The "bleak, chaotic place with no intrinsic meaning" conflates two things unfairly. Consider a beautiful sunrise on a tropical beach. It's part of the universe and not bleak and chaotic yet you don't have to believe it has a meaning enjoy it. As an atheist, the survival of us and our ancestors for ~4bn years suggests the universe is not so bleak in parts.
Thought it might be bleak for those who are ill-equipped to deal with the modern types of chaos (eg anxiety and depression). Like someone else said, this could all be a matter of labeling the world as "good" or "bad"; the problem with these labels is that they are rarely self-examined partly because it takes a lot of epistemological thinking and self-awareness to reach that level of meta-cognition.
From your points on conflation, just to clarify, are you saying that meaning does not determine our feelings about the degree of bleakness? Maybe meaning is a multiplier of feelings depending on the direction you are interested in. For non-bleakness, meaningfulness would multiply the amount of enjoyment, and for bleakness, non-meaningfulness would multiply the amount of hatred. Those two assume that state of bleakness is naturally attached with intrinsic feelings.
I wish I've read more about this topic; it is ultra interesting.
I dunno, I see the continued survival of our species as a cruel joke - certainly bleak - given the amount of harm we do to each other and everything around us.
Suppose there really was a loving creator that put this all in place just for us. Then, yeah, we've made quite a mess of it, and it really all rather sucks.
However, if it's just a bleak, uncaring universe, then the fact that we're around is amazing in the first place, and the fact that we've managed to carve out a niche where we can, by and large, thrive in ever larger numbers [1] is outright awesome and amazing.
It also then enjoins us to "keep on fighting the good fight". For example, I don't think there is "automatic karma" imposed somehow - it is incumbent on us humans to impose justice as well as we can.
[1] The notion that things are terrible and getting worse is wrong, I think. See for example
- Julian Simon, "The State of Humanity"
- Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of our Nature"
Harm is again an unnecessarily negative judgement. We are the same matter and energy (nature) as the Earth, the Moon, the Sun. What we do when our matter and energy moves around is not any more purposeful or harmful than what the Sun does.
It's kind of like asking if the Universe was harmed by the big bang.
Then again we also do a lot of great thing and create and experience love and beauty. I have no idea how to quantify and weigh the good against the bad, so perhaps it comes down to temperament if you consider the human existence an overall negative or positive experience.
I find that people's outlook on humanity comes down to where they focus their attention. We're definitely a mixed bag of wonderful and terrible. But, the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time are boringly nice to everyone and everything. That boring niceness is as common, as important and as easy to forget as air.
Also, the world has many very bad aspects and some of them are getting worse. But, on average the world is getting to be a better place rapidly. Today is the most peaceful, most healthy, most just, most educated, most comfortable time ever. As people who were born and grew up knowing only such good times, we easily forget how so much of what we would consider atrocities today was common a mere few hundred years ago.
We have adjusted to be tremendously more sensitive than our ancestors. And, we are infinitely more informed about every bad thing everywhere in the world. That doesn't make everything OK. But, it is a great sign that more attention and effort is being focused on the remaining problems than ever before. If you are deciding to focus your attention on the problems we still have, then you are a sign of how the world is getting better.
With that attention, you can find problems that remain. With some historical perspective, you can figure out which ones you can best help reduce. With some effort, you can be part of making the remaining problems in the world even smaller.
Great points. Despite my cynicism and strong bias towards the self-destruction of mankind, there would be always be moments when I thought "hey, I'm glad this guy/gal existed because the world is a better place because of them." Things do get better when you look at the world around you.
