a straight shot to utopia. In this view, Torres says, it is immoral for the government to do anything but “get the hell out of the way and let people innovate.”

Now on to the article ... :-)

If you’d rather listen to the article below, you can do so on YouTube, here:

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“Every day feels like a funeral.” — The poignant response I received when I asked my friend, a well-known political theorist, how they were doing several years ago.

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I’m quite a cheerful person by disposition. I’m naturally upbeat and optimistic. If you’ve ever met me in person, listened to my podcast, or seen one of my interviews on YouTube, you’ll know that I smile a lot, always strive to be friendly, and never pass up a chance to share a laugh with someone. Yet, if you were to ask me about my overall assessment of the world, I’d tell you that the grumpy German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was basically correct in claiming that the world is a living hell, a disaster zone, a waking nightmare, a horror show overflowing with unfathomable amounts of sorrow, anguish, and heartache.¹

How are these two things compatible? Shouldn’t someone with such a gloomy outlook have, you know, a rather gloomy personality like Schopenhauer did? (As Rick Lewis writes in Philosophy Now, “For Schopenhauer was a grumpy old sod. He was … a glass-half-empty sort of guy. He was not merely pessimistic but also moody and sometimes downright aggressive.”)

Given that just about everyone I know right now is dealing with some kind of mental health challenge — depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc. due in large part to the bleakness of world affairs — I thought I’d share a few pillars of my personal philosophy, in hopes that someone might find it helpful. I’d also be really interested to know what strategies you employ to stay sane in this moment of unprecedented global challenges and disheartening political developments. Please do share in the comments section (open to everyone, not just subscribers), if you’re comfortable doing so! :-)

Aphorisms to Live By

A large part of my worldview can be reduced to three aphorisms — words that I live by. These explain how I maintain a generally cheerful attitude despite holding what the philosopher Frederick Beiser describes as “the darkest view of life … that which likens it to hell.” These are:

(1) “I might be pessimistic, but that’s no reason to be gloomy.” This (or a variant thereof) has been attributed to the author Cormac McCarthy, although I’ve been unable to confirm.² Nonetheless, it captures something central to my approach to living: so what if things are dreadful? Why does that mean I can’t laugh and smile?

In fact, I’d argue that the worse things are, the more important it becomes to inject a bit of levity into life; it’s precisely because the world is so relentlessly terrible that we should chuckle at every opportunity that comes along. Indeed, I see humor, comedy, playfulness, jocularity, etc. as the best antidotes we have for the endless awfulness of this place. As many of you know, I cohost a podcast called Dystopia Now with the brilliant comedian Kate Willett, and I think comedians like her provide an indispensable service to our society in decline: making us laugh, because the other option (in many cases) is to cry. This is why my upbeat attitude is not an act: I genuinely love to laugh, smile, and share a joyful moment with others. As the environmentalist Les Knight likes to say, “a little levity eases the gravity.”

(2) “I don’t believe in hope, but I do believe in duty.” Off the bat, I wouldn’t say that I’m hopeless, though I would aver to having very little hope about humanity’s future. The global predicament, in my evaluation, is unequivocally “superfucked,” an intentionally silly term that denotes the radical overdetermination of bad outcomes given the vertiginous multiplicity of existential threats before us, from climate change and advanced AI to the ongoing risks of nuclear war and fascism.

The reason I love this quote — which I got from the filmmaker Marc Silver, though he attributed it to someone else — is that it foregrounds the importance of morality, which is distinct from the psychological state of hopefulness. The idea is this: even if one has no hope, moral duty nonetheless calls one to join the ongoing fight for a better world. Indeed, this duty should be sufficient on its own to motivate ameliorative efforts, even if the chance of successfully improving the world is very small.

Echoing comments made above, I’d urge that the worse things are, the louder this call of moral duty becomes. It’s precisely because the world is a waking nightmare that I, personally, feel so driven to make things better — to fight the rising tide of fascism, the tech extremists in the TESCREAL movement, etc. So, don’t give up! If the world weren’t in such bad shape, the imperative to improve it wouldn’t be nearly so compelling.

(3) “Be the change you want to see in the world,” a slight variant of Arleen Lorrance’s exhortation: “Be the change you want to see happen.”³ (Though often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, it was Lorrance who initially coined this lovely little locution.)

I think this saying is brilliant, and see it as directly tying into (1) and (2): I want to see more kindness and compassion in the world, and feel driven by a deep sense of duty to help make the world a little kinder and more compassionate. Once again, I’d also contend that this aphorism becomes more urgent in proportion to how bad things are. It is, in other words, especially important to be the change you want to see if the world is very bad. The worse our situation becomes, the greater the need for people to lead by example and exemplify goodness — to be paragons of good behavior that others should want to emulate.⁴

Hanging Out With God

So, what do you think? These three aphorisms are fundamental to my personal philosophy, and they explain how I (usually manage to) avoid Schopenhauerian grumpiness despite having a profoundly negative view of the world in general.

