We can often find ourselves living in a way that might make life seem more like a burden than a blessing. Life would be a whole lot more agreeable if it wasn't mandatory. Wouldn't it be great if we could just shut off for a while at command and come back a few hours later once the annoyance has passed?

Unfortunately, we are given a chore to deal with - and oftentimes the only reward we get for our toils is a brief respite in unconsciousness before we do it again. How much conflict, strife, suffering and loss is due to an inability to cope with the responsibilities ascribed to us by our bodies? How much is caused by evil intentions, and how much is caused by sheer desperation?

It's strange to consider ourselves as being owned by our bodies; usually we see ourselves as the masters of our physical. Yet the Buddhist teachings ring true: if we truly were in control of our bodies, we would not age, we would not contract disease or infirmity, we would not feel compelled to sink below our threshold for pain. And yet our bodies do, and the best we can do is hold on tight and hope nothing too terrible happens. "Planning" is a method in which we attempt to harness external tools to safeguard our well-being against the insecurities and threats of whatever comes our way, including ourselves. One can wonder how many people run away from themselves, to save themselves.

The pessimistic tradition has a long history, filled with thinkers who focus on certain aspects of "the human predicament" - a web of inter-connected general complaints and observations that combined lead to an overall disappointing and embarrassing, if not concerning, picture of human existence and life in general. Some thinkers have attempted to construct a metaphysics from this in order to explain how all these poor evaluations "come together" and why they even exist to begin with. But although it can be helpful and tempting to coalesce everything into a singular explanatory model, this threatens to migrate the focus from the explicit and the obvious to the abstract and the irrelevant. Rival models clash and we're left questioning what isn't that important and ignoring that which is, that which has been irritatingly obscured again by the same sort of metaphysics that had been initially discarded when we originally began collecting these observations in the first place.

inequity — Robert Lockhart

Inequity is a general complaint that can be raised, but it's only part of the picture. As soon as we try to pin down the human condition to a single or group of conditions, we're left with an insufficient frame that fails to capture every aspect of existence. For say inequity was solved. Would there no longer be a human predicament?

The one thing that connects everything together is, I think, the unexplained phenomenological disconnect, an alienation, between the self and the rest of the world that results with a general sense of anxiety or dread, the hidden and repressed feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that it might not be just human-exclusive. Something is missing, something doesn't belong, something is defective. A Problem, lurking below the surface and affecting the current without properly being fully described or explained.

Not just "problems", but "A Problem". A Problem that is the source of all other problems. Sentience itself is a problem, as it is the way in which all problems and "The" Problem are noticed. Existence itself is a spiral of problems-on-top-of-problems, in which problems are fixed by installing new problems in a never-ending process of problem-updates masking as refinement and perfection; "delayed" problems, an act of procrastination, before the problem is finally shown to be what it is.

But here I am again, pursuing a metaphysics that sounds more like a story than anything else. Stories can be helpful, though.

Darthbarracuda – Thanks for your response.

My own view - regarding this question as to why our human situation, at its’ most irreducible level, seems to us to so intrinsically constitute a dilemma – is that an answer to account for that finding can be provided by the theory that everything we experience is the result of a logical descent, by means of a cause and effect manner, from some unknown primal cause – this theory then necessitating as a consequence that every experience realisable in principle for human beings could accordingly in practice be realised in terms that represent its’ logical limits in the abstract. - The iconic - albeit rather hackneyed? - image of the, ‘Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, intending to suggest the epitome of what in practice could be possible for humans were their fate in principle soley to be contingent on what are the limiting possibilities in the logical abstract, to me anyway, then seeming to evocatively spring to mind!

In this regard, while of course it could be asserted that if no attempt can possibly be made at identifying the nature of a first cause then there could exist no justifiable means of attributing observed effects to it, perhaps nonetheless, though in the absence of such a required description, the degree of inequity which in practice we witness to characterise the situation of individual human beings – in that it seems to manifest every degree apparently possible - of itself then provides evidence reconcilable with no scenario other than one where our circumstance in general is indeed soley descended in a cause and effect manner from an unconscious - and thereby specifically amoral - primal cause, albeit though that the nature of the latter cause is ultimately unknowable.

Unsatisfactoraly, got to leave it at that now, ‘cause - like the Princess with her slippers – I've got now to promptly beat it back home! :)