Suffering serves a role. Or at least, it can be very useful. It’s one of the most potent motor for growth that we have. It throws things into perspective. It can spur us towards action, towards new opportunities. It changes the scale with whom we judge what happens to us, often to our benefit.
Ongoing, long-term suffering is bad. But a bit of suffering… I’ve met many people that were much the better for having suffered a bit. Ditto for me. On the other hand, you sometimes see people who look like they haven’t suffered quite enough. They can be nice enough. But you can tell. They don’t understand suffering. Their empathy is stunted. They get frustrated over things that shouldn’t matter.
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It’s hard to tell where psychological suffering comes from, but you are right that we can control it. We can rein it in, or wallow in our own misery. I think neither option is really satisfying. There is a time to mourn, and a time to laugh.
I lived through a bad breakup last year. It would have been really easy for me to suppress my emotions, my suffering. I can do it, I have done it in the past. But I refused to. The pain was an acknowledgement that the relationship meant something. It was a ritual of sorts. It also served as a lesson. It changed me, and I know there are things in how I act that will never be the same due to this. They were deeply rewired. If I had avoided suffering through meditation or otherwise, first I would never have dug in enough to understand what I did, and the lesson wouldn’t have been visceral enough to stick.
In the past, suffering helped me understand things about myself that were deeply buried and wouldn’t have otherwise come to the surface. In particular, I understood two big drivers of suffering for me: the feeling of powerlessness, when part of your fate is outside your control; and a fear that I don’t really matter to people whom I love — it would be more comforting to know they hate me, but the doubt and the fact that they are simply indifferent really hurts.
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Of course, Nietzsche:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.
I wouldn’t read too much into the soundness of his argument. But empirically, I think he’s right. The most remarkable people I have met are people who have suffered grievously, but have managed to transcend this suffering.
Of course, for every person that transcend her suffering, how many others drown in it?
I agree in principle, but I have one reservation.
Suffering serves a role. Or at least, it can be very useful. It’s one of the most potent motor for growth that we have. It throws things into perspective. It can spur us towards action, towards new opportunities. It changes the scale with whom we judge what happens to us, often to our benefit.
Ongoing, long-term suffering is bad. But a bit of suffering… I’ve met many people that were much the better for having suffered a bit. Ditto for me. On the other hand, you sometimes see people who look like they haven’t suffered quite enough. They can be nice enough. But you can tell. They don’t understand suffering. Their empathy is stunted. They get frustrated over things that shouldn’t matter.
---
It’s hard to tell where psychological suffering comes from, but you are right that we can control it. We can rein it in, or wallow in our own misery. I think neither option is really satisfying. There is a time to mourn, and a time to laugh.
I lived through a bad breakup last year. It would have been really easy for me to suppress my emotions, my suffering. I can do it, I have done it in the past. But I refused to. The pain was an acknowledgement that the relationship meant something. It was a ritual of sorts. It also served as a lesson. It changed me, and I know there are things in how I act that will never be the same due to this. They were deeply rewired. If I had avoided suffering through meditation or otherwise, first I would never have dug in enough to understand what I did, and the lesson wouldn’t have been visceral enough to stick.
In the past, suffering helped me understand things about myself that were deeply buried and wouldn’t have otherwise come to the surface. In particular, I understood two big drivers of suffering for me: the feeling of powerlessness, when part of your fate is outside your control; and a fear that I don’t really matter to people whom I love — it would be more comforting to know they hate me, but the doubt and the fact that they are simply indifferent really hurts.
---
Of course, Nietzsche:
I wouldn’t read too much into the soundness of his argument. But empirically, I think he’s right. The most remarkable people I have met are people who have suffered grievously, but have managed to transcend this suffering.
Of course, for every person that transcend her suffering, how many others drown in it?