This is a straw man of philosophical pessimism, I think. (Philosophical) pessimism does not claim someone cannot feel good at such-and-such time and place. Schop1, myself and others have consistently focused on the structural features of life that are negative. Nowhere have we argued that existence is bad because we don't like it at such-and-such time and place. What we have argued for is the idea that the "negative" components of existence are in some way more fundamental than the "positive" components of existence. — darthbarracuda

And I am saying the exact opposite. I experience life as good independent of what is going on at the moment. Even when there is unhappiness and suffering. Living is fun. Interesting. There's stuff to do. Learn. People to talk to. Food to eat. We were made for this world, whether by God or evolution. The fact you don't feel that way says something about you, not something about the world.

how do you feel about death? — darthbarracuda

Death is death. I'm going to die just like 90 billion people and trillions of other organisms have before. I don't have any beliefs in an afterlife, so I'm pretty sure I'll just cease to exist, I'm 66 and Clarks don't generally live past 75. So, it's coming pretty soon. I can feel it coming closer. After many years of ignoring it, I can't really do that anymore. So? No big deal. That's how it works. It's not as if it's not fair or something. I don't really want to die. I'm having a pretty good time.

What' your point? Why would that change anything?

Nobody is going to deny that health is good. Yet life is the decline of health. Sooner or later you lose it, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. — darthbarracuda

It's funny. Getting weaker. Healing more slowly. Not being able to do things you used to be able to is really interesting. You learn important things about yourself. If you've spent your life ignoring your body, as I have, you're forced to become more self-aware. It is so satisfying to have been around long enough that when something happens you don't get all excited like other people do because you've seen it twice before. It's like you can see into the future. You know how things play out. It's fun.

This is an example of the structural negativity of life. Other examples include our moral impediment, the onerous burden of need and desire, the transitory nature of pleasure, etc. The philosophical pessimistic perspective is that life, stripped of any contingencies (where and when you were born, what opportunities you have, personal traits, etc) is at-its-core negative. — darthbarracuda

Boy, I'm sorry life is so inconvenient for you and Shopenhauer1. Just don't make it some sort of principle. It's just self-indulgent.

@darthbarracuda@Baden

I'd like to explore the idea of entailment darth has brought up. Systemic suffering in many ways is about entailment- what is determined by being born as the human animal. Darth brought up death, which is a classic case, but there are more. The metaphysical pessimist tries to mine experience for these systemic entailments. Some of what I have been talking about falls into these entailments:

• The entailment of dealing. That is to say, there is not a time when we are not making a move in the framework of our socially-derived goals (in the broad categories of survival, maintenance, and boredom-fleeing)
• The entailment of restless desires
• The entailment of absurdity of circularity.
• The entailment of dealing with contingent circumstances.
• The entailment of the individual dealing with the given.

The metaphysical pessimist tries to mine experience for these systemic entailments. — schopenhauer1

If we're going to look into this more, how about a definition of what "entailment" means in this context. Is an entailment just an unavoidable consequence? Or do you mean something else.

Nobody is going to deny that health is good. Yet life is the decline of health. Sooner or later you lose it, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. Life kills us all, and oftentimes painfully. This is an example of the structural negativity of life. Other examples include our moral impediment, the onerous burden of need and desire, the transitory nature of pleasure, etc. The philosophical pessimistic perspective is that life, stripped of any contingencies (where and when you were born, what opportunities you have, personal traits, etc) is at-its-core negative. — darthbarracuda

That's the whole Earth. So, Earth is negative.

Is an entailment just an unavoidable consequence? — T Clark

That's it.

— schopenhauer1

• entailment of dealing. That is to say, there is not a time when we are not making a move in the framework of our socially-derived goals (in the broad categories of survival, maintenance, and boredom-fleeing)
• The entailment of restless desires
• The entailment of absurdity of circularity.
• The entailment of dealing with contingent circumstances.
• The entailment of the individual dealing with the given

.

Bullet 1 - you just mean life, right? Kind of begging the question. Also, I'm never bored. You're doing something wrong.

The rest - please expand. They don't seem like anything too onerous to me. Restless desires - that's what awareness and spiritual growth are for. I don't find life absurd. Funny sometimes. Circularity - do you mean things just keep happening over and over again - that's just the way things work. Contingent circumstances. Don't know what that means. Dealing with the given. Again, don't understand.

