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Why do we not just focus on reducing suffering and increasing pleasure?

This is a losing battle as life in the universe is a zero-sum game. For one being to gain absolute happiness, another being must lose out. Just look at the pursuit of human happiness: we generally get more comfortable lives at the expense of most other living things. Life is built around competition, unmet needs, predation, disease, fear, and constant vulnerability.

 

The relative part of happiness is also impossible to solve for all living things as for one being to be happy requires another being to be unhappy or requires the being to experience both happiness and unhappiness over time. Without fighting many billions of years of evolution to rewire the biology and minds of all living things, extinction is the only way of fixing the flaws built into life.

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