A lab mouse feels victorious pushing the red button to be fed a treat while diligently avoiding the punishing blue button. No stress there! He’s a real winner! And he'll keep pressing that button over and over until the end of his days. But humans are (just barely) intelligent enough to foggily recognize the game.
Here's the edge of recognition of that dawning truth; the dangling thread to be pulled:
The reward is always chintzy (which explains why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).
It's a pretty crappy game. The cynic's bitter assessment of a shitty world is not senseless. But if you forswear enchantment with the laboratory apparatus - the cheap lures and petty repellants - and simply embrace it all as-is (a unity rather than a binary), that shift of perspective reveals a world that's extraordinarily non-crappy.
To clarify, the crappiness doesn't, like, vanish. It's revealed as part of a greater beauty. Everything in its place! All hues contributing to a full, rich, enticing color spectrum! Exasperation fades and is replaced by fascination with the soulfully intriguing wrinkles within an infinitely captivating tapestry.
We claim to desire a world that's nothing but the "positive" stuff, but such a world would swiftly drive us mad. In fact, that's precisely what's happening right now. As I once wrote,
After millennia spent desperately seeking cheat codes for this world, figuring the whole while that things would be so much better if only we could purge the illness and lions and warlords, the famines, droughts, and extreme poverty, we've done it! This richest of rich-world countries has expunged the vast majority of its nemeses! Yet look around you. Most of us spend most of our time building needless drama, stress, and sorrow for ourselves. We are far more depressed than any human beings anywhere, ever. We build internal towers of brooding discontent, and spend vast tracts of time lost in tumultuous TV shows and video games and sad songs and memories of pain and worries of loss, desperately seeking out whatever snatches of drama we can find to identify with.
Further reading:
A Tale of Two Chickens
Exiting the Skinner Box
Why God Lets Bad Things Happen
Paradise Lost
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Evolution of a Perspective
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