What if everyone was loved for the fact of merely existing?

[Aplev]

At first, the title was going to be: "Everyone should be loved for merely existing". But I realized that's not really it. The fact of the matter is, existence itself is painful.

Being loved for the fact of merely existing sounds nice, sure, but it still wouldn't solve a lot of the pain that comes with existence. And what would "being loved" imply? It's super hypothetical, anyway. But if it implied people feeling for each other all the time and never any selfishness in any way from anyone to anyone... would that stop trauma, for example? Well, if everyone loved each other simply for existing, there wouldn't be any more trauma, right? If depression and trauma come from human relationships, and human relationships are built on pure love... maybe there wouldn't be more of those?

One might argue that some people simply don't deserve love. But that's why I thought what if this love is mutual, reciprocal? Nobody would cause harm to others. We'd simply exist... to be loved.

But then how would the physical world look like? Would there still be diseases, natural disasters, and other kinds of external, physical stuff that also causes so much suffering? Would they be tolerable enough, because we love each other and support each other unconditionally?

People say and even criticize me for spending a lot of time imagining worlds that don't exist. Well, that's simply how my mind works.

Maybe it can be shortened to this: the ideal world where we're happy just by existing doesn't exist. So as it stands, existence is painful (because all that exists is pain) and anything that could exist... simply doesn't exist.

So I wish to simply disappear and stop existing.

 

[Alexei_Kirillov]

I mean I think this is the attraction of Christianity: human love is fickle, but God's love is eternal and universal. All are made in the image of God, and as such all have equal value and dignity. You are loved for your mere existence as a human being endowed with a soul.

It's a lovely story, but what is it worth if it's not true? Or if you just can't find it in yourself to believe in it?

 

[ijustwishtodie]

I believe that, if people really loved me, they would give me N. Love won't make me not want to die. I'd still wish to be dead no matter what at the end of the day

 

[deadeyesnowman]

In an ideal world, that would be nice...

But in truth, this is a delusion. An illusion. A farce.

People will only bother to love me if they need something out of me before throwing me away like trash or yelling at me like some sort of animal.

... and I am tired of it.

 

[ZeroM24]

Existing feels just so wrong to me. I dont want to be loved for something that violates my mind since birth.

 

[Aplev]

I mean I think this is the attraction of Christianity: human love is fickle, but God's love is eternal and universal. All are made in the image of God, and as such all have equal value and dignity. You are loved for your mere existence as a human being endowed with a soul.

It's a lovely story, but what is it worth if it's not true? Or if you just can't find it in yourself to believe in it?

This is probably why I dislike/hate christianity so much. They raise your hopes up, only to bring them down as you learn more about it, and make it hurt way, way more than if they were upfront from the beginning. It doesn't take reading much of the Bible to see that their "God" as they call it is a partial one: one that prefers people who do what they're told and who are smart enough to do it throroughly and viciously, but not smart enough to learn that they're actually very disposable and will in fact be discarded should they not do what they're told. One that promises that there will be some people who will certainly be sent to a place where is burning all the time which they call "Hell" and that people chosen arbitrarily by said "God" will be watching it joyfully from a place they call "Heaven". One that directly tells you is pulling the strings, and then mocks you for not being able to do anything about it.

If the "God" of the Bible is not the definition and embodiment of both physical and emotional sadism, I don't know what is.

 

[Mayfly]

Love is all around us and it reallyy sucks to feel excluded but Haha i guess if love were that common then it wouldn't be so precious yeah ?
Having a creative mind truly is double-edged sword … I hope you can find peace

 

[We Are Angels]

Loved by who? You mean like everyone just unconditionally loving eachother? How would that work? Even in a situation where everyone was living in harmony somehow, bad things can still happen, so a truely loving person would opt out of reproduction to spare them pain and we would quickly go extinct.

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

I couldn't care less if a human loved me or not. I need to kill myself not love

All I want is for the monsters to remove their laws they passed that make it a crime for me to hire someone else to aid me with suicide. That would make my suicide almost guaranteed.

I couldn't care less if a human loved me or not . What I need is action to help kill myself. If you can pay or hire someone to help you with suicide they don't have to love you. They will do their job regardless how they feel about u

 

[Aplev]

Love is all around us and it reallyy sucks to feel excluded but Haha i guess if love were that common then it wouldn't be so precious yeah ?
Having a creative mind truly is double-edged sword … I hope you can find peace

To me is fake love though, because as soon as someone does something that bothers the other person enough, the relationship ends (friendship, romantic or whatever). True love doesn't exist. Love in this world is conditional. It is given provided that you did something to deserve it. For example, you lent your ears to someone who was going through a bad moment. Think about it this way: if someone you love would start taking things (money, jewels, etc.) away from you, you tell them, but they keep taking things away from you... would you still love them the same? Sure, you might not leave them immediately, but I'm sure you'd would feel less inclined towards spending time with them, let alone help them. I suppose you can also see it as "everyone is loved until they do something to not deserve it". Well, even then, I'm pretty sure there is time you could be spending on helping others, but instead you decide to spend said time on going out with friends and buying things you really don't need but that make you feel good. However, if it's someone that you're close with, say an SO ("Significant Other"), I bet you'll be much more inclined to sacrifice time going out with friends to help them in whatever they need. So, love is conditional.

