I don’t agree with this article - I think there’s a lot more suffering than happiness in the world. Most people aren’t suffering most of the time, but suffering when it happens is so much more intense than even the greatest happiness. Thus experiencing everyone’s suffering and everyone’s happiness would be about as miserable as only experiencing everyone’s suffering.
However, it doesn’t do anyone any good to increase the amount of suffering in the world by suffering yourself whenever you hear bad news. Thus the way I look at it is that bad things happening now over which one has absolutely no control should be treated the same as bad things that happened in the distant past. My usual example is this: let’s say historians find evidence that 800 years ago, Genghis Khan killed one thousand more people than their prior estimates indicated. You’ve just read this, it’s news to you, and it’s pretty bad. However, you probably don’t respond with much emotion. It feels like dry history, and you didn’t even know what the previous estimates of how many people he killed were. How is a thousand people dying today on the other side of the world any different? You are no more able to save them than you are to save people who have been dead for centuries, and you don’t have any more personal connection to them than you do to those long-dead people either. You probably don’t even know how many people die on a normal day, just as you don’t know the number of victims of Genghis Khan’s wars. (The answer is about 180,000, so two deaths every second.)
I don’t agree with this article - I think there’s a lot more suffering than happiness in the world. Most people aren’t suffering most of the time, but suffering when it happens is so much more intense than even the greatest happiness. Thus experiencing everyone’s suffering and everyone’s happiness would be about as miserable as only experiencing everyone’s suffering.
However, it doesn’t do anyone any good to increase the amount of suffering in the world by suffering yourself whenever you hear bad news. Thus the way I look at it is that bad things happening now over which one has absolutely no control should be treated the same as bad things that happened in the distant past. My usual example is this: let’s say historians find evidence that 800 years ago, Genghis Khan killed one thousand more people than their prior estimates indicated. You’ve just read this, it’s news to you, and it’s pretty bad. However, you probably don’t respond with much emotion. It feels like dry history, and you didn’t even know what the previous estimates of how many people he killed were. How is a thousand people dying today on the other side of the world any different? You are no more able to save them than you are to save people who have been dead for centuries, and you don’t have any more personal connection to them than you do to those long-dead people either. You probably don’t even know how many people die on a normal day, just as you don’t know the number of victims of Genghis Khan’s wars. (The answer is about 180,000, so two deaths every second.)