As old Schop said: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other."

People look to religion and metaphysics for justice and salvation. This poor "Egg" guy is trapped in a trillion-year cycle of pain and injustice. I guess it's Buddhist hell, too...

That's not true at all though. This is how a baby thinks about a needle. Often pain is less painful than we expect, and pleasure is pleasantly surprising.

> The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.

Getting eaten is the last 5 minutes of a prey animal's life. If you asked that antelope whether those few clumsy minutes of bleeding out outweighed a lifetime of frolicking through fields, all the children they sired, all the berries they ate, I think they'd be a bit offended.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the story. This is a worldview committed to pessimism, where bad must always outweigh good because it is easier to upset ourselves by contemplating bad things than to soothe ourselves by contemplating good things, and therefore the bad must clearly predominate. There are very few things I'm willing to dismiss as a mindset problem, but this is one of them. Schopenhauer should have gone to therapy.

I have a hard time thinking of any kind or quantity of pleasure that would outweigh some of the more horrible fates that some people have had.

Sure. I'm not saying the good outweighs the bad in every individual life. But you're explicitly picking the most extreme examples, and this is a claim being made about life in general.

I believe the point is that the person in The Egg experiences every extreme example.

They live each life separately, though, with no memories of their other lives. Joe from Idaho isn't suffering in the moment because of the experiences of some poor sap halfway across the world, even if they're both part of a greater continuum. The character will only regain memory of all the events when they "hatch" & become a god, at which point (being divinely capable of remembering billions of lifetimes) they will presumably have the mental fortitude to deal with that trauma.

As far as we know, people don’t remember anything after they die. Does that mean it’s no big deal to torture you to death? You won’t remember it.