Should everything be different?

I rejected the dogma I was raised with a very long time ago. And even though I never cut myself off from the concept of faith and reflecting on what exactly it means to have faith, I have been fairly skeptical for most of my adult life, and I would say even most of my teen years. But the idea that we live in a fallen world has been so ingrained in me that I believed it without ever really thinking about it until just a few years ago. I don’t mean I literally believed the story of the Fall from Genesis, but I did accept the basic idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with existence. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Life is something that should not have been.” I think that statement is a crystallization of an idea that has permeated Western Civilization for centuries. I think it’s one of those things people accept without ever really reflecting on it, even people who aren’t particularly religious or spiritual. In the film Grand Canyon, the character Simon says, “Everything is supposed to be different from what it is.”

This idea can’t be blamed entirely on our Judeo-Christian heritage because you can find it in Plato, too. It may be a natural assumption considering what life is like for human beings. For most of human history, up to half of all children died before reaching the age of maturity. Many women died while giving birth. Life is filled with suffering and pain, and then we die. We live our lives knowing we’re going to die, too. That often casts a pall over our brightest days. We know the storm is coming. And if the natural process of disease and decline weren’t bad enough, human beings make it even worse for themselves by fighting and killing one another. It’s easy for us to imagine that things weren’t supposed to be like this.

But I reject the idea that life as we experience it is some kind of divine punishment. If there is some kind of reason or purpose for suffering and death, I don’t think it’s because we live in a fallen world. And I question the idea that everything should be different from what it is. I don’t mean to suggest the problems we experience in life aren’t problems for us, but either existence is what it is or if there’s some kind of purpose or meaning to existence, then maybe there’s some kind of essential quality of existence that gives rise to our problems. I think it’s arrogant for us to assume we have some way of knowing what a better world would be like.