I don’t buy any of this “do everything to stop suffering” bullshit. Suffering makes us human. Read some Aldous Huxley. Attempting to avoid the unavoidable is neuroticism by definition. Learn to appreciate your suffering and get to acceptance of it as quickly as possible.
To be That Buddhist Guy - as the old saying goes: "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".
To me this is the critical distinction. Pain (loss of loved ones, physical pain, health issues, losing a job etc) is a part of life. If you love, you ultimately lose. This is what life is, this is what love is. It's gunna hurt at times. This cannot be changed and cannot be controlled. This is the Buddhist "first arrow".
But. What you ~do~ with that pain - how you respond to a crisis, how you think of yourself as victim or otherwise, how much you ruminate on the self: "damn, this shit always happens to me / why am I always ill / I'm poorer than that guy over there and it's eating me up" - all of this ~can~ be changed. This is suffering. We're all so bound up in the self that the ego very often controls our response to pain. Suffering blooms. This is the "second arrow".
Like anything else, it takes practice to get better at this. But you can get better at it. I know I have. I'm still - like most humans - often bound by instinctual reactions. I'm still triggered by anger and fear and uncertainty at regular periods. But with mindfulness and attention training it becomes easier to be content, easier to "put a gap between stimulus and response", easier to just notice the ego flaring up, see those moments of regret or jealousy or greed.
Attention truly is at the centre of this. Noticing from as dispassionate a position as possible that you are reacting in a particular way will only come when you pay attention to your inner dialogue. That's another reason why attention being eaten by gadgets / notifications / etc is so nasty.
Hey - in brief: a long and consistent meditation practice, and retreats when I can. I've also done some MBSR[0] courses and am training to be an MBSR teacher - much of that focuses on putting some distance in-between an initial "pain" and the response to that pain.
Yeah, if you get a nail through your foot, don't pull it out! Make the nail a point of pride, as you limp through your life! Humans are supposed to suffer, after all.
I have gained a great deal of value from the stoic/Buddhist traditions around acceptance of a certain amount of suffering, but 'learn to appreciate your suffering' is just plain silly in most cases. If masochism is your thing, fair enough, but don't act like it's what everyone should do.
The author didn't even indicate you should do everything to avoid suffering, but you're going after the idea like a ghost has been haunting you with it. I would normally assume you meant 'appreciate' as one might appreciate an avalanche - from the farthest possible vantage point - but you took that right to the "any of this 'x' bullshit" level right form the hop, just because the author made a reasonable assumption. (which was not that we should "do everything to stop suffering"). Nearly every human and other living creature seems to act in accordance with the author's assumption, so it's probably not a bad thing to assume.
Suffering is bad - arguably as bad can be. If I must live with it, I'll appreciate how polished the turd is, but if I don't have to live with that turd, why would I?
You nailed it! (No punt intended obviously) This is my exact thought process each time someone says that suffering is something that should be "tolerated", absolutely NOT!
Something about the suffering you experience ultra-running rewired my brain, actually. I came to think that we try too hard (in the first world) to make ourselves overly comfortable. And, in fact, some amount of suffering and struggle motivates and promotes the human brain. Good innovations, culture, food, etc tend to come from these places.
I think the article means suffering in a first couple Maslo’s Hierarchy kind of way, i.e. food, sleep, disease, etc. This is hard to argue with, especially when kids are dying of easily preventable problems in some parts of the world. This is clearly not what I mean. We can and should do everything to solve that suffering.
But, by contrast: having to walk two miles every day to get somewhere because you can’t afford a car is probably a good suffering with lots of fabulously creative solutions.
It feels to me like we sometimes confuse inconvenience for suffering and then try to “solve it” because “suffering is bad”.
But there’s a secondary problem with this: suffering can’t be appreciated by definition - in fact a good working definition of suffering is “that which is not appreciated”. So asking people to do that just generates gibberish.
Or grifting.
An example I see on socmedia regularly: some mogul worth 20 to 100 million, or more, lecturing the rest of us on the value of suffering. It’s ridiculous. Does that guy suffer? No.
So I prefer not to encourage this and say honestly, as a near working class person who struggles mightily to save & earn - I don’t appreciate suffering and I especially don’t like to hear it from people materially insulated from suffering. End of story.
You're hyper focused on the instant effects of suffering. Intentional suffering helps prepare us for unexpected things down the road that will be much more difficult, such as deaths in the family, injuries to ourselves, getting fired, etc... Suffering that is out of our control will also make us more resilient
Your assessment of suffering being unappreciable is borderline ludicrous. I can appreciate someone else who works hard. Do they have to earn 20 million to get my appreciation? Absolutely not. I can appreciate my own hard work when I get off my couch and run a few miles. I could have stayed on the couch and taken it easy. Do I have to break my back for a noble cause for it to be suffering? Absolutely not.
If life was just a happy stroll for 100 years straight, that would actually be miserable.
> An example I see on socmedia regularly: some mogul worth 20 to 100 million, or more, lecturing the rest of us on the value of suffering. It’s ridiculous. Does that guy suffer? No.
It's kind of ridiculous to assume that merely having lots of money removes all suffering.
I mean, it sounds to me like someone worth 100 million has quite a lot of attachment, which I am told is the basis of suffering according to some guy under a tree.
Partially agree with you, but don't stop at appreciating or accepting suffering. What makes us human is overcoming suffering. So yes, don't avoid it, but overcome it. Avoid complacency.
I agree. There’s beauty in suffering. There’s lessons in it. It sucks but when you come out the other side I wouldn’t trade the lessons I got for anything.
That's absolutely horrible position to take that held back our civilisation so many times already. We should leave it to philosophers. The ones that nobody reads.
Yeah, just saying suffering is bad without any context is not helpful. Apart from being unavoidable, certain kinds of suffering produces happiness for people down the road. For example, running & training for a marathon was suffering but the reward and experience of doing it was life changing, taught me so much about myself.
