Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6: Life is Hell (early access)

The moral case for understanding that despite life's suffering, it's still worth it.

Author’s Note: This might seem like a strange piece to have so close to Christmas, but I imagine a few of you might be having some not so fun family events. Maybe it’ll help.

---

Life is suffering.

It's a phrase people often hear but rarely do they ever understand what it actually means. For most people, they think that the idea that life is suffering means that all you're really going to ever feel is pain and suffering until the day you die. That the world is this horrible place with things like war, disease, crime and people doing terrible things to each other. While there may be some small amounts of pleasure and joy in this world, most of the time they're going just going to either hurt someone else or be hurt by someone. Knowing this makes people feel like life isn't worth living in any real sense. It's better to just accept this about the world and to do your best to make sure that you inflict more pain on other people than being on the receiving end. Which is usually why people are willing to do terrible things, because in the end none of it really matters. But is that really true?

Previously in this space, we explored the importance of accepting responsibility for yourself and the people around you, as well as the difficulty of learning to live with consequences. Then we looked at what it means to choose a future when you know that your actions will have such problems, how to take on the importance of these ideas for yourself rather than letting others tell you. More recently we looked at how all of these problems can lead someone to want to connect with a more powerful force and where you learned it in the first place, your family. However, even with all of these factors in place, you still have to learn to live in the world. You still have to get up and find a job and do all the ordinary things that make up these ordinary lives. It's the ordinary things that can drive you insane.

“I was happy. Wherever I, was... I was happy, at peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time, didn't mean anything. Nothing had form, but I was still me you know? And I was warm, and I was loved, and I was finished... complete. I don't understand theology or dimensions, any of it really. But I think I was in heaven... and now I'm not. I was torn out of there, pulled out, by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch... this is hell.”