I realize this is a bit of an odd question, with a bit of an odd array of answers. I'm trying to get a feel for several things and may not yet be able to articulate them in a poll like this.

Basically we evolved in highly different circumstances, say hunter-gatherer circumstances. We found fire, language at some point and have been accelerating ever since (bronze, iron, sailing, industry, HUGE leap with digital and electricity, contraception, nuclear, AI) . . . . now we function in incredibly synthetic environments, abstract interfaces, we are inredibly interconnectedness, twitterverse phenomenon, blah blah blah. Especially in WEIRD countries we seem to see new dilemmas emerge (anxiety and depression), though we also debatably don't have much data on them in the past. Certainly multiculturalism on such a grand and FAST scale is a new experiment.

The point is: many people (evolutionary biology types) feel we are no longer equipped to find any sort of sustaining meaning/fulfillment in our current circumstances. We are just too far removed from nature, from physical effort, from close-knit kin-group empathy, from the sorts of activities and face-to-face interactions for which our neurochemistry developed. It's regularly recognized that we need an 'aim' or 'endeavor' to give us a sense of satisfaction in life; but maybe everything is so abstract and unnatural now, the aims no longer suffice. This might be the view of technological pessimists, people who believe religion still retains much unrecognized value, and people who believe change is simply happening too fast.

Then you have the others who insist history was a nightmare dominated by bigotry, ignorance, brutality, and dogma. It was a miserable scrabbling for 99.9 percent of sentient creatures (even just humans), for 99.9 percent of time.

I suspect the manifold crowd is a bit more technologically optimistic, free-thinking, and less likely to desire the constraint of dogma/religion/tradition. I'm just curious how most of us begin thinking about questions like this, and if we have a general sense of either meaning or suffering diminishing in the modern day––and if so, what that means for the correlate (meaning or suffering on the other side).

The primary questions were probably the first two or three––but as this is a poll, I thought I might as well add more as they came