Sufferin' succotash!

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If you’re like me, you’ve come to dread the push notifications from the New York Times. Once, long ago, reading them made me feel like I was staying on top of the news, learning about significant events more or less as they happened. The buzzing of my phone meant an opportunity to be informed, even if I rarely clicked through to read the full story. I even looked forward to them.

But over the past couple of years, and especially in 2025, they’re wearing me out. It’s always bad news; even when it’s good news, it’s bad news. I remain dedicated to keeping up on most aspects of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute miseries of this planet, but the New York Times alerts are beginning to discourage me.

Still, every once in a while, one of them captures my attention: A couple of weeks ago, on May 17, the NYT buzzed us all to announce that there had been a bombing in Palm Springs, California, outside a fertility clinic. A car exploded, killing its occupant and injuring four nearby. I had to read the notification a couple of times before it made sense to me. A fertility clinic? Not, as is usually and tragically the case, an abortion clinic? Was this a case of a catastrophically misinformed anti-abortion activist? Or a new, extremist “pro-life” wing lashing out at IVF for reasons too dogmatically arcane for laypeople to understand?

No, it was even weirder. The 25-year-old bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, was apparently a follower of “efilism,” a philosophy that my status as a father requires me to clarify has nothing to do with online taxes. Rather, it’s an anti-life ethos—”efil” being “life” spelled backward—that sees our evolution into sentient beings as “pitiless” and cruel, because with sentience came an understanding not only of our own suffering at the indifferent hands of a violent universe but also of the inescapability of that suffering. Efilism.com calls that moment of realization in human history “The First Ouch.” Yep, the First Ouch. It was “the beginning of ALL problems in the universe.“ And, of course, efilism has the solution:

Or, if you’re Guy Edward Bartkus, a failed attempt to stop others from procreating.

I get it. Life on Earth is shitty and getting worse. My phone brings me news of this several times a day. Billionaires and wannabe billionaires and corrupt politicians in every country are hoarding wealth and enacting schemes that will immiserate 99 percent of the world’s population, in part by accelerating climate change that will kill them—us—on a scale it’s hard right now to imagine: heat waves worse than any war, crop failures that bring worldwide famines, floods that force billions from their homes, never to return. We can vote against them and organize and cross our fingers their deep ineptitude will sabotage their efforts, but even so the outlook is, let’s say, not good. Not for us or our kids or grandkids or any of their descendants.

And even if things were great, even if we lived in a socialist techno-Eden, the efilists say, life would still suck. Kids would still get ass cancer, men would still treat women like shit; there would still be mental illness and random accidents and bullying and failure and nagging, humiliating mistakes and the absolute, inescapable crush of ennui. Oh, god, the ennui! Where there is life, there is suffering, and where there is conscious, sentient life, the suffering is infinitely worse, because we know it’s never-ending. To create more life is therefore unspeakably cruel, particularly because no child ever gives its consent to be created. Better, then, to fight the imperatives of our DNA and embrace not so much death as the end of life, the end of procreation, and the end of suffering.

This anti-natalism, or pro-mortalism, has a neat kind of logic to it, but it also sounds like the kind of thing a moody 19-year-old would come up with. Philosophically, it’s boring, unimaginative, tied to a rigid worldview that can’t survive outside a dorm room. It’s so strident that I want to laugh in its long-suffering face.

My instinct is to go after its core assumption: that suffering is bad. As we all know, I’m a big fan of Saint Augustine, who came up with a brilliant answer to the question “If God is good, then everything He made is good, so how can there be evil in the world?” Augustine’s genius lay in understanding that the opposition of good and evil was a human concept, and that he could simply redefine the situation as he liked. Hence evil did not, in fact, exist, at least as “evil.” Instead, in Augustine’s view, evil was simply a lesser form of good—harder to understand, harder to bear, but still on the same spectrum that encompassed goodness.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of that god stuff, nor the good and evil bits, but I’ve taken to heart the idea that we really can redefine how we experience the world. At mealtimes, confronted with flavors or textures or odors that some might find off-putting, I try to withhold judgment; these foods or scents simply are what they are, without inherent qualities of good or bad, and it’s up to me to derive what pleasure I can from them. At my place of work, I have colleagues who are—sometimes with justification, sometimes not—well and truly loathed; me, I try to like them all, or at least to appreciate them for who they are, as if they’re complicated characters in a well-written² novel only I get to read. (I think about you, my dear reader, this way, too.) It takes practice to be able to do this, and I’m hardly monkish about it, but it does free me from a little unearned suffering.