You keep repeating scripts. You haven't answered my points.

Death is death. I'm going to die just like 90 billion people and trillions of other organisms have before. I don't have any beliefs in an afterlife, so I'm pretty sure I'll just cease to exist, I'm 66 and Clarks don't generally live past 75. So, it's coming pretty soon. I can feel it coming closer. After many years of ignoring it, I can't really do that anymore. So? No big deal. That's how it works. It's not as if it's not fair or something. I don't really want to die. I'm having a pretty good time.

What' your point? Why would that change anything? — T Clark

It's great you are having a good time and continue to find enjoyment in living. You, like most everyone else, do not want to die. That's what so tragic - whatever life gives us that dazzles our minds, it eventually takes away. Everything is impermanent, flux, and thus ultimately nothing. We come from nothing and go back to nothing, and nothing happens and nothing changes. Man cannot live, he cannot think, Sub specie aeternitatis. He must limit his mind - the healthy mind is one that is not aware of its incoming doom, and thus not crippled by despair.

It's funny. Getting weaker. Healing more slowly. Not being able to do things you used to be able to is really interesting. You learn important things about yourself. If you've spent your life ignoring your body, as I have, you're forced to become more self-aware. It is so satisfying to have been around long enough that when something happens you don't get all excited like other people do because you've seen it twice before. It's like you can see into the future. You know how things play out. It's fun. — T Clark

Yes, I imagine that is one of the pleasures of aging - a better sense of perspective. There is nothing new under the sun. The cycle continues: birth, suffering, death. It's sad, but the fact that it's unnecessary makes it absurd.

It's great you are having a good time and continue to find enjoyment in living. You, like most everyone else, do not want to die. That's what so tragic - whatever life gives us that dazzles our minds, it eventually takes away. Everything is impermanent, flux, and thus ultimately nothing. We come from nothing and go back to nothing, and nothing happens and nothing changes. Man cannot live, he cannot think, Sub specie aeternitatis. He must limit his mind - the healthy mind is one that is not aware of its incoming doom, and thus not crippled by despair. — darthbarracuda

I am not thrown into despair by my "incoming doom." My life is not tragic. I don't want to die now, but I don't want to live forever. I'm sure you and I can go on like this for as long as we want. You feel the way you feel, I feel the way I feel. I can't imagine I'm going to change your mind.

I don't think my posts are even really aimed at you. I want other people who read what you are writing to hear another voice too. To you I say - Ok, you don't enjoy life. It's unnecessary. You're in despair and unable to face the certainty of your own death. I'm not trying to talk you out of that. What bothers me is that you not only judge your own life but other's too. You try to talk other people into joining your cult of despair using what you try to make sound like reason.

Does a pig suffer?

Does a pig suffer? — Posty McPostface

My son and his girlfriend are farmers and vegetarians. They don't raise animals, but have friends who raise pigs for eventual slaughter. The pigs are treated with kindness and comfort while they grow and killed as gently as possible. Laura, who loves pigs, visits them, feeds them, and plays with them, then grieves when they die.

Most people focus on contingent pain. Metaphysical pessimists see the structural aspects. — schopenhauer1

Bullshit. The structural aspect is the dichotomy of the good and the bad, the rough and the smooth, the burdens and the transports.

So the "subtle" response you get is that you are telling a one-sided tale of unrestricted regret. There is only the bad. Even when things are good, that's when things are really, really bad, because now you have to deal with the possibility of that goodness being missing.

You have built yourself a rationale. It may have some kind of truth for you. You may just be very unlucky and stuck in a basically depressed state. But philosophically, you need to deal with the fact that your story lacks the kind of naturalism that understands life to be a mixed bag. And that is generally all right.

Then also the bit you really don't want to hear. If life is not as you would like it, then a large part of that could be because you have constructed this self-reinforcing rationale of pessimism - perhaps as a "coping" mechanism.

Pessimism is bad philosophy. Plain and simple. Fortunately there are other choices on the menu.

