Is suffering worthwhile?
Different religions have different takes on suffering. Buddhism considers it to be a bad thing and the purpose of life is to free oneself from it by letting go of attachments and cravings. Stoics, likewise, attribute suffering to worrying about and trying to control things outside of our control, a condition of slavery from which one is freed by focusing one’s energy on that which one can control, the inner life.
Muslims have a somewhat different attitude towards suffering in that, suffering is what we experience with temptation and lapses of the will, while affliction is when the world inflicts pain on us. Affliction is seen as normal and part of God’s perfect design. This rather fatalistic attitude requires only acceptance of affliction as part of God’s plan, in the spirit of the Book of Job.
Christians, on the other hand, largely see suffering as all part of our fallen nature. Even when we suffer because of natural disasters, for example, it is only suffering because we are fallen. We are asked to suffer for the sake of the Gospel but, whereas for Buddhists, suffering is always negative, for Christians this is a cause for rejoicing. The expectation is that we will suffer in this life but be supremely happy in the next.
Judaism is somewhat on balance between Islam and Christianity in that it recommends that, in suffering, we bow to God’s will, but in doing our duty, if we suffer because of it, we will be rewarded in heaven.
Thus, the proper response to suffering could depend on your religious affiliation: practicing non-attachment, simple acceptance of it as a mystery, part of doing one’s duty, or seeing it as part of the nature of the fallen world and God’s mission to restore it and ultimately “wipe away every tear” (Revelation 5:15).
According to a 2017 paper, human suffering in modern psychology can be defined as “an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level.”
Even when suffering is not caused by biological or observable circumstances (like the pain associated with tissue damage), it is an embodied experience which we cannot but feel in the rhythm of our hearts, the clenching of our stomachs, the sweat on our hands, our (in)ability to sleep, or the position of our shoulders, just to provide a few examples.
Thus, suffering is not simply a mental experience like a thought. It is both mental and physical. Psychology suggests that
Although pain and suffering are unpleasant, they are not per se either destructive or constructive forces which tear down or build up the self. Rather, they are part of a person’s life, and the self is the result of various experiences including pain and suffering, which have an existential dimension inasmuch as they depend on the person’s attitude, resources for their management, as well as choices and commitments related to that person’s attachment to life and the world.
As Wesley, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, tells Princess Buttercup in the Princess Bride, “life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
The key across religions and in psychology is that suffering has to be accepted. What you do about it otherwise may depend on your beliefs, culture, and so on. As Philip K. Dick once said, “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Suffering is part of reality, not your mind. It may derive from your mind, as with anxiety, for example, but once present it is real. You cannot force suffering, emotional, physical, or spiritual, to disappear with a stiff upper lip, a mantra, or a new product. You have to experience it first.
Cartesian philosophy, which influences how the sciences and modern philosophers see the mind and body, proposes a dual relationship where the mind and body are separate from one another. The body occupies time and space while the mind does not. The mind can be separated from the body and still exist, disembodied. The mind suffers, the body feels pain.
This point of view ignores the intimate intermingling of mind and body. When it comes to our experience, pain and suffering are not separable at all. Likewise with other feelings such as joy. Our physiological experience of feelings is not a reaction to the mind but part of our consciousness. We feel with our whole selves, mind, body, and spirit.
Given that pain and suffering are part of life and affects everything about us, the question I want to address here is whether it is worthwhile. Should we, like Buddhists and Stoics, seek freedom from it or should we, like the Abrahamic religions, only seek to free ourselves from temptation and the suffering inherent in moral depravity. Does suffering build character and bring us other rewards or does it enslave us?
I imagine it like this: if we had some magic pill that made all suffering go away, should we take it?
Many choose to try to do so with alcohol, drugs, risky behavior, self-harm, and in the end suicide. Despite the belief that death is the end of suffering, even the last may not mean freedom from it. Indeed, most religions believe that one can suffer after death although the reasons why differ. A dualistic philosophy invites us to consider reincarnation while a holistic one invites resurrection. Atheistic beliefs in eternal oblivion are no better supported than these since we have only a small portion of all time to inform our experience. Thus, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet suggests when he says in his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy on suicide: “to die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream”, suicide is, ironically, an action based on a hope that has no evidential basis.
In any case, none of these mechanisms necessarily creates a pathway out of suffering and all are considered self-destructive.
Nevertheless, most religions offer a pathway out of suffering if not in this life then in the next. Thus, they assert one way or another that it is possible to experience human life without suffering.
In this article, I am going to argue from a couple perspectives. The first is from evolution that suffering, by which I mean the psychological definition, is a necessary component of human life because we are creatures that evolved to survive and it is those humans who suffered in the past who survived best. Humans beings who did not suffer ultimately died sooner and produced fewer offspring. The second is from a psychological perspective in that suffering produces in us, counterintuitively, hope which is the basis both for progress and meaning in our lives.
Indeed, Nietzsche said, “Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.”
Thus, for us, suffering produces a psychological benefit in that it creates meaning—perhaps not always but often. In other words, a life without suffering is not one worth living.
