Living A Meaningful Life: Why Suffering Matters
Suffering: it’s part of being human that most people avoid at all costs. We constantly miss opportunities for growth when we turn our heads and hearts away from what brings us pain.
Being alive means you will die, guaranteeing a certain amount of suffering for everyone that is born. It’s best to figure out what to do with it sooner than later.
Most likely, there will be devastation at several junctures of your life, leaving you feeling helpless, insecure, and scared about the future. It turns out that this is a necessary part of development for quality humans.
We don’t need to seek out suffering, it will find us without fail. It’s up to us to respond accordingly and use it for our own development.
Being human is not easy, and I don’t claim to have a shortcut to happiness or a way to take your suffering away.
The best thing I can offer you is a way to shift your perspective.
We can reorient ourselves toward suffering. We can use it to round us out while avoiding falling into a deep depression.
The goal here is to use our inevitable suffering to reveal our true selves, while simultaneously avoiding the pain that we create which doesn’t serve us. This requires a certain amount of self-awareness that can be difficult to achieve if we’ve never had it.
This concept is simple enough to understand, but also extremely difficult to do. It means taking responsibility for our reactions to the terrible things that are done to us and the horrors we bear witness to. While doing this we also have to maintain our awareness.
In my opinion, this is the ultimate challenge for a human being.
How can losing a child be good for us? How can watching your partner die of cancer be something that enriches your life? These are questions that are important to ponder.
Events of this magnitude will come for you someday even if you live the most blessed life imaginable. Your response to these challenges will determine whether you have a life worth living.
Will you shut down your feelings in an attempt to power through the pain? Or will you recognize feelings as signals to pay attention, as our own voices calling us to be strong and compassionate in the most inopportune times? Basically, will we love what we fear most and embrace it as part of who we are, or will we bury our head in consumerism and distraction?
What I offer here is an outline of what's happening in our heads and hearts during our worst suffering and why we act the way we do.
Then, I take you through a brief journey of my continuing self-realization and why I am the way that I am.
Finally, I offer some practical techniques that can give you a foothold if you want to change the way you feel.
This is in order to help you start building up self-awareness that is necessary for transmuting our suffering into compassion that will enrich your life. I want you to turn lead into gold.
With increased self-awareness comes increased capability to process our misery at the moment it happens. Our suffering then becomes a vehicle for meaningful change in our lives and the world at large, instead putting us into downward misery spirals that lead us into a living hell where we destroy the things we love. Cause that’s no fun.
We only need to suffer when we need to; we don’t need to create more by avoiding pain.
Most of us in the Western world struggle with suffering because we refuse to acknowledge it. We tend to take the classical economical approach when bad things happen: We try to increase comfort and convenience while avoiding suffering.
This is a road directly to hell. If we bury our heads in the sand, we fail to incorporate the fact that we are mortal into our daily lives. We miss our chances for love, compassion, and authenticity in favor of immediate gratification of our desire to be pain-free.
Our time as humans is limited; every second that passes by is a gift that is not guaranteed to be followed by more. We assume that when we are suffering, it will eventually get better on its own. It won’t.
Yet, most of us prefer to pretend that we are all gonna be okay in the end.
We start learning this flawed strategy as soon as we can walk. If we fall and scrape ourselves, we are told to be tough. The boys that don’t cry get special treatment and admiration. Girls are told to be pretty and obedient and not to speak up for themselves. We are fenced in from the start, unable to suffer in peace.
We are instructed to stuff our misery and pain into small boxes so that it doesn’t contaminate our seemingly perfect world. Then, one day, it spills out of us into the world and causes catastrophe millions of times more powerful than the original feelings we had.
We mop up the mess and try to stuff it back into the box, and we go back to work convincing ourselves that everything is okay.
This is how most people live and die if they never confront their suffering.
My personal journey to this realization has been painful for me and the rest of the world around me. I have fucked up so many things because I was trying to avoid the inevitable. When I finally learned to feel, I felt stupid for not doing it sooner. But I’m glad I finally did the work, even if it cost everything that it did.
I’m not too hard on myself, though. I was up against some tough odds from the get-go.
I learned from a young age that toughness is paramount for a man in America. To acknowledge my suffering feel it deeply meant that I was not tough. This would be a big failure on my part.
This defeat, I imagined, would lead to the worst kind of suffering because it meant that I was not good enough. If I wasn’t good enough, then I didn’t deserve love. Without love, why live? This was the early rationalization process that I learned.
It was apparent early on that crying, empathy, and feeling bad about myself were all obstacles to getting love, friendship, and adoration.
Any feeling or thought that steered attention toward my suffering was better off being compartmentalized and stored far from waking life. The way to win and get the love I wanted was to overcome obstacles, not make them up out of thin air because of weakness. Not feeling was rewarded.
While making me very successful and effective in whatever I chose to do, this kind of mindset made me dangerously unbalanced.
It brought me to the edge of psychopathy. There was no real connection or authenticity, just effectiveness and the rewards that came with it.
