The box

Imagine you were born into a box. It is a special box. It is completely dark, there are no windows or openings, and there is only darkness. Everyday at specified times food drops from the ceiling, an unpleasant plasticine-like dough which you discovered was edible only when you took a bite of it out of desperation. You do not know why you are in the box, what the purpose of all this is. You shout, but no one answers.

No one answers because there is no one. You were placed in the box and the box, and you, was then forgotten. The box obeys its programming and keeps you alive with food, water, air, and medicine. The problem is that that’s not the only thing it does. In addition to keeping you alive, it is programmed to periodically squash, heat, freeze, electrocute, and in general torment its contents in every way imaginable without killing it. Each day is hell and an unpredictable hell at that. There is no reprieve, only pain until unconsciousness, food, and then pain again. Then one day the box, obeying its programming, stops holding back and kills you in the most painful way possible. You die screaming for help, demanding to know why this is happening to you. No one replies. There is no one.

Would you have wanted to have been born at all?

There is no meaning to your life or your suffering. Each day you lived in pain for no other reason than that you had been placed into the box by accident and the box, being a box, simply obeyed what it had been programmed to do. You might rationalize your suffering were it not for the fact that the cunning of the box is such that no sustained coherent reasoning is possible given the way it disrupts every thought with blinding pain. Its programming might have come from its creator’s desire to serve some perverse purpose, but that is irrelevant now: its creator, or in fact anyone at all, is no longer around to appreciate this function of the box. There was no purpose to your pain, not even a perverse one.

It would have been better not to have been born at all, if being born meant the box. It is a life with no meaning and no possibility of meaning, not even an imagined one. It is merely a life of pain, and even the pain has no meaning. It would be better to not live at all than to live such a life in the box.

The point of this is that people who say life has some mysterious inherent value are wrong. Life does not necessarily have value — in fact the idea of the box reveals the possibility of a life with disvalue or negative value. Such a life cannot be a gift, if its being a gift is what gives it value. The world would not be a better place with more people born into boxes. It would be a worse place. Life would only be a curse for these poor souls.

What the box tells us is that life has no special value of its own. It would not be possible to have a life with negative value if it did and even if it did there is nothing so special about its value that does not allow it to become a curse. Life is only valuable because of the value it allows — pleasure, meaning, purpose, good… take your pick. A life that could not have any of that would have no value. And a life that had only disvalue would be a curse.

Life is an instrument for what is truly valuable and its value depends only on its usefulness as an instrument in obtaining value. It has only instrumental value. And if the instrument is broken, if all it does is beget disvalue,

It should be discarded like any broken tool.

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