As it happens, I’m not the only philosopher who thinks the world is awful. Bernard Williams once wrote that “if for a moment we got anything like an adequate idea of [the suffering of our world] and we really guided our actions by it, then surely we would annihilate the planet, if we could.” I vociferously disagree with his comment about annihilating the planet to eliminate suffering — that’s the exact opposite of the sentiment behind (2) above! — but I think the gist is mostly on point: the world is replete with oceanic amounts of misery, as I show here. Even someone like William MacAskill, a TESCREAList who I’d consider an “optimist,” admits that things are very bad:

Imagine you’re travelling through a foreign country. During a long bus ride, there’s an explosion and the bus overturns. When you come to, you find yourself in a conflict zone. Your travel companion is trapped under the bus, looking into your eyes and begging for help. A few metres away, a bloody child screams in pain. At the same time, you hear the ticking of another explosive. In the distance, gunshots fire. That is the state of the world. We have just a horrific set of choices in front of us, so it feels virtuous, and morally appropriate, to vomit, or scream, or cry.

Here it might be worth distinguishing between two kinds of pessimism: philosophical pessimism of the sort promoted by the ornery Schopenhauer, and empirical pessimism, which claims that the world is an unhappy place for largely contingent reasons that are, to some extent, under our control.

I’m not (really) a philosophical pessimist: I don’t think I accept that life is intrinsically very bad like Schopenhauer does. (Or, as the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism puts it, “Life is duḥkha,” i.e., suffering, unease, or unsatisfactoriness.) Rather, I think that what’s most terrible about the world is largely the result of human foolishness, greed, and moral indifference. These are qualities that we could potentially change in ourselves, if we were to make the effort. At least, that’s what I tell myself, though at times I waver between this view and something a bit more depressing: that humanity, overall, really is inherently awful. Consider the following thought experiment:

You’re hanging out with God before he creates the universe, and he asks you: “I’m thinking of making people, on the whole, quite selfish, greedy, narcissistic, cruel, callous, power-hungry, and largely indifferent to the misery of others. But I’m trying to figure out what kind of world would likely result if I were to do this. What do you think?

How would you answer? If I were asked, I’d describe the outcome as a world almost exactly like the one in which we actually live — a world full of wars, genocides, exterminations, exploitation, loneliness, racism, bigotry, and the like. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter article, the 6,000-year history of human civilization is little more than a protracted record of murderous horrors. Open a history book and you’ll find one atrocity after another. In contrast, if God were to ask me what kind of world I’d expect if he were to make people, on the whole, kind, compassionate, charitable, altruistic, and loving, I’d describe a world vastly different from this one. (Wouldn’t you, too??)

So, perhaps there is a little bit of philosophical pessimism in my worldview — a pessimism about the corrupt (or corruptible) nature of humanity. But again, given the hortatory aphorisms of (2) and (3) above, this doesn’t in any way deflate my motivation to act — quite the opposite: the worse humanity is, the more urgent it becomes for one to exemplify kindness and compassion.

Another idea I think about a lot concerns the question of whether the world is getting better or worse. One’s answer depends on how one measures things like happiness and suffering in the world. So-called “New Optimist” like Steven Pinker argue that what matters is the statistical prevalence of bad things like murder. But this is obviously wrong, because it implies that one murder should be evaluated as less bad if the population is 1 billion as compared to 1 million.

Yet the badness of murder is — or should be — independent of how many murders didn’t happen. Hence, what matters aren’t the relative (statistical) numbers, but the absolute numbers, and as I show in this article, there are more people suffering terribly today than ever before in history. Just consider that 50 million people live in modern-day slavery, ~700 million find themselves in extreme poverty, and around 800 million children (!) have lead poisoning, which causes permanent brain damage (that’s about 1/3 of all children on Earth). If one looks at the absolute numbers, then things have unambiguously become far worse over time!

This conclusion is integral to my (mostly) empirical pessimism, and it’s yet another reason that, in my opinion, there’s an immense moral urgency to doing everything we can right now to ameliorate the human condition.

The Moral Urgency of Activism

When I was just a child, I remember looking around at the world in wonder and awe: what is this bafflingly strange place in which I mysteriously woke up? What is it like? Who are these creatures around me — are they kind and loving or cruel and callous?

I was told by a family friend circa the age of 10 that some people in the world are so disadvantaged and impecunious that they starve to death, and I remember being struck, in that moment, by the horrifying possibility that the world might not be a very nice place to have ended up.

This is when I formulated what I’d now call the “Schopenhauerian hypothesis.” I’ve said before that the single biggest continuous project I’ve worked on in my life has been trying to disprove, at least to my own satisfaction, this hypothesis. I absolutely did not want it to be true, in part because, as noted, I am by disposition a rather cheerful and optimistic person. By my early 40s, though, I finally admitted to myself that I cannot, and probably will never be able to, disprove it.⁵ The Schopenhauerian hypothesis emerged victorious, much to my chagrin!⁶

The question at that point was how to respond. There are several options:

1. Collapse into nihilism. Embrace a defeatist attitude and give up on the world.

2. Fall back to asceticism, as Schopenhauer suggested. Defect from society, and try to ignore the world as best one can. (I actually know someone who did this. They’ve been living off the grid for years now, don’t follow the news, are uninterested in politics, etc., because they found it all so depressing.)