You have built yourself a rationale. It may have some kind of truth for you. You may just be very unlucky and stuck in a basically depressed state. But philosophically, you need to deal with the fact that your story lacks the kind of naturalism that understands life to be a mixed bag. And that is generally all right. — apokrisis

A mixed bag? Generally all right? Which one is it?

The question the structural pessimist asks if the value of being as such. Not the value of living now that we are here, or what could be done to make such an existence valuable. We want to know whether simply being is good or not. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle raises a similar question when he asks what the very function of being-a-man is and not specific functions a person can later assume (carpenter, philosopher, soldier, etc). This is the structural way of looking at things, an example of the ontological distinction. There is a being, and then there is the being's Being. In this case, we want to know what the value of this Being is, i.e. what the value is of a person's existence qua their very existence, and not in terms of what society they live in and what roles they play in this.

Optimists are selective and strategic in their defense of life. What they cannot defend, they blame pessimists for over-reacting to. Or they attempt to psychoanalyze pessimists as being "depressed" or "schizoid", because the existence of the pessimist is incompatible with the affirmative narrative and must be "explained away" via some evanescent category. If pessimism did not hold at least some element of truth, it would have been demolished from the get-go. Pessimism would be definitively shown to be incorrect, not simply asserted to be incorrect. Yet a look at history shows a pattern of thinking that correlates to the structural pessimist's point - life is, at its core, bad. I'm even willing to say you cannot truly understand the religious mind, or understand the essence of religion unless you at least accept that there is some truth to the proposition that life is suffering. Nor can you understand human relationships, which so often are based on sharing a burden. I do not doubt you understand either, which makes me believe you are not recognizing that you do, i.e. you have a cognitive bias (re: Pollyanna principle of rose-tinted glasses)

Instead of a mixed bag, though, I would say a more accurate picture is that you cannot have any good without the bad. The good is optional, the bad is required. You already recognize this when you say life is "generally" good - i.e. despite the fact of all the evils, life is still "worth it". But, I will maintain, when considering the life of a person, as a person, the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that they will die. There are other things you can be sure about as well (beyond reasonable doubt):

• That the person will die (already mentioned)
• That the person will need before they enjoy
• That the person will have to wait more than anything else
• That the person must learn through mistakes
• That the person will feel pain, and at least sometimes extreme pain (consider a child breaking their arm, pulling their baby teeth, falling off their bike and smacking their head, getting dumped by someone; traumatic and intense for the child, a spectacle for the adults who treat the child as a child and thus ignore them)
• That the person will be raised by people they did not choose to be raised by
• That the person will make others suffer, even if it is unintentional
• That the person will have to defend their existence if they wish to continue to live (related to previous)
• That the person will make serious mistakes that jeopardize their ideal dreams and thus must "settle" with the below-expectation, the sub-par, the mediocre. Nobody excells in everything, nobody achieves their greatest dreams in entirety.
• That the person must have their limits violated in order to know their limits
• That the person will experience the death of their parents and/or loved ones
• That the person will be assimilated into a politicized structure that perversely attempts to "fairly" distribute violence in accordance with strategic goals of particular people
• That the person will feel despair at points in their life, and contemplate suicide/their own mortality, thus every person is a potential suicide (Cioran: life is a state of non-suicide)
• That the person is a "puppet" that lacks free will and a substantial ego that is immortal (an existential horror)

One of my favorite songs:



"Funeral planet, dead black asteroid
Mausoleum, this world is a tomb
Human zombies, staring blank faces
No reason to live, dead in the womb
Death shroud existence, slave for a pittance
Condemned to die before I could breathe
Millions are screaming, the dead are still living
This Earth has died yet no one has seen

Funeralopolis!

I don't care, this world means nothing
Life has no meaning, my feelings are numb
Faceless masses filed like gravestones
Sacrificed for the glory of one!
Funerary cities, flesh press factories
Corporate maggots feed on the carrion
Funeralopolis, grey morgue apocalypse
Black clouds form to block out the sun"

Dramatic, sure, but accurate.

I wrote a song about zombies when I was 17. It was pretty similar to the above far as I can remember. Started with:

"Another mindless zombie joins the crooked line..."

(Note the amusing superfluity of the word "mindless.")

Can't remember the rest. Our band was called "Morbid..." something or other. Good fun at the time.

