Suffer, you are worth it.
Many people know me as the world’s most connected human, wearing gadgets, measuring everything I do.
You can actually google “Most connected man” to find me.
What journalists never captured until now, is how that data helps me explore my suffering and map my sorrow.
My Showtime special “Upgrade” in Season one of “Dark Net” on January 28, 2016, will show the world how deeply intimate I have become with suffering.
It will be hard for my friends and family to see me in so much pain.
Even the New York Times recoils at my story.
“For me, relationships are difficult,” he admits. “I see people as just a pile of information.” He compares data to heroin: Having it only makes you want more. The same technology that made him physically fit is dehumanizing him.
So now that the world via television is about to find out about my suffering, let’s talk about how to suffer in the age of digital dualism.
Suffering 101
All the beauty in life becomes visible in our suffering.
Each time you are touched by a movie, moment or gazing upon beauty, you are suffering.
The instance realization that something is loved, gentle or fleeting, you suffer.
It’s a microdose of the goods tuff. Your first “hit” of sadness is the best kind of drug.
It is time to talk about how to suffer.
Unfortunately creating a space to swim in sadness is a gift reserved for philosophers, poets and artists.
In an age where everything we do is digitized, suffering is something we all share in real time.
Suffering is the original viral media.
Suffering is easily characterized within some eastern religions in four categories: birth, old age, sickness and death.
Within our life we can further narrow suffering down into three types of misery:
- Getting what you don’t want.
- Not being able to hold on to what you want.
- Not getting what you want.
Suffering, the most naturally feeling in our lives, is the one we take the greatest strides to avoid.
The calling cards of our soul’s “hallow” are effortless in their identification.
Heartbreak, anxiety, depression, relentless rumination, intrusive dark thoughts, negative self speak. Instantly we recognize the sensations like the smell of smoke creeping under a doorway.
I challenge you to explain to me how depression is any different than being “truly happy”?
In both cases life is just as groundless.
What is it though, that we actually feel?
At 47, my life has been a battle with suffering or an infusion of distraction.
Only in the past three years have I purposefully started to cultivate and practice the art of suffering.
My process started with an examination of my suffering.
By separating the physical sensations and examining the thoughts, slowly the root cause of my suffering started to rise and become visible.
Time is the root of my suffering. Controlling time, managing time, making time, spending time.
Time is life’s greatest practical joke; eternity’s satire is a clock that functions only upon your heart.
So how do you practice suffering?
It starts with some basic rules to consider:
- Suffering can’t hurt you.
- Suffering is part of joy.
- Suffering is temporary.
By practicing these three rules each moment you’re in pain, you will start to understand the art of suffering and willfully create space for sorrow.
Ironically the tools to lean into pain are being taken away from us in digital spaces. Recently Facebook created two different tools to manage “ex relationships” and to edit out “painful memories” from your life.
If you’ve ever wondered why you feel so lonely when you use digitized systems, I can help you with the answer.
The act of recording something changes it, the act of editing a record changes it. Each of these digital layers creates a new “record” of impermanence.
Social media is “realtime grief”
Tools to manage online fear or offline pain will amplify your anxieties, learning to focus on them is the only way through.
Each moment you experience that twinge of fear, anxiety or depression coming on, apply the three rules of suffering and give yourself space to see the reaction.
For me, this has been a slow process of letting the darkness settle in as the blue hues after sunset take over my mind.
Purposefully I start to move slower. My speech, activity, gaze, all are appropriately adjusted downward to look upon the sorrow that creeps up in my day.
As I began to be more comfortable with this new pool of pain to wade through, the depths, temperature and variations in my body and mind were not places that I feared, as much.
We are not taught as young people or more importantly as adults the urgent and important message that sorrow has for us.
The second phase to practicing suffering is to act upon it.
The most direct and purposeful action to access suffering is meditation, but that is not for everyone.
A mindful cyborg can use tools all around them to learn to practice suffering.
So let’s talk about something you already do or have done, journaling.
Many people feel they don’t have the time to journal, or are afraid of the contents of the tomes of their life.
Journaling gets a bad rap in life. Start looking at journaling as something that’s being done automatically for you in your day.
Some of your greatest journals are already created!
- Register receipts
- Old emails
- Photographs on your phone.
- Voicemails saved.
Open your documents, sort them by created date, find the oldest thing you created and read it.
Go to google, download your browsing history, what was the first thing you ever searched for?
The tools of journaling are available to you now and the gifts of these insights are the companion suffering is looking for.
It is in reviewing our “journals” that we realize life’s greatest mystery, we are and always will, suffer.
Suffering is not something to escape from, or run to.
Suffering is proof we are alive, suffering is your heart's journal.
Digital technology is the single greatest opportunity to practice suffering in mankind’s history.
By creating time to practice suffering you become closer to yourself.
Right now, use your phone. Each time it rings, do you feel the racing heart to “silence it”.
With each new email alert, notice the sense or urgency to address it, file it, respond to it.
For every moment you see someone looking longingly at their mobile device, wonder with gentleness how much pain they must be in.
Create the compassionate heart of a warrior while you work with and not for your technologically assisted life.
The best thing I ever created was a relationship with my suffering.
Go on, hurt, it’s ok.