I think we can reduce suffering a lot. Maybe not to zero, but a lot. And I think that a world that has some suffering in it can still be worth living in. And, more importantly, I don’t actually get to decide whether the world will keep existing. I just get to decide how I live in it.
The difference between a million people in pain and 999,999 people in pain is a person, no longer in pain. I care about that. I don’t care about it any less because there are a million more of them; I wouldn’t care about it any less if there were a trillion more of them. It’s good that I be happy and it’s good that you be happy and every bit of happiness is a good thing in itself, not just a step towards a world that is on the whole ‘okay’.
That first sentence from the anon is so fundamentally baffling perhaps only Star-Lord can answer it:
