No system is perfect, and sometimes the pain signals get misdirected or mixed up with other signals. Still, pain seems a necessary evil here.

We spend a lot of time and money on pain-avoidance, pain-lessening, and pain-management. Some slow progress is evident.

Hunger. Deformity. Cruelty. Greed. And so on.

Some suffering yields somewhat to our various scientific and technological clevernesses.

The suffering that seems intractable we’ve tried to deal with by constructing elaborate sets of assertions and strictures and guidelines (law, ethics, morality, philosophy, religion). Progress here, though fitful and at a snail’s pace, continues. Sort of.

The richest, the smartest, the mightiest can after all be reduced to a quivering mass of protoplasm begging for surcease by one tiny toothache. Still, since most of us most of the time do not exist in a state of extreme pain or suffering, we’re able to get on pretty well with the business of life and keep our prideful self-image intact. Sort of.

What takes the existential cake and turns it into a bad-joke safe falling on us as we stroll down life’s sunny sidewalk is the fact that, come three score and ten (or fewer or more, depending on the whims of this little universe we call home), we ALL (there’s no polite way to put this) disappear.

Total, abrupt erasure. Perfect vanishment.

No matter how many dollars you have, how many your I.Q. points, how many 9th symphonies you’ve composed, how many starving children you’ve helped, POOF! One minute you’re there, next minute you’re gone.

End of you. End of all your pretenses and beliefs.

And, as humans have long noted (memento mori! carpe diem! gather ye rosebuds while ye may!), a terrible, unavoidable reminder to all bystanders that erasure awaits them as well.

As with other intractable problems, the general human solution to impending disappearance is that of Scarlett O’Hara: We’ll think about it tomorrow (meaning: never).

No matter. Disappearance is acoming whether we think about it or not.

And doesn’t that just really tear it. After all we do, after all our efforts, all our struggles, and yes all our pain and suffering, out goes the candle. Spfffft. The moving hand, having writ for a while, is done writing.

Period.

What to do, what to do.

There being no answer, we just keep on keeping on, more or less to see what happens next and next and next before the final erasure.

But.

If I were young and bright and of a curious, investigative/scientific bent, there’s one disjunctive corner of our experience of this marvelous but troubling universe that I’d turn my attention to.

That is sleep. For the simple reason that: Before the Big Disappearance happens, there’s the little Disappearance every 24 hours that we call sleep.

We go to sleep. Out goes the candle. Spfffft.

But then what happens? Pretty strange: Next morning, there we are again, bright-eyed as ever, and pretending that we hadn’t just, well, disappeared.

Figuring out stuff about what happens to us when we go to sleep probably won’t explain death. But such figuring may nudge us a little further along in understanding life.

Some clever sleep research (with resulting theories and explanations) might at least provide us with a pretty potent existential aspirin. The tootheache of disappearnce may not go away, but it’ll hurt a lot less.

END

Suggested further reading:
   Swift: Gulliver's Travels.
   Voltaire: Candide.
   Huxley: Island.
   Sengtsan: Hsin Hsin Ming.