Great Suffering is Little Understood
Teachings on Standout and Rare Binds that Elevate to True Suffering
In this article I attempt to fairly and optionally teach some of my ideas and mental models for considering and dealing with very tough trials, burdens, and ugly dead ends in living and pursuing happiness. I do this to arm the reader with knowledge empowering them to more mercifully assess the unknowable situations of some unfortunate other persons, fostering better treatment of others, and also with knowledge that could benefit the reader in unlikely case, if unpredictable and indeterminant future living might degrade into suffering for oneself. In my background of enduring heavy chronic suffering for many years uninterrupted, I picked up on how much better so very many people could live their lives, which consoled me significantly. So, I can put forth with some confidence and credibility that these sorts of situations of ugly suffering are infrequent, and not predominant across demographic populations, which is good news for when considering the overall aggregate state of life. Consoling also is the truth that years or decades worth of time do terminate even the worst conceivable trials to endure.
Suffering changes entirely the experience of living, from fair and reasonable, to instead an experience of prolonged suffering (less intense but relentless) or abject agony (more intense but lasting much less lengthy in duration).
There are to my knowledge and considerations two or maybe more distinct categories (or types) of suffering. The most relatable type of suffering is “physical torsion suffering” which features modes and intensities and buildups of pain. This is most often due to degraded health, but can also develop quickly if torturous demands are being made upon the human body by means of environmental, situational, and social factors pressing hard on a person, or forcing someone to press amazingly hard, if facing worse danger to quality of life, as deemed by quick dry-runs of other available and practical courses of action, even if less demanding. Another less relatable type of suffering is “opportunity collapse suffering.” I will convey what moderate amount I understand of each next, in order mentioned above. I have the unusual experience behind me, and I would feel the hoarder of valuable ideas, models, techniques, and mindsets if I were not to log them in articles such as this, and make available for future readers to explore at their convenience.
Physical Torsion Suffering
The idea is that our trusty sense of pain is not our enemy, unless it is burdened with particular conditions, considered next.
Pain is but the sense of touch when even barely discomfited by touch sensations, and is in play all the time while conscious, and continually updates each of us as to many factors of personal wellness. But if physical discomfort and pain become entrenched by time wearing upon the person pained, and by the beneficial aspects of brief and adjustable pain no longer acting like our friendly sense of touch, but instead by being rendered unto our experience of the pain as very constant and not adjustable, then this makes the experience too very close to constant and invariant, and brutally unreactive to attempts to modulate the level of the pain. These conditions of pain also disallow surging-through voluntarily greater pain to find rest-relief from pain totally, in anyone’s tactics of pain management. Importantly, the intensity of the pain is not what causes transitions to a steady state of suffering, but what does build into suffering is the continuance at whatever pain level, for long unknown duration, and pressing upon the awareness at too close to perfect invariance of even milder level pain. This is very different than our everyday and every hour happy lightning quick touches are, reacted to casually and with little effort, and which we regularly experience every day.
Opportunity Collapse Suffering
In the same manner, “opportunity collapse suffering” amounts to human rights and civil liberties abuse, as it is an entrenched hollowing out of frontiers, and of near to far future opportunity — to act with much freedom, or self-interest. This differs from what many people consider (incorrectly and misleadingly) to be equivalent liberty and opportunity freedom so-called trials or so-called burdens, such as choosing to proceed on a less pleasant course of action, when one had preferred earlier something better, and only when ones life had changed by a situational change done fairly by others. This is not in the same league as freedom hollowing or shutdown: a civil liberties abuse.
Freedom is evident in such case to be in good condition, as the choice between options was in concept notionally made by the will and to satisfy the balancing goals of the person doing the choosing.
I kept my modeling of opportunity and options to same-time comparison, rather than skipping time in timespan and then comparing choices from different past or future notional moments, which is not really of what situation is presented to any among us, ever during real life. I did this keeping to reality by using a framework of imaging this case as only valid if honoring that living is done in only one ongoing moment. Then I used that sensibility to only respect real-same-time options, to be closer to a real judge of relevant and real opportunity, and allowing for change of personal welfare to explain inconsistencies (changes) over time, very much so.
The option being open and full enough of a range of self-incentives inherent to hourly and daily routine, means that opportunity was in good shape. When any responsibility or obligation detracts from quality of life, only those that were built into a given person’s reality without voluntary power or self-volition, are the highly dangerous ones to any person of all peoples. If instead responsibilities were entered into voluntarily, and also after which there is the power and availability to eventually volunteer out of the commitment, then this is not suffering but just tougher hours than typical, such as when having suboptimal options or recourse readily available for self-decision on and self-management, which prevents torment level abuses upon persons.
College is volunteered into, and unless under coercion pressure by relatives, it is also volunteered into with suitable societal previous warning as to high challenges and difficulties, to select from with freedom. Also, and most importantly, life usually proceeds with several recourses available to each student should the student become cornered by realities, to the point of an ethical self-treatment debacle onset: which is when tolerating and enduring the former tough choices, become anathema choices instead. In such a case, the guide ethically is usually only known and understandable to the individual, who would prefer not to go through a questioning session to please the rescue instincts of another interloping would-be advisor, and thus only the individual can dry-run assess very highly likely risks of self-treatment volunteered into that he or she would find grossly twisted and unpleasant far beyond difficult challenges we all more regularly are experienced with, in life memory. The same factors behave very similarly for voluntary entrance into marriage social contract, and for voluntary entrance into employment social contract, with fair disclosure of key features of the job conveyed or available freely, via internet and/or during interviews with employers.
Sadly, there are those who self-pretend such experience with true suffering, and who also make the real brutal error of presuming that experience with such situations would not be a prerequisite to understanding it even partially, when the alternative is to use the imagination to fill in the blanks or issues not understood, until fooling oneself that such could match adequately true experience with such debacles in life. At least that explains authentic reality, which I find heartening, if somewhat awkward, in what this section has armed some readers with, maybe. I may have missed a few factors involved, but the factors I did notice I consider to have been presented in a way true enough to nature to learn openly from, comfortable that the assessments are credible.
Closing Comments
The reader should be by now better enabled in life ahead, by having explored with me these issues with rigorous-to-nature “thought exercises.” It is better to be equipped with thinking and communicating tools — to reduce or ameliorate disturbing feasible situations life could sometimes maybe pan out to include ahead for some relatively few — than it is to be unarmed, if and when such a situation might occur upon oneself, or upon those others whose personal welfare is valued dearly, and whose personal welfare is often affected in social or communal coeffect with the reader. This has been an article full of rare and unusual subject matter, and successfully navigating through much of it may be very interesting, but it is also taxing. That I realize and appreciate, for those who might happen to read this, after the time of my finalizing this writing. Thank you for your steadiness, and I advise myself and others to more often attend to factors of plans and decisions, which soon thereafter, or later, affect opportunity openness of frontiers.
