Is the world a good place? Does it want us to be happy? Or is it a horrible place where we can only do our best to battle or avoid its "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"?
People don't really have any business thinking that the world thinks, much less that it thinks about them. I try not to moralize the world.
Somehow we have the (mis)fortune of being materially configured such that we (1) have minds and (2) experience suffering, elation, hate, and desire in a world that is utterly unaware of itself and lacks all capacity to feel.
It's just a category error to ascribe any kind of mind or morality to the world. If you expect the world to be nice, you will die thinking it hates you -- or else you will develop rationalizations for why you must be "tested" in such horrible ways. But, having lost all expectation that the world regards you at all in any manner, the issue becomes a non-issue and you are free to get on with things, or do whatever it is you do to cope.
Even if hell exists and we're in it, hell itself does not punish. It can be punishment, but cannot punish. Punishment is deliberate -- only by conscious design or purpose. The world is indifferent. It doesn't have a mind to mind us -- much less punish us.
The world is a giant operant conditioning chamber complete with random reinforcement and certain death, and as a species we face extinction or evolution, a fate that is, I'd say, largely out of our control. That much is certain.
Bottom line is: A bit of pessimism might be a call to action, but too much is completely disabling.
"Antonio Gramsci famously called for 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will': the one the spur to action, the other the resilience to believe that such action will result in meaningful change even in the face of adversity."
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