3. Fight tirelessly for a better world. Become an activist. Find ways of effectuating meliorative change. View the world such that the worse things appear to be, the more driven one is to make them better.

I chose the third option, of course, which is exactly what the three aphorisms above are intended to capture. I’m reminded here of a study from 2015 in which the authors surveyed people’s responses to catastrophic risks.⁷ They found that folks tend to have three responses when confronted with such risks: fundamentalism (looking to religion for answers), nihilism (turning away from the world), and activism (being inspired to actively change the world for the better). This of course overlaps with my own list of options.

The take-away from the present article, then, is that one should respond to the endless awfulness and relentless injustices of the world with activism. Write, tweet, join a protest, stir up good trouble, etc. — whatever you find to be most effective, given your unique set of skills and aptitudes, and pursue it with passion. I hope this also shows that holding a profoundly dark and deeply pessimistic view of the world doesn’t for a moment mean that one must tumble into a nihilistic state of passive defeatism. In fact, one can reinterpret such a view — one can flip the Necker cube, as it were — such that it provides an immense source of inspiration to work for a better tomorrow.

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Btw, some listeners of Dystopia Now have asked for a link to the podcast’s theme song, which was written and performed by yours truly! So, here it is — from my forthcoming album Hospice for Humanity (what else would I have titled it? Lol!). I’ll probably start sharing some songs as the release date (January 1, 2026) approaches. I’ll have some exciting news to share in the coming weeks about this album (it might actually end up getting some attention!).

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side.

(I am incredibly grateful to Remmelt Ellen for detailed, insightful comments on this article — which doesn’t, of course, mean he necessarily agrees with everything I say here! Incidentally, Remmelt has become a very important voice within the community of AI critics, and recently published a devastating critique of the AI company Anthropic, which I’d highly recommend. You can follow him on Twitter/X here.)

1. As I wrote in a now-deleted Substack article (because I’m going to re-write it at some point and publish the updated version):

Just look around at the state of things today, or crack open a history book. The best way I can explain how I feel is that on several occasions in my life, I’ve experienced extreme physical pain. A moderate amount of physical pain might cause me to cry, but there’s a phenomenologically strange, weird-feeling threshold that one crosses with extreme pain, beyond which one stops crying. It hurts too much to cry. That is the way I feel — psychologically — about the world in general. I’m too upset by everything to cry anymore. I’m all out of tears — I’m beyond tears. So I end up kind of floating above it all, depersonalized, looking down in constant astonishment and horror.

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If someone had been considerate enough to approach me before I was born and say: “Hey, Émile. Let me show you something: this is what the world is like — the best and the worst — and here are some of the things that you’ll personally experience — the best and the worst — if you’re born. Are you in? You wanna do this thing?” I would have vociferously shot back: “That world? Those experiences? Are you mad? Have you lost your damn mind?

2. The attribution comes from an interview I did years ago with the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. Note that Krauss was later accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct — I was even quoted in the Buzzfeed article that first made these accusations public. I later compiled a very long list of claims from women who, in the aftermath of Krauss being forced out of his job, publicly described unpleasant and/or inappropriate experiences with the guy.

3. A friend who I met through this newsletter, Ged, suggested an alternative formulation last time we spoke, which I love: “Be the trouble you want to see in the world.”

4. As I put it in the same article referenced in footnote 1:

There is a silver lining to this picture, though. In my opinion, the sadness and unfixable brokenness of this world is why one should be motivated to make it better. The worse people are hurting, the greater the reason to be kind, compassionate, friendly, loving, and charitable.

That said, Remmelt Ellen, commenting on an earlier draft, noted that this third aphorism absolutely shouldn’t make one feel guilty if one is unable to achieve it, due to depression, etc. Rather, as Ellen eloquently makes the point, “it’s about love being stronger than fear (or anger, of frustration, or depression), and choosing love as much as you can.” (The “love is stronger than fear” quote actually comes from Remmelt’s friend, Forrest Landry.) I completely agree, and think this is an important caveat to add to my discussion of the third aphorism.

5. As I also wrote in the aforementioned article:

So, at the age of 41, I am ready to admit that my life-long project to disprove the Schopenhauerian hypothesis has failed. It has failed in a spectacular way, too, because I’m not sure at this point that there’s any amount of evidence that could change my mind. That’s not a statement of dogmatism: rather, it’s a point about how powerful and copious the evidence for the hypothesis is, if one examines it seriously and honestly, without flinching or looking away.

6. See this article of mine for a candid discussion of some (very) personal experiences that finally broke the camel’s back, as it were.

7. Incidentally, they found that “a majority (54%) rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50% or greater, and a quarter (24%) rated the risk of humans being wiped out at 50% or greater.” Yikes!