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The Egg (2009)

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227 points jxmorris12 | 2 comments | 31 Mar 25 11:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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A_D_E_P_T ◴[31 Mar 25 12:44 UTC] No.43534338[source]▶
Hah, it's literally Schopenhauer's hell: Humans as both the tormenting demons and as those doing the suffering. In this case, one human -- which further frames suffering as an inescapable, masochistic cycle. "You were victimizing yourself" says the demiurge.

That everything is predetermined and that time is nonlinear is also something that should trouble every contemplative person.

It's basically a devil's brew of nihilism and determinism that frames existence as a solitary, predetermined journey toward an abstract goal (maturation into godhood?!) that renders individual lives expendable and morally ambiguous. And it plays out over a trillion or so years. Horrifying.

It's especially funny as the author, with very little awareness of what he was writing, tried to strike positive "we are all one" notes... And ended up with something that would give Ligotti nightmares.

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_def ◴[31 Mar 25 12:58 UTC] No.43534526[source]▶
Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
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A_D_E_P_T ◴[31 Mar 25 13:13 UTC] No.43534680[source]▶
As old Schop said: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other."

People look to religion and metaphysics for justice and salvation. This poor "Egg" guy is trapped in a trillion-year cycle of pain and injustice. I guess it's Buddhist hell, too...

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bccdee ◴[31 Mar 25 13:29 UTC] No.43534831{3}[source]▶
That's not true at all though. This is how a baby thinks about a needle. Often pain is less painful than we expect, and pleasure is pleasantly surprising.

> The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.

Getting eaten is the last 5 minutes of a prey animal's life. If you asked that antelope whether those few clumsy minutes of bleeding out outweighed a lifetime of frolicking through fields, all the children they sired, all the berries they ate, I think they'd be a bit offended.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the story. This is a worldview committed to pessimism, where bad must always outweigh good because it is easier to upset ourselves by contemplating bad things than to soothe ourselves by contemplating good things, and therefore the bad must clearly predominate. There are very few things I'm willing to dismiss as a mindset problem, but this is one of them. Schopenhauer should have gone to therapy.

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wat10000 ◴[31 Mar 25 15:35 UTC] No.43536238{4}[source]▶
I have a hard time thinking of any kind or quantity of pleasure that would outweigh some of the more horrible fates that some people have had.
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bccdee ◴[31 Mar 25 15:51 UTC] No.43536404{5}[source]▶
Sure. I'm not saying the good outweighs the bad in every individual life. But you're explicitly picking the most extreme examples, and this is a claim being made about life in general.
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wat10000 ◴[31 Mar 25 16:08 UTC] No.43536617{6}[source]▶
I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.
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1. bccdee ◴[31 Mar 25 20:27 UTC] No.43539549{7}[source]▶
They live each life separately, though, with no memories of their other lives. Joe from Idaho isn't suffering in the moment because of the experiences of some poor sap halfway across the world, even if they're both part of a greater continuum. The character will only regain memory of all the events when they "hatch" & become a god, at which point (being divinely capable of remembering billions of lifetimes) they will presumably have the mental fortitude to deal with that trauma.
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2. wat10000 ◴[01 Apr 25 14:22 UTC] No.43547111[source]▶
As far as we know, people don’t remember anything after they die. Does that mean it’s no big deal to torture you to death? You won’t remember it.