Yikes. It doesn’t sound like a very liberating discovery.
I used to believe that if I was suffering it meant that there
was something wrong with me — that I was doing life
“wrong.” Suffering is completely human and
completely normal, and there is a very good reason for its
existence. Life’s persistent background hum of
“this isn’t quite okay, I need to improve
this,” coupled with occasional intense flashes of horror
and adrenaline are what kept human beings alive for millions of
years. This urge to change or escape the present moment drives
nearly all of our behaviour. It’s a simple and ruthless
survival mechanism which works exceedingly well for keeping us
alive, but it has a horrific side effect: human beings suffer
greatly by their very nature. This, for me, redefined every one
of life’s problems as some tendril of the human
condition. As grim as it sounds, this insight is liberating
because it means: 1) that suffering does not necessarily mean
my life is going wrong, 2) that the ball is always in my court,
so the degree to which I suffer is ultimately up to me, and 3)
that all problems have the same cause and the same solution.
We all suffer right? We all think that there is something
wrong, but not necessarily, sometimes it just means that we
need to improve something in our lives.