Glad others enjoy good music! :grin: :grimace:

What @darthbarracuda said. But to add..there is no "off" button. Sleep is the closest we get. Entailed in being is the constant dealing with of our being. This is our willing natures dealing with the contingencies of the world. As Schop used to say- this is basically negative in nature. It is always about what is lacking at that moment. So yes, there is a dichotomy of sorts that drives actions- but it is largely of a negative nature (i.e. something always lacking).

All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity, fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the former is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will [which is as long as we are will-filled living beings], so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace. Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible. (Die Welt, vol I, p 196) — Schopenhauer

Now, regarding the contingency of the world- we are the mired world of contingent circumstances. The world impinges on our personality/ego/character and we react according to our own heuristics/fears/judgements, working to bring ourselves to some level of comfort only to find ourselves needing more (see quote above). Much of the time we our equilibrium is thrown off- "Ugh, the neighbor brought a stench in.. better get rid of it, making me feel uneasy in my own home..".. "Shit, I'm going to be late for work.. which if I do often will get me fired which may lead to financial troubles later on or relying on others in burdensome ways".. "Oh, my car won't start.. I could not have a car and thus throw other consequences off in my life..or find something to fix".. But that's just the maintenance part (and maybe partly survival in stratified post-industrial economies).. But this works the same with our excess "free time" (boredom-fillers).. "I'm kind of lonely reading for 4 hours and then riding my bike for another 2 hours.. I wonder where I can get some new friends.."

It's all dealing with.. The churning will confronts the fateful contingencies. There are some inventory of positive "goods" (i.e. relationships, learning, aesthetic/physical pleasure, flow states, achievement) but often its fleeting, not-achieved in equal distribution (based on many contingent factors), and does not negate the underlying negative basis of existence. Darth has it here:

The good is optional, the bad is required. — darthbarracuda

But it is the totalizing nature of this bad- the very essence of being qua being that we need to look at straight on and not hand-wave as "depressed".

And, this is why people should desire what they enjoy and nothing less. If circumstances prevent that from happening, then changing such circumstances is the only way out. If the circumstances cannot be changed, then you learn to cope with it.

*Goes back to wallowing.*

A mixed bag? Generally all right? Which one is it? — darthbarracuda

Both for most people much of the time.

But anyway, here is my absolutely killer argument. :grin:

Pessimists are selective and strategic in their attack on life. What they cannot attack, they criticise optimists for over-valuing. Or they attempt to psychoanalyze optimists as being "elated" or "deluded", because the existence of the optimist is incompatible with their negative narrative and must be "explained away" via some evanescent category. If optimism did not hold at least some element of truth, it would have been demolished from the get-go. Optimism would be definitively shown to be incorrect, not simply asserted to be incorrect.[/quote]

@apokrisis@darthbarracuda

I edited my post above.

But anyway, here is my absolutely killer argument. :grin:

Pessimists are selective and strategic in their attack on life. What they cannot attack, they criticise optimists for over-valuing. Or they attempt to psychoanalyze optimists as being "elated" or "deluded", because the existence of the optimist is incompatible with their negative narrative and must be "explained away" via some evanescent category. If optimism did not hold at least some element of truth, it would have been demolished from the get-go. Optimism would be definitively shown to be incorrect, not simply asserted to be incorrect. — apokrisis

You missed the point of my exposition by a full mile and a half. I'm tired of not being taken seriously, having my entire argumentative essay reduced to a single paragraph and then straw-manned, and then mocked for putting forward my honest thoughts on the matter. It's clear to me that you especially do not take this seriously and would rather screw around than provide any formal response.

How about this? I don't think it's a strawman with regard to the OP at least. If you do, tell me why:

Put it another way, it's valid to generalize outwards from your own experience with regard to structural/systemic elements of life that are obviously shared, such as pain, boredom etc. But it's not valid to generalize outwards with regard to your attitude to these structural elements, and your attitude is an intrinsic part of the equation with regard to what effect these elements have on you, and therefore your overall quality of life. And that is actually what makes life worth living or not. So, there's a huge lacuna in your reasoning that presumes a frame that's actually a choice or orientation rather than anything intrinsic. — Baden

My response was more focused on apo specifically, but to answer your query:

Put it another way, it's valid to generalize outwards from your own experience with regard to structural/systemic elements of life that are obviously shared, such as pain, boredom etc. But it's not valid to generalize outwards with regard to your attitude to these structural elements, and your attitude is an intrinsic part of the equation with regard to what effect these elements have on you, and therefore your overall quality of life. — Baden

How do you feel about this being used as an argument for antinatalism? That you find life "good" does not mean your children will find life "good", and it's not valid to generalize outward with regard to your personal attitude to these structural elements in life and assume your perspective is more valid than theirs.

