Life Lessons
Suffer Now, Not Later
Or, how to embrace pain and live a more meaningful life
We are wired to desire ease and comfort.
When a choice comes between putting our heads down to work or booting up YouTube for the twentieth time today we will often choose the latter option. Work is hard and uncomfortable whereas the goings on of our favourite vlogger offer us a temporary respite from our thoughts and responsibilities. We can procrastinate a little while longer without too much adverse effect, we tell ourselves.
In life it is usually a choice between suffering now or suffering later. Either we suffer now because we have to expend energy doing something that we may not want to be doing, work, or we will suffer later, if the work does not get done and our supervisor is unhappy. This tradeoff is at the heart of living a meaningful life and by making the right choices we can all find ourselves in a world that is better than before.
The Problem of Suffering
Suffering is painful, so we try to avoid it. It can come in many forms, from outright damage to our body to the irritation that we get from doing boring or frustrating work. We may suffer from worrying about our responsibilities, imagining how difficult our presentation will be or simply…
