Futility of Life, Inevitability of Death, and Suffering as Part of Life

Letter to Society
Name
Institution
Letter to Society
Dear Society,
There are many problems that face the world today. Evidently, in most cases, society tries to evade some of these problems or bury them. However, this letter is about the problems that the citizens of the society must learn face. These are the problems that citizens should stop evading and embrace them because they are part and parcel of life. In this way, there are three main problems that as a society citizens have to face according to the writings of Schopenhauer, Camus, and Cioran. These problems are the futility of life, inevitability of death, and suffering as part of life.
One problem that citizens of society should face is the futility of life. According to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms in the part titled “On the Vanity of Existence,” he says that life is futile. According to Schopenhauer, human happiness is just an illusion and life is a worthless existence. He says that life has reduced humans into desiring machines like addicts who keep searching and acquiring to get another fix, only to endeavor for another. This forces people to be stuck in an endless cycle of seeking and fulfilling their selfish needs and wants. He writes, “In continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists” (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 779). In this way, human being strives endlessly such that when one does not have anything he or she strives to have something. However, even after getting something, one strives to get more. This cycle creates a situation where true happiness is never achieved and in so doing life becomes futile. In this way, society should face the reality that life will never be satisfactory because fulfilling one need leads to another need or want. For example, when one is financially stable, he or she could be striving to ensure one gets good health, and this is the futility of life. In the same way, Albert Camus explains the futility of life in his novel The Stranger. In the novel, Meursault comes to the realization that life has pointless purpose or meaning. After Meursault kills an “Arab,” he is sentenced to death and while in prison he has thoughts of a successful escape or achieving a fruitful appeal process. However, after meeting with the prison Chaplin he comes to the realization that life has no real meaning. He proclaims, “What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers” (Camus, 1942, p. 64). In this quote, Meursault claims that the fate of men is the same and whatever decisions they make fate would still determine their life. For example, every person is bound to die whether at a young age or in old age. This means that life is really futile because despite what road a person chooses to follow, fate would be the determining factor in deciding when one would be alive or dead. Since all humans will eventually m...