> We Westerners are not recognizing the great achievements and there is an excessive distrust in the system that connects with the nostalgia for a strong leader.

He talks a lot about happiness in the abstract and how we’re not appreciating the great accomplishments of our current system, but at least from an American’s perspective the big thing he’s not mentioning is capitalism and how these days people just seem to feel squeezed. If you need to work more and more hours at a crappy job with an aggressive boss in order to afford the same amount of food and a crappier place to rent and you can’t afford a family or leisure time and you have all this anxiety around your future being worse than your present, it’s a big deal. And add to that a sense of unfairness at wealth inequality, and a ruling class rigging thing for themselves and critical under-addressed issues like climate change and all the headlines about violence, and corporations spying on you and trying harder and harder to milk you for profit … I mean at some point life just stops being fun. And when that happens it casts a shadow over our philosophical meaning-making and our sense that using our rational mind to play the game that society sets out before us is the winning strategy

His only mention of suffering is a random line in passing “This is why wars always work the same way: I want to destroy you, I suffer and I want revenge.” He doesn’t seem to perceive rational people existing in the current world as sufferin; he just thinks of them as ungrateful.