David Pinsof writes: Your brain evolved to seek stuff in the world—like food and status and safety—that was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments…
When you suffer, your brain does all sorts of useful things for you. It figures out what went wrong, adjusts your expectations, updates your beliefs, gives you an adrenaline jolt (if you’re under threat), lowers your energy (if you’re helpless), and recalibrates your motivations to the right level. Suffering is useful. It’s designed by evolution to help you deal with bad things, avoid making them worse, and prevent them from happening again in the future.
Once you recognize this fact, all the puzzles disappear. Why do teenagers get crushes on people out of their league? Because that’s how they learn what league they’re in. Why do little kids get so many boo-boos? Because every boo-boo is a learning opportunity for their clumsy little bodies. Why do we want to know when our partner is cheating on us, even if it makes us suffer? Because we’re not trying to avoid suffering; we’re trying to avoid being cheated on. Why do we watch horror movies, read bad news, give ourselves mild electric shocks, and have nightmares? So we can learn about dangerous stuff without putting ourselves in danger. Why do we say we “grow” from suffering? Because we do grow! It’s not bullshit.
But there’s another puzzle to solve. Why do we talk as if suffering is bad? It’s pretty weird when you think about it. Suffering is good for us—it helps us learn and grow—and yet we talk about it as if it were a mental substance of intrinsic hellishness. Why do we act like we hate suffering so much?
Because we’re bullshitting…
We want pity points. We’re like personal injury lawyers trying to milk the jury for sympathy. Personal injury lawyers don’t just want to recover lost wages for their clients; they want compensation for the “pain and suffering” caused by the injury. That means the “pain and suffering” have to be bad. Very bad. If they weren’t bad, they wouldn’t merit compensation. So all of us, including personal injury lawyers, pretend that suffering is the worst thing in the world, because it maximizes the “compensation” we get from the jury of our peers—i.e., more yummy pity points.
We want to hide our unflattering motives. Our motives are often pretty ugly. For example, we feel “friendship jealousy” when our friends like other people more than they like us. But when we suffer friendship jealousy, we cannot come out and say why we’re suffering. We cannot say “I feel like shit because you’re spending time with people who are not me, and I want you all to myself, because I’m a clingy, selfish person”. Instead, we say “I’m feeling hurt”. When asked what’s wrong, we bullshit about the awfulness of what we’re feeling, as if the problem was a bad thing inside our heads, instead of our friend having a social life.
We want to show we care. Imagine something terrible happened to you. Say, you lost your job. You tell your friend about it and try to get sympathy. Your friend says, “Meh, big deal. I read a blog post about how suffering is actually good for you and you’re just bullshitting about how bad it is.” I’m guessing you would not think very highly of your friend. The point of a true friend is to help you through hard times. That means your friend has to see that you’re having a hard time and feel a powerful urge to help you. They have to take your suffering seriously. So friends engage in the social ritual of credulously believing each other’s sob stories, including their bullshit about the terrible suffering inside their heads, to show they care—that they’re good friends…
We need to rethink our relationship with suffering. We demonize it and fail to appreciate its benefits. We try so hard to protect our kids from suffering that we prevent them from learning and growing. We pretend our suffering is the worst thing in the world, because sympathy has become a form of status, our tears a social currency. We’ve forgotten the virtues of resilience, stoicism, and fortitude. These character traits have been virtues across cultures for a reason: they’re good. It’s good to be strong. It’s bad to be needy, to be a complainer, to be constantly fiddling away on one’s sadness-violin. Yes, being compassionate is good. But it’s also good to avoid being a burden on others—itself a form of compassion.
