Mindfulness meditation taught me something that Haruki Murakami describes well about running: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
I wonder if suffering is only optional if you inflict it on yourself.
* you feel less pain if you cause it for yourself (you've already conquered fear)
* mindfulness eases pain because of more knowledge / seeing, less fear
"Suffering is optional" is a concept that dies immediately if you apply even a tiny amount of creativity to the question. It also fails if applied to animals.
It's really only available to people in a specific range of situations, and often it's stated not because it's actually true, but because it makes people feel powerful in situations where they're rather powerless. Which is mostly the point of stoicism anyway, as it is a philosophy developed during a time when people felt that they couldn't change anything about the world.
Of course, this means it's a poor philosophy to follow if your interest is in things improving, and not in just you personally not caring about them, something that many people already accomplish all too well...
I think you’re projecting your own beliefs onto others.
So you claim that love, justice, truth, and honor are not real “by definition”? And, moreover, that everyone agrees with you on this?
> I think you should find another fight to pick with someone else.
Who’s “picking a fight” here? You’re being weirdly defensive.
> it's a poor philosophy to follow if your interest is in things improving
Stoicism helps people accomplish more, by letting them transcend the things that are holding them back that they control.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, and one of his points (as I understand it) is that humans deeply desire to know that their life is meaningful, and even if another person is torturing you, you can find meaning by maintaining your human dignity in the face of the evil around you.
The stories in the book are heartbreaking, but there is a clear sense that it's possible to find something even when it seems like there's nothing. I guess he would say: perhaps you can't always find peace, but you can find meaning.
It’s an absolutely different story when you are being wrongfully interrogated in the USSR and thus giving up simply implies a life in prison. And the other option is another day of torture.
Suffering is relative.
This is the sort of thing one can email to the Quote Investigator. Maybe I will.
https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/pain-is-inevitable-suffering-is...
It's often phrased in terms of the "first arrow" (pain) and the "second arrow" (suffering in reaction to the pain): the second arrow is optional and self-inflicted.
Imagine you wake up and your back is sore. Getting out of bed is a struggle, everything aches and you must move slowly.
Without other knowledge, you may get worried, anxious, feel distressed.
If you remember you had a workout yesterday, you may actually enjoy the feeling. It reminds you of the effort you put in, the future progress you’ll make as muscles are repaired.
The physical sensation is exactly the same.
Ultimately, we're making a prediction: my life is guaranteed to be worse off because my muscle was recently torn. Is this true?
The fact that it feels different to you could just be that it’s a different context. Different “metadata” so to speak, with the same pain.
Seems like GP thinks the metadata is making it worse, and you think the data is different. How would you tell the sifference?
Me deciding to drink alcohol would be indulging. I know the consequences but I do it anyway. In this sense, the side effects of drinking alcohol would then be caused by me.
But if I wake up one day with a huge cluster headache, why am I considered indulging in it? It makes no sense. I didn't ask for the headache, it showed up on its own. Rather, I may try to resist the headache, but I'm certainly not "yielding to a pleasurable experience", more like I am being attacked and I may attempt a skill check, or I am drowning in an ocean and trying to swim; for neither of these is the term "indulge" appropriate.
And that's the core difference. The original poster used terms like "indulge" and "desire for alternative" to imply that suffering is generated, or manufactured, by humans, that it's a fake thing that doesn't have to exist. My example of animals clearly shows that this is not the case, as most animals do not have enough mental faculties to generate such things in the first place, yet we do not kid ourselves that animals do not suffer.
Suffering is primary. Suffering comes first. "We let suffering happen to us" makes about as much sense as saying a victim is letting themselves get beaten by someone bigger. It's technically true, but not in any kind of useful sense, and the history of those kinds of statements is horrible.
> Many dogs will ignore their own pain to help another in need.
Examples like this are not useful here, because they are not situations of high control. The dog is not ignoring the pain, the dog is, rather, feeling something else that took priority. A human can similarly ignore lots of pain if they are high on adrenaline, but it is not because the human is controlling the situation and actively not "indulging" in pain, but that their body is not interested in supplying pain right the moment. But when the body goes back to being interested in supplying pain, it will come.
Pain: My head hurts. This sucks.
Suffering: My head hurts. It's not going away. Maybe this means something is wrong with me. Maybe it means I have some kind of disease or disorder. What if there's something wrong with my brain, like a brain tumor or a blood clot? What if I suddenly die next week? etc. etc.
