I keep wondering why my life turned out to be so hopeless and miserable. Did I do something in a past life and this is my punishment? Is it bad karma? But then karma has never made sense to me. If you murder someone, and karma decides you then need to be murdered to pay for that, it requires someone else to commit murder so you get your karma. The cycle would never end.
Is the New Age idea that we choose our lives before birth true? Do we choose everything that will happen to us in advance so we can learn something from it? Or is that just cope?
Are we just evolved pondslime who mutated into humans by chance and none of this means anything?
Why is life so incredibly awful for so many people?
Sorry you’re suffering. I suffer as well and my perspective is very bleak and probably not comforting in the slightest, so I am going to spoiler it to make reading it an opt-in thing.
spoiler
I take a materialist approach. There is no known mechanism by which spiritual / energetic concepts like karma or any New Age (all old stuff repackaged for a modern audience) stuff can happen. We do not choose our lives before birth. We do not exist then. Who and what we are are simply the emergent properties of nervous systems, which are biological electrochemical circuits and networks. Like computers, but far far more complex and not really much like them. “Meaning” itself is just something we think about or feel.
That doesn’t mean nothing matters. It doesn’t mean we aren’t real. Information is real – you can see that in digital files. Our feelings and experiences are real.
But there is no “why”. There is only “how”. How is life so awful for so many people? It’s what happens. Capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, empire, but also random happenstance and awful things. There is absolutely no deeper meaning or purpose to the suffering of someone with a debilitating genetic illness that shortens their life or leaves them wracked with chronic pain. There is no meaning at all. There is no reason. You didn’t deserve it. Neither the good nor the wicked inherently get what they deserve. I believe that karma, afterlives, spirituality in general, are all ways for people to cope with the fact that horrible things happen to good people and that the world is inherently unjust.
Think about it this way: We humans are but animals. Does the mouse who gets eaten by the owl deserve to die? No. Does the owl deserve to starve? No. Does the sweet duck who dies of highly pathogenic avian influenza deserve to die of a horrible disease? No. These interactions just are.
What this means is nothing. There is no deeper meaning or reason to anything. We exist for a limited time and we do what we can with that time based on our own values. I try to take care of my loved ones because I love them. I tried to fight for collective liberation because I cared about other people, before I got crippled from depression and lost the ability to do anything but suffer. There’s no justice or meaning to anything.