Being sad is a bit of a funny thing. It's one of the few fundamental emotions of which the legitimacy can be questioned and overlooked. It all starts at puberty when all of a sudden everything just sucks. Life sucks. Friends suck. Parents suck. School sucks. The world is against you at every moment and you're the only victim of the war crimes life is committing against you. I know, I've gone through it. Every song and poem about darkness and heartbreak seemed to justify this desperate feeling I thought I constantly felt and every little thing hurt 100 times more than it ever should have. But now that I'm older I see it in younger kids and I scoff because I know it's not legitimate sadness. Who am I to say? If all feeling is relative, if they experience these emotions as true suffering (as compared to the rest of their limited scope of experience), how can we say that it isn't?
But then we have legitimate suffering of all flavors, ranging from a missed connection with a stranger to the loss of a loved one. But you'll notice (hopefully) right off the bat, all of the suffering discussed thusfar has direct relations with people.
"Ah Dylan," you might at this point be saying. "I understand why suffering is relevant in relation to previous discussions. Not only because it's an interesting facet of human psychology to examine, but because it's another facet of human social interaction and social life. Very good!"
Thanks.
Anyway, human suffering is interesting to me because if you think of all the ways you can suffer, it all comes down to human interaction.
- I asked someone out--they said no.
- My friend moved away.
- Someone said they hated me.
- Someone said I suck.
- My parent died.
- My favorite show got cancelled.
- My life hurts.
- Etc.
Actually, now might be a great time to differentiate between pain and suffering. When I say pain, I mean physical discomfort. I mean stubbing your toe, burning your skin (accidentally), breaking a bone, having a stroke, a cramp, anything like that. You may suffer from the pain, but that's a completely different kind of suffering. That suffering is of one color and flavor: this pain sucks a lot. When I talk about suffering, true psychological suffering, I'm talking about the multicolored rainbow that is purely emotional suffering. I'm talking about suffering that's much more complicated, suffering that's woven deep into your brain and takes a firm hold of every facet of your life.
For example, you're in a relationship and it's getting pretty serious. You've been together for a long while and you have a deep connection with this person. Or so you think. They cheat on you. You found out from a friend of a friend and you go to confront your significant other. There's a dozen things going on your head. You feel hurt, you feel betrayed, you feel insecure, you wonder what you could have done. Whatever happens next, the only guarantee is that right now you're suffering. This suffering is a complicated blend of every single moment of your relationship with this person coming to a screeching halt. All of a sudden you're questioning every single tender moment that has until now, been a symbol of their love and affection. You doubt whether or not the relationship is genuine at all. Your confrontation is done and you find yourself alone. What are you thinking about? Everything and nothing. Your head is spinning with all of the thoughts going through your mind. You have regrets and questions--your whole world is upside down. That, my friend, is what I mean when I say suffering.
The fun part hasn't begun yet. The weirdest thing about suffering is not it's cause, but what it does to you. You're sitting alone, ruminating over this news, and you feel physically ill (potentially elevating the suffering with pain). Your stomach is in knots, you feel like your heart is imploding, you're lethargic and no matter what you do, you can't seem to pull yourself out of this hole you feel yourself falling in. Now of course, maybe all of this isn't caused by a crap relationship. Maybe the only thing that could make you feel this way is a family member dying. That has to be a suffering I can't imagine. A torrent of emotion and distress on a level I can't begin to understand. Regardless, this psychological state affects us physically as well.
Socially, it makes us do some dumb stuff. What's the one thing you're okay with doing when you're sitting alone in your room crying about whatever it is you're crying about? The phone rings and you pick it up. Someone's calling and before that "hello," you're ready to dump all your garbage on the pour soul who dialed your number. Even if no one calls, you send a message, a text, an email, a chat, anything to anyone to who might listen and give you sympathy.
Sympathy is a funny thing. We only really seek it when we're in distress. We swing our issues around with reckless abandon until we get it. We just love for people to feel sorry for us. That's the reason we post those dumb, passive-aggressive statuses on Facebook. We're dying for someone to say "What happened?" We love that validation that everything's going to be okay because for some reason no matter how many times we tell ourselves that, the sympathy of anyone is infinitely more potent.
