{"id":163898,"date":"2025-09-27T20:59:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T04:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163898"},"modified":"2025-09-27T16:02:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T00:02:32","slug":"suffering-is-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163898","title":{"rendered":"Suffering Is Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Pinsof writes<\/a>: Your brain evolved to seek stuff in the world\u2014like food and status and safety\u2014that was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments…<\/p>\n

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\u2019re under threat), lowers your energy (if you\u2019re helpless), and recalibrates your motivations to the right level. Suffering is useful. It\u2019s designed by evolution to help you deal with bad things, avoid making them worse, and prevent them from happening again in the future.<\/p>\n

Once you recognize this fact, all the puzzles disappear. Why do teenagers get crushes on people out of their league? Because that\u2019s how they learn what league they\u2019re 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\u2019re not trying to avoid suffering; we\u2019re 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 \u201cgrow\u201d from suffering? Because we do grow! It\u2019s not bullshit. <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another puzzle to solve. Why do we talk as if suffering is bad? It\u2019s pretty weird when you think about it. Suffering is good for us\u2014it helps us learn and grow\u2014and 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?<\/p>\n

Because we\u2019re bullshitting…<\/p>\n

We want pity points. We\u2019re like personal injury lawyers trying to milk the jury for sympathy. Personal injury lawyers don\u2019t just want to recover lost wages for their clients; they want compensation for the \u201cpain and suffering\u201d caused by the injury. That means the \u201cpain and suffering\u201d have to be bad. Very bad. If they weren\u2019t 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 \u201ccompensation\u201d we get from the jury of our peers\u2014i.e., more yummy pity points.<\/p>\n

We want to hide our unflattering motives. Our motives are often pretty ugly. For example, we feel \u201cfriendship jealousy\u201d 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\u2019re suffering. We cannot say \u201cI feel like shit because you\u2019re spending time with people who are not me, and I want you all to myself, because I\u2019m a clingy, selfish person\u201d. Instead, we say “I\u2019m feeling hurt\u201d. When asked what\u2019s wrong, we bullshit about the awfulness of what we\u2019re feeling, as if the problem was a bad thing inside our heads, instead of our friend having a social life.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cMeh, big deal. I read a blog post about how suffering is actually good for you and you\u2019re just bullshitting about how bad it is.\u201d I\u2019m 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\u2019re 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\u2019s sob stories, including their bullshit about the terrible suffering inside their heads, to show they care\u2014that they\u2019re good friends…<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve forgotten the virtues of resilience, stoicism, and fortitude. These character traits have been virtues across cultures for a reason: they\u2019re good. It\u2019s good to be strong. It\u2019s bad to be needy, to be a complainer, to be constantly fiddling away on one\u2019s sadness-violin. Yes, being compassionate is good. But it\u2019s also good to avoid being a burden on others\u2014itself a form of compassion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Pinsof writes: Your brain evolved to seek stuff in the world\u2014like food and status and safety\u2014that was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments… When you suffer, your brain does all sorts of useful things for you. It figures … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happiness"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t