I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.
I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.