In war, this would be the optimal mindset and attitude. But, I was always in a relatively safe environment. As a result, my life became isolated and corrosive despite checking all the boxes of a healthy life.
I was afraid of failure. I was unwilling to take any emotional risks.
Even with a seemingly good life, there was mass confusion and anger in me. I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did. I had followed the map given to me, and it turns out it was a map to hell.
Without feeling my feelings, I had no capacity for sympathy or empathy. I couldn’t connect fully with people because I wasn’t a complete human. I didn’t understand why people struggled with their feelings.
If someone was sensitive, they appeared slow and cumbersome. I didn’t like tapdancing around them. I pretended that I didn’t need those pesky feelings, and I paid the price with interest. My suffering grew and grew despite my efforts to stop it.
I remained in my own personal prison until I learned how to feel. Feelings allowed me to finally process my suffering. This allowed me to relate to people again and enjoy life for what it is, instead of trying to impose happiness onto myself and others around me.
If we compartmentalize how we feel we will compound our unnecessary suffering. If this is something that you habitually do, it doesn’t mean that you’re totally fucked. Sometimes, life overwhelms us and we need some time before we get to work. Compartmentalization gives us that precious time.
But, at some point, we have to get to work.
We can develop habits to soften our hearts and we can learn to feel again.
Opening up to bad feelings is a huge risk for someone that compartmentalizes their emotions, and it should not be taken lightly.
If you have a closed emotional framework, the world is a safe place. No one can touch you or phase you.
The second you open up, you will start to feel terrible feelings along with good ones. You will cry often. You will feel the world’s pain.
It will feel like exercising for the first time after a decade of eating nothing but ice cream. Your soul will scream in anguish at all of the terrible things you never realized you were doing. Then, it will get better.
Taking emotional risks will provide the relief that we all seek and allow us to be fully human. Relief will not come from outside of you. It must come from within. Then, you can connect with other people and experience life’s true treasures.
Without connecting to other people, we are lost. We can’t do everything on our own. Even if we are alone by choice, we need to feel our deepest, darkest feelings in order to truly know ourselves and share our gifts with the world.
Otherwise, we’re just pretending like we’re headed toward some unknown destination and the sooner we get there, the less suffering we’ll have to endure. We will be strangers in our own skin, confused about why we feel so terrible no matter what we do to stop it. Then, we die confused about why we never felt good about anything.
The stark reality is that there is nowhere to go in this life. We are stuck here for the moment. There is no point in accelerating toward the red light. We have to feel each moment, or we are relegated to the mercy of life, and life has no mercy in the end.
We can at least avoid the unnecessary suffering by confronting it.
If we neglect the fact that we’re going to suffer at some point, we just compound it. This works similar to interest on credit cards. Pay the balance before the interest compounds, or get stuck in the spiral.
Techniques for processing suffering that work:
If you’re interested in starting to feel more deeply, there are methods and techniques that require no entry fee. They are free, safe, and proven to work. You can do them in the privacy of your own home.
But, like anything worthwhile, they will take something from you for the gift that they give. Make sure that you want to see change in your life before you start.
There is no putting the genie back in the bottle once you start feeling deeply.
Breathing Exercises
Here are some videos that feature techniques that are great for forcing hidden feelings out. I cried like a bitch for the first dozen times I did these. It’s not painful or dangerous if you follow their instructions. Go easy, and don’t underestimate how transformative it can be.
(I’m not sure why the video isn’t embedded. Copy and paste the link below, and you’ll get there.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvQuVP2OTdM&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCaZQqAs9I&t=1s
Transcendental Meditation
Although it’s tough to get at first, it eventually can give you enough space to observe your own idiosyncrasies. When you can observe yourself, you gain self-awareness that can help you be present during your suffering. It can also keep life from sucking too much if you’re stuck in a bad place. Like breathing, it doesn’t cost you anything and it can’t hurt you. Here’s a good intro technique to get you started and in the right frame of non-mind:
If this is hard for you, don’t give up. It takes time and discipline to see positive results. Be easy on yourself if you tend to be a go-getter. The less you try, the more you do.
Journaling
Writing daily can give you a look at yourself, especially if you don’t have a taste for meditation. You can discover things about yourself that you didn’t know you were holding on to. It makes you more observant, and therefore more self-aware. Like everything that is worth anything, it takes time and energy to see results. Keep journaling and be honest with yourself. No one will see it except for you, so it’s okay to take all the risks you want.
Journaling is a long-haul approach. You won’t feel any better after a week. It takes months of dedication, but it will turn into a powerful vehicle for transmuting your bad feelings into compassion for yourself and others.
However you decide to eat the shit sandwich that is life’s inevitable suffering, the important thing is that you get busy eating. Your life is waiting for you. It’s getting shorter every day, and that sandwich is just getting smellier. Start with a small bite, and take one every day. You will not regret it.
Your life will start to populate with rich ideas and good humans. You won’t have to fight yourself to feel good. Good luck, and don’t lose hope.
Love,
Evan
