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Comment by tom_ilsinszki | Hacker News Reader

Life is _not_ suffering.

* When I am unhappy it is because I'm focusing on what I am not, and what the end result should be.

* If I focus on the process and the problem at hand, and I focus really hard, I will not have any more brainpower to think about things that make me unhappy. I get absorbed in the moment, and nothing else matters, but what I'm doing right now.

* Also, if I focus on the process, I will be able to give the best solution I'm capable of, because greedy, envious and ego-driven feelings will not distract me.

I do not see (rationally speaking), how I can get unhappy if I manage to keep this mind state.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/srikumar_rao_plug_into_you...

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The term "suffering" in the GP's post should, IMO, be understood as "pain", which is nowadays more tuned-up to the Buddhist/Nietzschian concept of suffering. Maybe we westerners have identified too much the term "suffering" to "sadness", the latter being the worst, most passive way with which one can react to pain.

Thanks, that's exactly what I meant. I didn't think about how many people were unfamiliar with the definition in the Buddhist/Nietzschian sense, as you put it :)

I definitely don't mean that life is sadness. I mean that life is absolutely full of little pains, and big ones, from losing people you love to being aggravated that your thermostat is hard to use, to not being able to find your keys, to wishing it wasn't raining right now.

That's definitely all suffering, in the Buddhist sense. And I don't believe anyone who says they don't suffer.

I don't think the parent meant it that way. I guess what he really meant was that something or the other will always be wrong. Ignore the small things and focus on fixing the larger problems.

Emotions are like weather. You can stick to your regimen forever, and you're still going to feel down sometimes, even if for absolutely no reason at all. That's totally normal cycles of chemistry.

And yes, life is suffering. You stub your toe. You think it's too cold, or too hot. Somebody doesn't look at you the way you want. Your tummy hurts. You constantly have to 'battle' against focusing "on what you're not," for example. You have a hard time focusing. You look at books, things, places, scenes, and people (hey, and HN comments) and they feel WRONG. You don't like them. You judge them. You judge everything by your yardstick.

That is all suffering.

That's the human condition: judging, and struggling, and hurting.

It doesn't say there aren't OTHER things, but the suffering is always there.

That, and the sheer sum of suffering vastly trumps pleasure in the world. And not just in humans -- there is a lot of cruelty in nature.

Pain can also be condensed much more easily than pleasure, to maddening heights.

It seems very whimsical to say that suffering is not one of the main defining features of the current situation on planet earth. And to say so is to blatantly ignore not only your own suffering, but the world's. Think about how tiny hope was compared to everything else that was let out of Pandora's box.

>>> You constantly have to 'battle' against focusing "on what you're not,"

Well, I don't have to. If I focus on the problem I'm facing probably I will be happy with the outcome.

One thing is for sure: My "focusing on the problem" self can beat my "focusing on what I wish I'd be" self any day.

Programming helps here. I got a lot better at doing this in everyday things when i got a lot better at programming.

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