We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our world looks a bit better than purgatory. It has its ups and its downs, but the ups certainly outweigh the downs, and there’s almost always enough hope to go around.
But, despite this, we must remember that our world contains hell.
Every year, five million children under the age of five pass away. This means that, every six seconds, parents have the worst thing that could ever happen to a person happen to them. They have the most special and important thing in their entire life irreversibly and permanently taken away. And, as much as we want to help them, we know that there’s nothing we can do to lessen their grief.
For another example, currently, there are three million adults worldwide who live with cluster headaches, which are widely regarded as the most painful experience one can have in their entire lifetime, far exceeding the pain of breaking a bone, getting shot, or giving birth. On a scale from one to ten, sufferers, on average, rate them a 9.7/10. And, because sufferers often attempt to kill themselves while experiencing them to escape the pain, they’re often colloquially known as “suicide headaches.”
And, that’s just within the realm of human suffering. If we’re focusing on animals, things look even worse.
Each year, more than 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, where they are given less space than a single sheet of paper to move around. Because they’re so severely confined, they live in a constant state of distress. And, worse, because they can’t exercise, they bones becomes brittle, causing extraordinarily painful keel bone fractures. The research on this is still developing, but our best guess is that they experience at least a couple hundred hours of pain so intense that they’re unable to focus on almost anything else. As you can imagine, virtually every person who has ever researched their lives in depth believes that they would be far better off dead.
And, in the wild, things are probably vast orders of magnitude worse.
To give just one example, the new world screwworm is a fly that lays its eggs in the wounds and body openings of warm-blooded animals such as cows and dogs. Its larvae, upon hatching, burrow in their host’s bodies, devouring from them inside out. This is so extraordinarily painful that the standard response for humans is to immediately give the patient morphine before cutting the screw worm out of their flesh. Since 2023, over 185,000 cases in animals have been reported in Latin America. And, since this is mostly just pets and farm animals, we can assume that it’s an extreme undercount of how many wild animals suffer from them too.
We all would really like to believe that the world is a good place, but we must also remember the vast suffering that it contains.
When we go about our daily lives, commuting to work, gossiping with coworkers, and eating lunch, there are living beings all across the world experiencing unimaginable suffering.
This is why I think that everyone should, at least once in their life, seriously consider giving a substantial amount of their income or their time to working to solve these problems.
It’s easy to want to pretend that they’re not happening, but, when you acknowledge them, the idea of working on them can be pretty motivating.
And, in fact, each of the problems that I’ve mentioned so far are completely solvable.
First, five million children die each year, but the vast majority of these deaths are from preventable diseases. Because developed nations give so little aid to the undeveloped ones, the marginal cost to save a life is currently around only $5,000. By making personal donations or working in global health, you could easily help to save tens if not hundreds or thousands of children’s lives in your lifetime.
Second, three million adults suffer from cluster headaches worldwide, but there are known and effective treatments for them. The main problem is that they’re simply illegal because they often make use of psychedelic substances. By supporting research or advocacy in cluster headaches, you could help to make them a thing of the past.
Third, 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, but the cage-free movement has had some incredible successes. In 2007, 3.2% of US chickens were cage-free, but now, as a result of corporate campaigns, only 45% are. By supporting these campaigns or otherwise working within the movement, you could probably, in expectation, help hundreds of thousands if not millions of chickens.
Lastly, at least millions of animals are devoured by screw worms each year, but, from 2006 to 2023, governments had completely eliminated the screw worm from North America. By supporting research and advocacy, you could help eliminate screw worms from the whole world for good.
And, even if you don’t have money to donate or time to spare, you can still bring these issues up to your friends.
Your chicken number is too low by orders of magnitude