I think you would disagree with this. I think you would say that your position is not only yours but also more or less "objective". I recognize that personal bias and all that can influence evaluations like these. I'm not willing to submit that this makes these evaluations entirely subjective. That's what "attitude" here means, the evaluation of a state of affairs as good or bad and subsequently adopting an appropriate orientation to the world.

What doesn't make sense to the pessimist is why someone would have a positive attitude to the world and life in general. It doesn't make sense for life to be filled with suffering, boredom, decay, etc etc and yet think life is good. Separating the two just seems to me to be an ad hoc violation of common sense. You wouldn't separate them for any ordinary intra-worldly event that had the same characteristics (say, a bad party with no food, terrible people and poor entertainment), but for some reason this separation is pulled out in defense of life. Why? Why does life get this preferential treatment?

I think you would disagree with this. I think you would say that your position is not only yours but also more or less "objective". I recognize that personal bias and all that can influence evaluations like these. I'm not willing to submit that this makes these evaluations entirely subjective. That's what "attitude" here means, the evaluation of a state of affairs as good or bad and subsequently adopting an appropriate orientation to the world. — darthbarracuda

It's a matter of probability and you can measure that empirically by interviewing people about their quality of life. Extrapolate for your child's circumstances with regard to the average conditions of similar contexts and so on. The majority of people in developed countries at least report being happy. Here's some data:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/these-are-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world/

What doesn't make sense to the pessimist is why someone would have a positive attitude to the world and life in general. It doesn't make sense for life to be filled with suffering, boredom, decay, etc etc and yet think life is good. Separating the two just seems to me to be an ad hoc violation of common sense. — darthbarracuda

If you agree with what seems a truism that it's better to feel good than to feel bad then it's better to have a positive attitude towards something (all other things being equal) than a negative one. The only case where a negative attitude trumps a positive one is in the case of prudence where it's necessary to prepare oneself for a likely negative event. I don't see philosophical pessimism as having that practical value for the most part. I'd only concede that it may be cathartic for certain personality types. Do you think it does have a practical value and/or do you deny it's better to feel good (about things) than to feel bad (about things) all else being equal?

It's a matter of probability and you can measure that empirically by interviewing people about their quality of life. Extrapolate for your child's circumstances with regard to the average conditions of similar contexts and so on. The majority of people in developed countries at least report being happy. Here's some data: — Baden

This is an example of what someone like Cabrera, and myself, call "second-order ethics". Probability? Estimation? Determining what is right and what is wrong based on contingent, empirical situations? To a "negative ethicist", this puts the cart before the horse. This is politicized, intra-worldly ethics that is catered to the interests of particular people who exist and not to everyone, including those who do not yet exist.

Estimating the value of a person's life before creating them is a supreme act of total manipulation. The other person has no say in the matter, whatsoever. Intra-wordly, empirical reasons are used to justify something that is ontological. For the negative ethicist, taking chances and estimating probabilities only makes sense in terms of the intra-wordly, where we have to make compromises and are forced into difficult situations. In terms of something as unnecessary as procreation, though, this sort of reasoning is entirely inappropriate. This ontological distinction is crucial to understand, in my opinion, if you are to understand what the structural pessimist is saying.