Pain: My head hurts, but that's not going to stop me from having an awesome day.
Suffering: I have a headache, this sucks, let me avoid things that might be fun even with a headache.
Perhaps a better example is the stoicism, Steve Prefontaine famously won an Olympic qualifier with the stitches on his toe ripping; "Yes, my toe hurts, but I want to win, I can fix my toe after I finish."
There was no council of people who have decided that moving animals need to consume energy in the form of food, and that they would feel pain if they do not consume enough of this energy in time. Yet here it is, and every creature is enslaved by it.
Adult, well-read humans blessed with mental faculties are at times able to cheat the mental pathway and come up with ways to not have it show up at the forefront, but there's nothing self-inflicted about suffering, and assigning quasi-religious themes to this process is not doing us any favors.
I like the theory that many emotions, especially negative ones, exist to spur us to some type of action.
Anger means we need a way to resolve a conflict. Fear means we need to take steps to protect ourselves. Regret means we need some introspection to discover how we should do things differently in the future. Revulsion means we need to avoid something. (This applies in less abstract, more visceral ways too. Hunger means we need to eat. Physical pain means we are reaching our physical limits.)
Anyway, a lot of suffering comes about because we don't take any action. When the situation continues to exist, the negative emotion continues to exist.
This isn't to say we should just all act rashly to get rid of our negative feelings. Obviously the right action is important. But sometimes just getting started is enough to help feel better. And if you've already done what you could or should have, sometimes it helps to realize that or remind yourself of it.
This means that the suffering is not always aligned. This is very not obvious since our association of "feels bad == bad" and "feels good == good" is very strong since it's so obviously hardcoded. But it's not hardcoded for your benefit, it's there for building the pyramid, remember that.
A lot of it is quite obvious in the issue of short term vs long term gratification, but there are more complex interactions. People can drown in guilt when something bad was done to them, and a person may be very happy from a sexual encounter, unable to see the causal link between it and the alimony payments they'll soon be making. Reason is necessary, emotions are a blunt instrument. Intuition is better than raw emotions, but requires calibration. Emotion and intuition can be overwritten, to some extent, which is what most of this thread is about.
But quite often, the incentives do align, as we're one of the more advanced and successful species out there, which means we're less likely to be afflicted with the kinds of sufferings and pleasures that lead to a loss of power (i.e., musth in elephants).
Do you think your cat won't suffer is you stop feeding it? Do you think it's making a conscious decision to suffer if it's hungry?
You know that animals are known to eat their own young [1]? Do you think its a conscious decision? Or they are just on auto-mode like a person that is less mindful is?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness [1] https://www.livescience.com/2053-animals-eat-offspring.html
"Suffering in humans" is not concrete. You would need to create a distinction between "suffering in humans" and "suffering in animals" and explain where it differs and what is special about it and I don't see any such definition, so I am going to go with "suffering in general".
Many people here are talking about physical pain, which animals can also suffer from, so it doesn't seem obvious to me that your definition of "suffering" would be some kind of a special definition that shares nothing with suffering in animals.
You are likely trying to say some kind of a thing where humans are special and have special mental controls and so when a human feels pain they have more means of control about it than an animal can. This is all well and good but then we get into issues like children or people with limited cognitive capacity. The line between human and animal quickly becomes thin and we're back to square one, the square where saying that suffering is a choice is egregiously wrong and the statement must be qualified.
It seems to me that you're trying to move some goalposts around.
To be able to be mindful you need consciousness first, to have that you have to be a human. Sorry, either don't move the goalpost and bring animals in, or prove that animals are capable of managing their stimuli with mindfulness.
I'll break it down to you. You receive an input (emotion) and with mindfulness you realize that you ('you' the human, not 'you' the cat) do have a say on how to act based on it. That is all.
This is the weak point in your argument.
If I have a flat tire, I can get it fixed. I didn’t consciously choose to get a flat tire. But if I don’t fix it, the next day I will have a flat tire I consciously chose to have.
You may not be able to choose the content of your thoughts exactly, but you may be able to change how they work on you.
I do not know how to scientifically quantify or test this but it is a reported by scores of people and can be understood experientially.
The idea is that this very conversation could lessen your suffering for the rest of your life.
If you talk to your cat about stoicism, they might suffer less during starvation, yes.