Or maybe: suffering does not have meaning beyond a mechanical system of blood sacrifice. We age and die so the genes survive better, not to make us wiser or happier. We’re just tools to it, not unique individuals with meaning to some benevolent order. It’s a fucked system that gives people gender dysphoria because the pattern just happened to propagate. If we choose to think that this world cares for us, then we justify its inequities as moral and just simply because they are; simply because they’re “natural.”

There are no comforting external truths and the only palatable meaning that exists is what we invent to make ourselves feel better. There is nothing stopping anyone from believing whatever helps them sleep at night, but such beliefs will never be above manipulation by selfish interests. In fact, our need for comforting beliefs are part of the reason why we’ll be stuck with war, bigotry, and hierarchy till the end of time. We struggle to accept the inherent nihilism of a world that simply just is. We struggle to divorce what ought to be from what is.