If you agree with what seems a truism that it's better to feel good than to feel bad then it's better to have a positive attitude towards something (all other things being equal) than a negative one. The only case where a negative attitude trumps a positive one is in the case of prudence where it's necessary to prepare oneself for a likely negative event. I don't see philosophical pessimism as having that practical value for the most part. I'd only concede that it may be cathartic for certain personality types. Do you think it does have a practical value and/or do you deny it's better to feel good (about things) than to feel bad (about things) all else being equal? — Baden

I generally don't see any logical connection between pessimism and specific mental states. Sure, in the real world, certain personality types are drawn to certain ways of thinking. That doesn't disprove them, it only makes debating an uphill effort. Pessimism isn't about "feeling" bad about life. How the negative structure of life affects you is an entirely different question than whether or not life has a negative structure. The structural pessimistic point, then, is that the value of life is at least in some sense independent of an individual's evaluation of their life. This is similar to psychiatry, which sees the actual state of a person as at least somewhat different than what the patient believes their state to be (a helpful distinction when dealing with things like schizophrenia, where the person believes their delusions are real - similarly, the pessimist has in their repetoire a plenitude of psychological studies attesting to humanity's capability for self-deception).

One of the things I'm interested in is whether or not a "positive" or "affirmative" perspective on life is compatible with a pessimistic view of the world. I think it can be, at least in some forms. That pessimism is consistently misinterpreted as a view prescribing we all be depressed and mopey and suicidal is something I'm getting more and more annoyed with. I don't think it's the pessimismi that people are so bent out of shape about, it's the consequences of accepting pessimism that make people freak out like apo.

If the pessimist mantra is that "life is not worth living" or as schope affirmed earlier "life sucks and then you die" then that's a value judgment that can only be based on specific mental states (a negative psychological orientation towards life as well as a negative philosophical assessment of life). If you are saying it's possible or even desirable to uncover the structural negativity of life (the latter) without coming to the evaluative conclusion (the former) then we're not really in disagreement. You might be in disagreement with schope though.

But it is the totalizing nature of this bad- the very essence of being qua being that we need to look at straight on and not hand-wave as "depressed". — schopenhauer1

Yes, good addition. Pain is not intra-worldly. Pain is Being. To exist as Dasein means to suffer through the terminality of Being, the condemnation to die before you're even out of the womb. The key I think is to see pleasure and positive value as reactive to this fundamental negative ontology.

What those in opposition to pessimism here need to understand is that we are not trying to eliminate pleasure, or downplay its existence. We're trying to get an accurate picture of what pleasure is without changing it. Ideally, understanding structural pessimism entails understanding how the existence of pleasure does not defeat pessimism, but rather instead the nature of pleasure itself helps contribute to the pessimistic point.

The pessimist mantra may indeed be that life is not worth living, but that does not mean certain moments of life at such-and-such time and place aren't worth living. Life as a temporal continuity of being is not worth it. Life in certain instances may be entirely worth it, though. And this is a structural pessimistic way of looking at things: life, taken as a whole, is not worth living, but this is not incompatible with there being positive elements within life. Once you're given life, it's hard to get rid of it so you might as well enjoy it as much as you can, while you can.

I did not really say that, I was trying to converse with Caldwell using his language.. and then qualified it that this needs more nuance and explanation than that kind of exclamation. This is strawmanning me and then trying to derive a rebuttal from it.

Thus I said:

Sure, it can be a summary, but then this has to be explained. As I've said, most people will just counter this with "I have good experiences, thus schop1 is wrong". The subtleties are what need to be conveyed. Dealing with, forced hand. Individual vs. the given, absurd circularity, etc. Most people focus on contingent pain. Metaphysical pessimists see the structural aspects.

No-one's arguing the toss that sometimes we're happy and sometimes we're sad. That's neither here nor there. We agree on that. But yes, pessimism posits an overall negative evaluation that relies on a negative psychological orientation that is indeed based on the structural elements of life. The reason the negative psychological orientation part is necessary in the equation is that it's possible to understand the structural negatives of life and not care all that much about them in relative terms (as I don't). So the argument that "Life is not worth living" is really an argument that "Life is not worth it (if you take a particular attitude to the structural negatives) You seem to claim that not sharing that attitude is irrational, which leaves you in the position of claiming that a negative outlook on life as a whole is more rational than a positive one. But if you accept that it is more rational to feel good if given a choice in terms of orientation towards a specific state of affairs than to feel bad (issues of prudence aside) then that argument falls apart.

so you might as well enjoy it as much as you can, while you can. — darthbarracuda

...and then it becomes worth living. So, why insist that an overall enjoyable life is not worth living (or do you really see that as impossible?) Why cling to the mantra. Problematize the negatives, sure, but drop the evaluation.