Suffering and Life & Emotions

I want to mention that this may be a delicate topic. I do not believe it is “taboo” or “controversial” but it is a topic not often discussed but is still very important in my view and it is worth discussing at times (net positive outcome).

Disclaimer: I am by no means a therapist/psychologist/psychiatrist or have any professional knowledge on mental health disorders/conditions, but I do spend time sitting alone and thinking about things.
Like every single human, one has positive and negative thoughts, and personally, I feel that is unavoidable, so the best thing you can do is try to maximize the positive ones, minimize the negative ones, but acknowledge all of them equally.

/ The point of this post is just to talk about the word Suffering.
I like the word suffering because it is both precise and really encompasses the state of “negative.”

I don’t like using negative, unpleasant, depression, sadness, or even pain, as these are either:

• buzzwords too often used

• have unclear or not well-understood definitions

• don’t resonate to the same degree

• (I’m reaching on this one) the true gravity of these emotions feel blurred, discounted, and disregarded because the antonyms are readily known and used sometimes.
  I am unsure about the reader, but personally, I have seen/heard/read statements like:

  • “turn that negative into a positive!”
    
  • “you aren’t really depressed, you’re just sad!”
    
  • “oh you have food and a roof over your head, why are you being unpleasant!”

  …but I haven’t heard statements like:

  • “oh stop suffering”
    
  • “why are you suffering”

  These statements don’t make much sense. The word suffering can’t be used in this context (I think), and the word is in a way immune to being discounted/ignored and could be a superior word choice (not in all situations of course).

I also like the word suffering because it is relative (?).

It is often associated with really unpleasant adversity or hardship (which is fine), but it is perfectly okay to say you have to suffer in the cold weather for a few minutes because you missed your bus. We are speaking about relative suffering (with absolute suffering/pain/hardship being an even more complicated subject to discuss).

Definition for completeness’ sake:

/ The other point I want to make about suffering (somewhat related), and largely the perspective of sadness/suffering/emotions, is based on a statement I heard (rephrased):

Life is a sum of your emotional experiences
and so how you feel and are, is how your life is

I don’t think this means to “fake” happiness or something similar, but something I’ve been thinking about is in general, things rarely happen according to plan perfectly (obvious), but I try to go a step further and just expect bad stuff to happen. I really mean that the base case is some negatives WILL happen. Anything from dropping your phone or having a blank brain moment and putting your milk in your cabinet (…😟) instead of the fridge.

And also more negative events. People will get sick, you will lose loved ones, relationships will be rocky, you’ll get lost, things will get rescheduled, and a boatload of things both in and out of your control WILL GO WRONG. It is literally the nature of the world and there is some baseline level of “wrong” that even the most wealthy, well-connected, and well-prepared individuals cannot avoid.

Sure, you can reduce problems in one area, but surely you may have more problems in another area. A friend mentioned that money can fix this. Sure, money can reduce some subset of problems BUT it does not reduce this phenomenon to 0. It may in fact cause more problems and make it worse!

I have found recognition that at baseline, suffering/negative events will occur, to be very helpful because when something goes wrong, it will either be because:

1. you weren’t ready and need more preparation

2. there are factors outside of your control, and whatever that happened that is “wrong”, is part of that baseline level of wrongness

Discerning between the two is a different challenge, but at least one is more aware.

Side note: I want to write about the rabbit hole that is preparation eventually.

tl;dr Suffering is an interesting word to describe that which is negative. Also, things are bound to go wrong pretty often and so expecting them proactively and preparing as much as you can to avoid them can be valuable.

Cheers,

Vish

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Published on April 14, 2023.