The older I get, the more I realize that not all pain carries a lesson. Some wounds don’t shape us—they simply break us. Some losses don’t carve new depths in the soul—they hollow it out. There is suffering in this world that feels gratuitous, pointless, beyond redemption. It doesn’t forge character, it doesn’t deepen compassion, it doesn’t inspire art. It only destroys.
This leaves a tension in my own worldview. I’ve built much of my philosophy around determinism, the idea that every moment is necessary, inevitable, an unbroken chain of cause and effect. Alongside this, my Forcing Theory of consciousness suggests that awareness itself must either expand—generating novelty, creativity, and growth—or collapse into stagnation and dissolution. Most of life is lived in that dynamic flux. We fall apart, then reassemble with more depth. We collapse into despair, only to re-emerge with unexpected insight.
But what about the suffering that collapses and never re-expands? Trauma that severs instead of weaving. Illness that only deteriorates. Catastrophe that leaves nothing behind but silence. These are the kinds of suffering that mock the comforting story that “everything happens for a reason.” They sit in sharp defiance of the idea that collapse is always a prelude to renewal.
Religious traditions and even much of secular philosophy have wanted to see suffering as meaningful—redemptive, purifying, necessary. But determinism undercuts that comfort. If the whole system is causal, then suffering may be arbitrary. It may not be leading anywhere. Sometimes the most honest response is simply to admit that a person’s awareness collapsed, and it did not return. No hidden gift. No cosmic preparation. Just loss.
This is where absurdism becomes essential to me. Absurdism doesn’t demand that life justify itself, or that suffering prove useful in the end. It accepts that much of what happens is without reason. And instead of flinching away from that fact, it says: revolt anyway. Create meaning where there is none. Continue to expand in a world that makes no promises.
Absurdism prevents Forcing Theory from becoming too triumphant, too quick to turn collapse into a hero’s arc. It reminds me that not all collapse is productive. Some collapse is terminal. And yet—for as long as I am still here, still expanding—I can choose how to respond to it.
This is where the ethical dimension arises. If I can’t redeem another’s suffering, I can at least witness it. I can stand near the collapse without pretending it is secretly an expansion. Presence becomes its own form of expansion: the growth that occurs not in the one who collapsed, but in the one who refuses to look away. In Mirror Theory terms, the person who suffers becomes a distorted mirror. They don’t reflect me as I want to be, or even as I am, but as I could be if collapse overtakes me. To look into that mirror is to face both terror and responsibility.
And so the reconciliation is not in explaining suffering away, but in refusing to erase it with false redemption. Collapse exists. Collapse without recovery exists. Gratuitous suffering exists. To live honestly is to acknowledge this. And to live ethically is to remain present to it, even when it has no meaning to offer.
In this way, Forcing Theory does not deny gratuitous suffering, but absorbs it. Collapse is part of the system, as much as expansion. Awareness is not guaranteed to survive; it is guaranteed to oscillate, and sometimes to extinguish. What remains for those of us still expanding is the choice of how to bear witness.
Perhaps this is a kind of reconciliation—not one that redeems collapse, but one that recognizes it fully. Suffering may not lead anywhere, but it still calls something out of us: compassion, honesty, revolt. If collapse is inevitable, so is the possibility that someone else will be there to face it, unblinking. And maybe that, if not redemption, is at least recognition.