Well I had a job, but I got laid off. I had a heart but it got too soft. I had a girlfriend and she lied. I had a wife but my wife she died. – Buddy Guy
The Buddhists organise suffering into eight groups.1
The four major or universal sufferings are birth, aging, sickness, and death.
The four minor sufferings are of having to part with loved ones, of having to meet those one hates, of being unable to obtain one’s desires, and suffering arising from the five components of life.
If you’ve ever itched your neck on a hot day, caught a flu, or bumped into an old high-school rival, you can rightly say you have suffered.
And if you spend a few spare minutes learning about current world events, you will quickly see just how much suffering is happening to humans and animals at any one moment.
Most of us can intellectually understand the suffering that happens in distant countries or to people we’ve never met, but it’s very hard to comprehend. You could tell me my house burned down, and I could imagine it, and maybe start to feel a lot of stress and shock, but it’s probably not until I see the incinerated remains of my living room that reality would sink in.
The other thing we learn when we read the news is that we are not all suffering equally. A person living in a refugee settlement in Dhaka is dealing with a very different material situation than a person born into a middle-class family in Zurich.
I’m in that second group. Pick any framework or wellbeing score you want, I could tick off most of the boxes. I’m just not suffering that bad.
From my position, when I feel anxiety, sadness, loneliness or anything else that’s clearly not good, I quickly remind myself that it’s not that bad in the scheme of things. It really could be worse.
It’s true, it could be worse, but why aren’t I allowed to feel dissatisfied? Why is it that a warden from the Gratitude Police™ taps me on the shoulder and tells me how inconceivably lucky I am to possess my current living arrangements?
Because even if I don’t allow myself to feel miserable, even if feel guilty that I dislike something about myself or my life, it doesn’t mean I’m not suffering.
It’s legit, 100%, grade-A, USDA certified suffering. Trust me.
It’s suffering, just in the form of something like guilt. Suffering becomes inescapable in this sense. Like water, it fills in all the gaps, ensuring that every available person suffers, if they want to. Guilt is also “arrogant”, author Robert A. Johnson writes, “because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.”2
On the flip side, guilt can prevent us from being happy. When we find ourselves feeling joyful and carefree, someone (perhaps the Joy Police™) grabs us by the scruff of our neck and says “hey, not too much of that Joy stuff. Don’t you know there’s people hurting?”
Don’t listen. I could reel off lots of things that I’m incredibly lucky to have, but I could equally do the same for all my sufferings. We all could. It’s what fills every film, novel, play or conversation at a bus stop. But there’s no Olympics to compete in, leaderboards or medals to be awarded.
No matter who we are, or what we are, we’re all suffering and to ever think we need to create more of it, is simply more suffering.
Originally published on Substack
- https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/dic/Content/F/212 ↩︎
- Johnson, Robert A. Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche.HarperCollins, 1991. ↩︎
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