On Suffering

2023.12.10

Meditations: 20/22

Why do we suffer? What does it mean to suffer? How do you overcome suffering? Is our suffering simply evidence for an absent god?

That’s right, I’m about to answer questions that world religions have been struggling with for thousands of years in a 1500 word post: buckle up.

The DMV is all in your Head

I think a roughly working definition of suffering that captures the subjectivity of it is the following:

Suffering is the perception of pain. 

The ‘perception’ part gives me a lot of needed wiggle room; after all, a common sentiment that I agree with is that a great deal of suffering is rooted in our perception of things more so than the actual reality. 

When you’re in line at the DMV, you’re really just standing in a room with other people. The very fact that the room is the DMV and the line always takes longer than you’d expect and you have to be there because the government said so and you have a million other things you want to be doing are all just additional qualifiers to the fact that you’re standing in a room waiting for something.

So, before it took a global pandemic to force the slowest moving part of the government to enter the 21st century and allow us to schedule appointments online, why was the DMV commonly considered the pinnacle of human suffering? 

It certainly wasn’t because of some innate hellish quality about the building; rather, maybe we all played into the narrative of the DMV as hell when we got there, so it became hell. How much of suffering is in your head?

Physical Suffering

Physical suffering is an interesting class of suffering, because it feels like there is this objective thing that is the source of your tortured mental state.

After I originally broke my back, I was in constantly suffering. It was a transverse process fracture on both sides of my L5 vertebra; even walking could shoot pain up though my body. The whole thing was not very pleasant, to say the least. I would consider that suffering.

On the other hand, when I got thrown in Judo earlier this year and landed on my left hand poorly, it was quite painful, but I wouldn’t say that it was “suffering.” There was kind of this intermittent throbbing emanating from my hand for maybe a week, but it didn’t really bother me. It was a constant reminder of “yeah, I do cool stuff.”

I think there are two interesting takeaways here: 

1. The hand injury was physically isolated, while the back injury was the core of my body and shot out in every which way.

2. My hand injury was obviously temporary and didn’t impede much more than grabbing gi for a week, while the back injury was a permanent change (at least one transverse process never healed) and was supposed to stop me from running, squatting, benching, deadlift, etc, etc ever again. 

Number two illustrates the more obviously psychological portion of the suffering: how much more was I focusing on the pain when I was under the impression it that would permeate my existence until my death and serve as a constant reminder of my inability to physically express myself in the world? 

Yeah, I’m dramatic, but I’m giving it to you straight–that’s how I felt. And I can’t be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 90% of my suffering from that experience was removed from the physical pain itself because of how great the mental anguish I was in.

If pain is the perception of suffering, I was pulling ahead all of my projected suffering and discounting it like a cash flow until I was dealing with not only the weight of the injury, but the weight the injury would have on the rest of my life. In a way, I was building a psychological prisoner in which suffering (forever) was the only option. 

I tore that prison down, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t built others.

Depression vs Depressed Thinking

I read something about the difference between depression and depressed thinking the other day–depression is a real emotional state to be experienced, depressed thinking is a collection of negative thought patterns that both occur during depression and can induce depression like states. 

Take a few examples:

There is no doubt that mental anguish is the most frequent sort of human suffering in the West. It’s tough because you might be literally depressed at one point, but, if you’re not careful, the thoughts you have when you are there can perpetuate a lifetime of further mental suffering.

You don’t have to be depressed to use words in a negative way that traps yourself. It’s hard to catch these patterns, because they really can be quite subtle; it almost requires hyper vigilance to reprogram your brain away from them. 

I think some of the worst suffering comes when you convince yourself that some experience you have will never end, when some negative emotional state will stay with you forever.

If you convince yourself that it will never end, one day you might realize that you’re actually fine now, but you keep thinking depressed thoughts; your body has recovered from the experience, but your mind remains jaded and damaged.

Suffering as Unique

I think that overuse of the depressed thoughts leads to an inherently self centered narcissistic trap that is to be avoided at all costs: the idea that your suffering is somehow unique & entitles you to special treatment. 

Maybe this is the nature of all self imposed prisons—you find your suffering to be so great that you can’t overcome it. What about everyone else who had objectively worse suffering than you did but live happy and joyous lives and accomplish amazing things? 

The moment you believe that your suffering is insurmountable is the moment that you die.

I once knew someone who was obsessed with this idea, that he was uniquely marked and cursed by the universe and damned to live in a self contained prison, alone, alone, alone. Talk about a self fulfilling prophecy–he kept doing things to prove himself right. 

Sometimes, I’m guilty of finding my suffering to be unique, too, though. When life hits you two or three times in a row, especially when you feel like you’re “doing everything right,” it’s hard to not think you’re cursed.

But, why were you “doing everything right” to begin with? Was it so you would never suffer again, or was it so that when something bad inevitably did happen, you were that much more prepared to deal with it?

Overcoming everyday

There’s this romantic notion of some great fight to be had in life, some moment where good overcomes evil, but that’s bullshit.

It’s a war fought as a thousand little battles every day, and one dimension of that war is triumph & striving vs suffering & anguish. There’s not a discrete moment where someone or the world will give you permission to stop feeling pain from something bad that happened to you. Your thoughts give you permission to overcome the suffering a little bit more everyday.

Suffering doesn’t end when you walk out of the DMV; the beginning of its end is when you’re still stuck in line but change how you’re thinking about it. 

Your brain is like a computer. You can see a certain portion of what’s going on, whatever the screen is showing, but there are all these other programs running in the background. You can learn to read the code and even start editing them, if you try hard enough.

It’s not easy, but it might be the most worthwhile thing there is. After all, you’ll be stuck with you forever.

Live Deeply,