The evolutionary benefits of suffering are well known. Firstly, suffering is an emotion which is a psychophysiological response to stimuli. That means that our minds and our bodies experience the emotion in tandem. Our minds, in addition, feel the emotion as a subjective, conscious experience but the mental experience of emotion goes far below the conscious mind. This is why emotions can arise first in dreams or unexplained behavior.
Fear, for example, causes us to react quickly to perceived threats. If we didn’t feel fear of predators, our bodies and our minds would not have been able to react quickly enough to get away from them. When we experience fear, our hearts speed up pumping more oxygen to the body in anticipation of the fight or flight to come, our minds become acutely aware of our surroundings, we notice and pay attention to things that we normally ignore. Our pain responses are diminished so that we can push our muscles to the limits to escape whatever situation we are in.
All of this is extremely useful in the wild, but human beings evolved the ability to conjure fears out of their own minds as well. We didn’t just have to see a tiger in the jungle, we could simply imagine it. And it didn’t have to be a predator. We could be afraid of anything. That is why some people have the same reaction to giving a presentation to a room full of people in suits in a comfortable conference room that their ancient ancestors would have had to a charging woolly mammoth.
Fear is an unpleasant emotion that makes us suffer, at least for a time, but it is a necessary one to keep us safe.
Sadness and grief are almost the opposite of fear. Whereas fear gives a kind of immediate, tunnel vision, sadness broadens our perspective. Scientific studies have associated sadness with improved memory and judgment, better cooperation with others, and improved motivation. There is also research that associates it with improved immune system.
The evolutionary purpose of sadness is to help us replace a loss. This requires that we: (1) remember how things used to be, (2) use good judgment in choosing a replacement, (3) cooperate with others to get what we need, and (4) be motivated to make that replacement. If that loss is a child or a spouse, all of these make a lot of evolutionary sense since our motivation would be to replace that loss and produce more offspring. The goal isn’t to feel sad but to process our loss sufficiently that we are able to replace the loss well.
While we feel sad, we are suffering, but we are also, ideally, working on moving forward.
Sadness of course is not depression which is associated much more with withdrawal and avoidance rather than motivation. There is still debate about whether depression is evolutionary or merely adaptive, meaning is depression an evolved response or an adaptation to modern society. Depression is more frequent in societies such as ours that see sadness as a “problem” rather than a normal human emotion. Sadness pushes us out into the world while depression pulls us away from it. So, it would make sense that, if our sadness isn’t valued, we become depressed.
Physical pain of course has a clear physiological purpose. People who have a condition where they don’t feel pain often die young, often because of extreme temperatures. The psychological suffering, fear and sadness, that goes along with physical pain can motivate us to seek help and work to overcome the pain, which is important as well.
That is the evolutionary side of things. What about the philosophical side? Nietzsche suggests that we seek out suffering because it is in suffering for a cause or a person or thing that we give our lives meaning. When a religious person, for example, suffers for their faith, it gives their faith meaning. It helps to prove themselves. Many early Christians had to be restrained from seeking martyrdom and even today Christian missionaries risk great personal harm in order to bring their message to others.
As long as we don’t suffer, as long as we are comfortable, we cannot know how far we would go to protect and defend the things we care about. If we risk fear, loss, physical pain, and death itself, then we have proved to ourselves and others that something really mattered to us.
This is why Christians, for example, focus so much on the suffering that Christ endured. Without his suffering, there could be no redemption. God wanted to prove how much he cares about us by sending his only Son to die on the cross. It is by this love that He rescued the world from itself. Because God Himself is beyond suffering, he could only do so by the incarnation.
Most people, whether Christian or not, instinctively recognize the meaning in this sacrifice, to suffer and die for others, if not the ultimate benefit or motivation. The latter takes faith.
Likewise Jews and Muslims embrace suffering for the sake of others. Buddhists, on the other hand, practice compassion, which is not quite the same. They reject suffering but are willing to sacrifice for others provided that is a compassionate act.
Humans are so drawn to meaning that we are willing to take on all kinds of hardship for it. People quit high paying, comfortable jobs to take on something that gives them more meaning but pays little (or nothing). They go in debt, sacrifice health and family, and work themselves to death as long as they feel like what they are doing matters. Likewise, people work grueling, difficult, low paying jobs to help their families.
In his classic account of the death camps of Auschwitz, Man’s Search for Meaning, psychologist Viktor Frankl points out that those who survived the camps, who didn’t give up and just die amid all the suffering, were those who found some kind of meaning in hope. Hope is perhaps the greatest motivator that brings us towards suffering as well as through it.
Thus, the benefit of suffering is that it legitimizes meaning and hope. Without suffering, life is meaningless and hopeless.
My conclusion here is that suffering matters not only because we evolved it but because it gives meaning to our subjective experience. If we were automatons who had no inner life, no conscious experience, we would not suffer and life would mean nothing. Likewise, if all we experienced were comfort, then life would also have no meaning. It would be a kind of hell, but we wouldn’t know it.