Then again, I don’t have ass cancer. Nor do I live in a war zone. Nor am I abused, threatened, or physically and psychologically mistreated by anything other than the ineffable whims of fate. I’m lucky. Really, I should say I’m privileged, but knowing how easily anyone’s world can collapse, this tends to feel like luck.

Frankly, the Augustinian strategy feels too intellectual to combat the efilist morons. No, what’s needed is a response that’s grounded in real-world existence, that kicks their hifalutin, deterministic notions of humanity’s future right in the nuts. So, here’s how I feel about human suffering: I just don’t care.

That is, of course I care. I support ending the billionaires and imprisoning the corrupt and redistributing wealth and resources so that the vast majority of people on this planet have a better shot at happier lives. I want them to suffer less so that we all—myself included—will suffer less. Suffering really does kinda suck.

But on an emotional level, I don’t care. I lack empathy for statistics¹ . So do you, probably. Our brains can’t handle caring about that many people we’ve never met. So I just don’t care about the hundreds of millions of people who are suffering daily all over this planet: the poor, the sick, the oppressed. I’d say they seem unreal, except that I know they definitely are real, as are the monsters—human and systemic—who have entrapped them in such misery. I want their lives to be better, and I’ll do what little I can to bring that about, but still I find it hard to feel anything about their situation.

Antisemitism: don’t care. Fourteen thousand children about to die in Gaza: I don’t care. Law-abiding immigrants deported to Salvadoran prisons: I don’t care. Uighurs in concentration camps: I don’t care. Girls kicked out of school by the Taliban, Ukrainian civilians bombed by Russia, wildfires and nukes and unbridled chaos—I can’t even work up outrage any more because I just don’t care. I absolutely want all of these abuses to end, because the systems and people enacting them are just too stupid and cruel and fundamentally ineffective to be allowed to continue. The fascists and egotists and greedy motherfuckers are a waste of everyone’s time! But I just can’t care about the suffering itself. The scale is too monumental.

Nor would my caring change any of it, anyway. The depth of my emotions will not alleviate anyone’s pain, nor spur me to act with any more urgency or effectiveness to end the injustices that plague our planet. I am already doing what I can, and that does not include caring.

Because we all suffer to one degree or another. And you either learn to live with it, whatever it is, however bad it may be, and seek out and savor moments of warmth and joy, and find a way to be satisfied with that—or you rail and rage at the unfairness of it all, allowing anger to amplify your suffering a thousandfold. Actually, you can do both. (I certainly have!) You can let loose with fury one minute and you can put your suffering in perspective the next; you can live in stages; you can change your mind. This is what you go through, being human: You’re all of the above, and you’ve got to figure out how to deal. Or not. Maybe you’ll figure it out tomorrow, or next year. Maybe you never will, and you’ll make it to your dying day without understanding what it was you went through, or how to think about it, or whether the joys outweighed the suffering, but it’s okay because soon you’ll be dead and it won’t matter to you anymore.

But you know what you probably did? What we all do: When we have an ouch, big or small, we slap a Band-Aid on it and go about our day. Any parent knows this. The efilists would, too, if they’d ever bothered to procreate. And they’d also know this: The Band-Aid really does make everything feel a bit better, especially if it has Hello Kitty on it. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: I believe in luck

1  Here’s a great passage from “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” a history of the Rwandan genocide by Philip Gourevitch:

Listening to him [General Dallaire] I was reminded of a conversation I had with an American military intelligence officer who was having a supper of Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola at a Kigali bar.

“I hear you’re interested in genocide,” the American said. “Do you know what genocide is?”

I asked him to tell me.

“A cheese sandwich,” he said. “Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich.”

I asked him how he figured that.

“What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?” he said.  “Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where’s humanity? Who’s humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?”

I said I had.

“That convention,” the American at the bar said, “makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich.”

2  Well, occasionally.