“Life is suffering.”
This my least favorite expression, and why I’m not a Buddhist. I don’t believe in mindless hedonism, but I also don’t believe that we were put on Earth simply to suffer. I think that life is about powering through suffering, in order to carve out prosperity, joy, and meaning. I’m not anti-religious, but this concept has always bothered me. I wanted to discuss why in this subject.
Life has plenty of joy in it
Life is full of joy. If you live well, even your work is joyful. Generally speaking, people remember the joys of life if they’ve lived well. They organize celebrations and rituals in order to thank the universe for those joys. Capitalism allows us to experience joy in brief bursts via many different pleasures. I would venture to say that life is actually all joy, if you take into account the work it takes to maintain joys such as homes and children.
Some people live lives with minimal suffering
Minimal suffering is felt by those that are attractive, wealthy, healthy, and have good social skills. Their problems are so much better than those of normal people, or those who are lacking in any of these departments. This means that some people are suffering less than others, simply by default. They only believe they are suffering because they don’t know true suffering.
Suffering can be mitigated through habits and technology
If you follow the law, your odds of suffering the pain of arrest and prison fall off of a cliff. Modern medicine dramatically reduces and/or eliminates the odds that you suffer the pain of illness and death. Human behavior and achievements mitigate suffering.
Depression is almost always understood to be better than starvation, even by depressed people
This means that we are making serious gains in limiting or reducing human suffering through technology and capitalism. We haven’t solved depression yet, but we will once capitalism has fixed our housing and food issues. Humans tend to focus on a few things at a time. The fact that we can rank different types of suffering, means that experiences exist on a spectrum.
Life is suffering sounds like propaganda
All of your favorite religious texts had human scribes. Life is suffering is something that I would tell the peasantry if I was a rich man trying to keep them under my thumb. Think about it. This is the easiest scam to run. Tell people they were built to suffer, tell them to avoid violence, and rule over them. Life is definitely not about suffering, with all due respect to Buddhism.
Humans generally are becoming more prosperous
If life were supposed to be about suffering, it wouldn’t make sense that humanity generally becomes wealthier or more prosperous. Humans would be locked in, if life were suffering. Sure, a guy crying in a Benz is still crying, but as stated two paragraphs ago, certain types of suffering are worse than others. The natural aim of humanity is to reduce suffering. So how could life just purely be suffering.
I’m not into the notion that life is suffering. I will be aware of suffering, I will embrace struggle, but I won’t embrace suffering for its own sake. What I will embrace are gratitude and a constant commitment to bettering the human race. But I won’t embrace suffering for its own sake, and I don’t thik you should either.
Thanks for paying attention.
