Some people say it’s natural that life is full of suffering and our goal is to overcome this suffering with our mind and body. Buddhists say life itself is suffering, and enlightenment is to escape the cycle of suffering. Life seems to be one long list of problems, that ensnare you one after the other, until you meet the great problem: death.
Death is something it seems no one can escape, even if scientists solved aging and all health problems, there’s still accidents or murder, and in this universe of constant dangers to life, there’s no such thing as being 100% safe. Even if you somehow stayed safe for a long long time, there’s still the possibility of the heat death of the universe to contend with the “Big Freeze”, or the “Big Crunch” or the “Big Rip”, so all you are really doing is delaying death a very long time, not solving it.
Enough about death, suffering is what we’re looking at. The question is, can some suffering be good? We know that great suffering isn’t good, this is obvious, you can’t live a life like that. But what about little bits of suffering, here and there? What’s the definition of a little suffering, where is the line? Does suffering give meaning to things, or only to a certain point?
If we lived in a world where there was zero suffering, would it be satisfactory? If you never got hungry, thirsty, never got bored, tired, painful, stressed, pressured, unhappy, jealous, angry, confused, lonely, then would you seek anything out? You’d technically be content with whatever situation you were in, and never do anything, as to not be content is to suffer. No one would need any help and no one would bond over challenges, there would be no such thing as a challenge, as everything would be pleasurable. I’m not sure pleasure even exists in a world without suffering, as it’s the opposite, and without its opposite to define it, it basically just becomes doing something, not enjoying something. It’s hard to tell if you’d get the same pleasure if you had no possibility to feel any discomfort.
Suffering is part of the duality of life. When you’re chronically ill, you can start to suffer more than you feel pleasure, and this is one of the gateways to depression. Everything becomes unbalanced, and it seems impossible to balance it back without recovering.
It is possible to at least attempt to balance it out, and any shift back to more pleasure is surely worth it. We can suffer for so long, and even forget how much we’re suffering because we start to adapt to it. The thing about suffering, is it’s a ladder, and once you’ve experienced higher suffering, suddenly the suffering below isn’t as bad in comparison, that is to say, with experience limited suffering becomes manageable. Then again, not all pain and suffering is the same, it comes in different categories, not to mention physical and mental, but it can combine in different areas. To add further to this, it’s almost impossible to compare one person’s suffering to another, as you can’t feel as they do, our suffering is very personal and unique to us.
Physical symptoms of suffering can be horrible to get through, but mental ones are terrible too, and can’t really be compared. Sheer panic is something that you can’t really compare to physical pain. I’ve suffered kidney stones, and whilst the pain was unbearable at first, you start to adapt to it. But panic and dread, are something you can’t really adapt to sometimes, I panic over various phobias and no amount of adaptation works, maybe only something like hypnotism might lead to an escape for the brain’s system of phobia.
Suffering is an all encompassing word, and whilst I’ve generalised it so far, it shouldn’t really be generalised. It’s hard to draw lines as to what suffering is acceptable and what isn’t. For instance some people like spicy food, they like it because it causes slight suffering, a sort of masochistic sense of taste, and these people can advance the level of spice that they can handle bit by bit, until they can eat extremely spicy food with little suffering. Their brains and bodies adapt to the suffering, this is in comparison to other people who can’t even take slightly spicy food, and would experience a horrible time, that can even give them a phobia of spicy food.
Exercise is another realm of suffering, the phrase “no pain no gain” is commonly understood. Our bodies seem to reward us for exercising by releasing endorphins, sort of like giving a dog a treat for doing a trick. We train ourselves to train ourselves, instinctively we learn that exercise creates a strong body, and a strong body supports a strong mind. Strong in this sense, is a quality that humans desire very much, similar to wealth, because it’s a quality that protects you from things that can harm you. To be weak, is to be at the mercy of more and more, not just on a societal level, but on a microscopic level too, by exercising, you develop a body that can fend of all types of illness and disease.
Chronic illness puts us in a permanently weakened state, a state where exercise seems impossible, you just don’t have the energy to exercise, and if you exercise, your body gives you zero rewards, it instead punishes you, it’s constantly telling you that you need to rest, and it refuses to let you use up energy without severe consequences. So as humans do, we adapt, we do less and less, as our body and mind demands, and we find that we get weaker and weaker, and our illness gets worse, and we find that we’ve been told to dig a hole, and now we’re stuck in that hole.
The answer isn’t to exercise and ignore your body, that just leads to destruction, the answer is to continue to find out why your body is in a weakened state, something must be missing from your system of equilibrium, to set it so far off its balance, that you’re constantly unwell.
This realm is incredibly complex, there are millions of pathways and interactions going on in the body, which amounts to thousands of conditions, that vary slightly between person to person. We all start our chronic illness in a different place, even if we’re facing similar problems. Doctors try to group us together into symptom groups, so they can find medicine and therapies that work on the whole group, it’s more efficient than fixing people one by one. A doctor listens to our symptoms, and notes down their observations, they then consider their experience and understanding, and suggest medicine or therapy.
The issue with many chronic illnesses, is there is no known medicine or therapy that works. Your condition is outside medical knowledge. Some say that physicists currently understand even less than 5% of the universe’s mechanisms, and a theory of everything might not even be possible. Well we know just as little about the human body and mind, science has made exponential growth over the last century, thanks to new tools and the efforts of the scientific community. But we still have no firm idea what consciousness really is, where memories are stored, whether we can artificially create consciousness, what the neural mechanism of emotion is, exactly how human decision-making is performed, and most importantly the function of many conditions that affect the brain and other organs.
We have theories and a rough overall idea, for example we can scan the brain for issues, and we have a plethora of knowledge about its processes and nature, but our understanding is still massively lacking, and even gaining that understanding is a massive risk in terms of how it could be abused.
Going on a tangent away from talking about the chronically ill, what if after understanding all biological processes, that we could alter memories in a person, alter their consciousness, alter their reality to any whim. A particular malevolent individual or group of powerful people could set in motion a plan to alter everyone to enjoy being their undying slaves and be none the wiser, with no escape. If you can understand every process of the brain, you could also potentially trick its senses and trap people in a simulated reality that could be hellish, nothing as nice as the Matrix, and if aging can be reversed, they could remain there until the end of the universe. The levels of abuse to the mind don’t bear thinking about, death would be a blessing. So in a way, I hope we never really fully understand the mind to the extent we can systematically control other minds like robots to a whim, playing God to that level, seems fundamentally wrong. I hope we can cure all serious disease, but any full “control” over our collective suffering to suit desires in either direction, seems like a step too far.
Ultimately I hope for a balanced future, where we suffer challenges, but not ones that overwhelm us to defeat. Where we suffer temporary inconveniences at worse, and that great suffering is eradicated. Where any suffering is wholly positive in conclusion, and doesn’t trap us, or control us. In a deterministic world, there is no choice or free-will, and I hope the universe’s determinism leads us to balance whilst we exist. A world with absolutely no suffering seems hollow, and a world with great suffering is literally hellish, so it’s natural to be drawn to a balance, but a balance that is closer to absolute pleasure than suffering any day.
An interesting view from buddhism. We probably need suffering to feel pleasure, and there is certainly some psychology to it I think.
personally I don’t ponder on death that much, but whenever it hits me it just dwells on