About "then it wouldn't be so precious", that's exactly why I think there is a high chance that everything is predetermined. For love to be precious, there have to be people who are not receiving any love (or fake love as I call it). So, there has to be some way to guarantee that some people never receive it, so the ones that are receiving it perceive it as precious and can enjoy it in full.

For someone to win, someone has to lose.

 

[Forever Sleep]

It's an interesting idea. A utopia. I think a lot of human 'civilisation' is built on competition though. If we all loved each other equally, would there be any motivation to excel in something or, stand out from the crowd? We do a lot of stuff for appreciation when you think about it. Anything you take a pride in- your house, your work, cooking, sports, a hobby etc. In part, it's probably because other people appreciate it too. If we no longer needed to 'earn' love or appreciation, I wonder if our motivation would diminish.

It's kind of strange to think of in terms of best friends or partners too. People who stand out for us as being extra special. Would everyone just be equally valued?

The sad thing is, I can't even imagine a world like that. I think in part, humans create strong bonds by excluding others- even hating others. How depressing really. I know what you mean though. In the extreme cases- like wars and genocides- it's hard to look at that and not think: 'Can't we all just get along?'

 

[Aplev]

It's an interesting idea. A utopia. I think a lot of human 'civilisation' is built on competition though. If we all loved each other equally, would there be any motivation to excel in something or, stand out from the crowd? We do a lot of stuff for appreciation when you think about it. Anything you take a pride in- your house, your work, cooking, sports, a hobby etc. In part, it's probably because other people appreciate it too. If we no longer needed to 'earn' love or appreciation, I wonder if our motivation would diminish.

It's kind of strange to think of in terms of best friends or partners too. People who stand out for us as being extra special. Would everyone just be equally valued?

The sad thing is, I can't even imagine a world like that. I think in part, humans create strong bonds by excluding others- even hating others. How depressing really. I know what you mean though. In the extreme cases- like wars and genocides- it's hard to look at that and not think: 'Can't we all just get along?'

It's funny that you say this because it's exactly what I was describing in my last reply on this thread, pretty much word by word.

I think that's why I like to think of it as an ideal, a world where not even our physical world is the same, not even our biology. You talk of competition, but competition is something biology-driven (the way I look at it). So is love. If our biology changed such that we love each other truly unconditionally, perhaps so it would our need to be productive by being competitive. Perhaps, we would produce merely for the desire to produce, without any need to feel appreciated or valued by others.
(what I'm describing here is actually similar to the idea depicted in "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", where an attempt of biologically removing certain aspects of the human body is made.)

That would remove the sadism part of the world, though. Which, again, leads me to think this world really has been built/designed by someone else non-human that loves sadism.

 

[Forever Sleep]

It's funny that you say this because it's exactly what I was describing in my last reply on this thread, pretty much word by word.

I think that's why I like to think of it as an ideal, a world where not even our physical world is the same, not even our biology. You talk of competition, but competition is something biology-driven (the way I look at it). So is love. If our biology changed such that we love each other truly unconditionally, perhaps so it would our need to be productive by being competitive. Perhaps, we would produce merely for the desire to produce, without any need to feel appreciated or valued by others.
(what I'm describing here is actually similar to the idea depicted in "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", where an attempt of biologically removing certain aspects of the human body is made.)

That would remove the sadism part of the world, though. Which, again, leads me to think this world really has been built/designed by someone else non-human that loves sadism.

Yeah- that would be amazing. Like- some sci-fi Star Trek ideal species. My imagination won't stretch far enough to apply it to humans sadly but, I admire your vision.

 

[greebo6]

Nice idea but human nature being what it sadly is..... only an external non human force/being could do it. Not that you have to necessarily believe in such a thing of course.

 

[Toxinebulaic]

We have to define our terms here to even begin to approach this problem, and doing that is... complicated.

Not least because even ignoring the interesting question of what you mean when you say everyone and what it means to exist, you'd have to tell us all what love is. That's almost impossible because love is a vague term encompassing several multifaceted concepts, and everybody has their own idea of what it means to them.

I'll explain what I mean with an example.

I tend to save love for use in a romantic sense, and I wouldn't want everybody to love me romantically. I don't think that's what you meant, but what do I know, maybe you swing that way. In that case, what would it mean for everybody to love you romantically? Different people enjoy different things romantically, and so it could not be universally applied. You would need a completely different solution for each person, many of which might compete with other's ideas of romantic love as to make love between them basically impossible.

The same problems arise for basically every other sense you could use the word in. Platonically, the value of a friend is null if everyone is your friend. Familially, not everyone can be your family. Sexually, ew. Obsessively? I don't think I want any amount of that kind of love.

Respect is arguably the best fit for what you're asking, but only because it's difficult to argue that some people shouldn't be respected. It still runs into the problem that different people think respect means different things, and it would be impossible to actually enforce. Respect also doesn't fulfil you emotionally (which is what I suspect you might also mean by love), just afford you the basic level of dignity a human should be given.

I like your question, it's interesting, but for the thought experiment to work you'll have to be more specific.