Of course, I'm not preaching from atop my high horse because I'm as much a criminal as I am a crier (someone who makes loud announcements). My statuses and blogs would often be littered and saturated with sad song lyrics and a vague melancholy. But it's that attention and validation that I yearn for. When we're younger we feel like we're the only victim and maybe that feeling never actually goes away, we just cling to other people whom we hope feel the same way. We seek them out and we seek solace in our collective suffering and maybe, just maybe we'll emerge from it, finding something to occupy our time in a way that allows us to forget why we were sad in the first place.
Maybe it's also something about the public spectacle, too. You post a passive-aggressive status for what reason? So the person it's about will see it and all of a sudden suffer as much as you feel like they deserve? Or because others will see your indirect defiance of that person's transgressions and take your side? Either way there's something cathartic about a status like "I just can't deal with anything" or "Everything sucks." Maybe if your suffering is made public, it will somehow be on trial for all the world to condemn and hopefully that will help it's destruction in your own mind. I don't know what we expect people to say in response.
"I hear ya!"
"You stay strong!"
"You're a beautiful person!"
"Should I teach you how to tie a noose?"
Additionally, I don't understand death announcements on Facebook. Maybe I don't get it because I've never had to do it, but I don't see the point of announcing to all your 650 friends (which include at least several dozen casual acquaintances, your boss, and a hundred people from high school you haven't talked to in more years than you'd like to count) that your dog or cat died. Even worse, announcing the death of an immediate relative like your grandmother or parent. I mean, that kind of stuff seems a little personal for the internet. Of course, I can understand a personal message to your close friends about why you've been distant or why they should expect distance in the immediate future, but to announce to at least 300 people who usually don't care what you had for breakfast that your mom died seems a little insane. I mean, what do you expect them to say to you? It puts all those casual acquaintances in an awkward situation because while they are technically your friend, a sudden extension of sympathy might seem contrived due to the fact you've never really spoken. But I think we just like knowing that people know we're suffering. Again, I think a private message to close friends is more appropriate, but hey, all 650 of my facebook friends are technically my friends. Maybe this is just an opportunity at another sad attempt to quantify how many people actually care about me by their hollow attempt at sympathy for my loss.
I don't know. Honestly, I don't feel like people care. If you've ever heard someone complaining (or had a lucid experience in a conversation) about their day or life or talking about their personal suffering, you know that any discussion of the sorts turns into a contest of who can suffer the most. You find yourself in a situation where you've been listening to your friend complain about their week and instead of trying to genuinely analyze the situations and provide legitimate solutions to their problems, you're simply seeking a good point at which you can insert being late for work and getting yelled at or getting turned down for a date by a cute girl at a party. You find yourself not even listening to your friend as you build a case as to why your week was worse and you expect genuine sympathy in response. Your frustration builds as your friend deflects your complaints with another example of why their week was worse. At the end of the discussion everyone is exhausted and frustrated yet hopefully feeling somewhat cleansed of their freakin' issues.
Speaking of lucidity, I've really been trying to catch myself when I indulge in any of the aforementioned behaviors. Now before anyone sarcastically calls me a martyr or a try-hard or something, I genuinely hope to lead by example and if not, at least not partake in this behavior in the event my awareness of it. If someone is explaining to me their issues, I do my best to actually listen. If i'm about to post something stupid on Facebook, I erase it and replace it with a quip about my day or something. I'm not saying I don't have these feelings or tendencies, I just think that if we're going to suffer and we're going to force people to be a part of it, we might as well save our rare opportunities for a concerned ear for the times when we actually need them. If I feel like I'm about to complain about something that I have no right complaining about, I don't. Easy as that.
I try to make these posts as oriented towards the humanities as possible, viewing everything through a lens of psychology and philosophy. So I pose this philosophical question to you:
Would suffering exist without other people?
I say no. In a Hobbesian state of nature we have no ties to people--we live on our own in our shelter and we provide for ourselves. In this state of nature people are selfish and violent and living on one's own is the only way to ensure survival. Think about it: if we have no people in our lives, how could we ever suffer? There would be no relationships to betray our expectations or become invested in or lies or deceit or anything. We wouldn't care about the death of another. We would just live our short, brutish lives. I think it can be therefore said that people are the single cause of our suffering. But as I've said in the past, people are also the cause of our happiness. To have one without the other is impossible. You can't know happiness without knowing suffering. If we live in the state of nature, in these neutral lives, we can have no feelings other than maybe physical pleasure and self-satisfaction (which may or may not be a result of competition in society).
So the elimination of suffering is only possible with the elimination of people. That, of course, would never happen. So we deal. We deal with suffering when it comes, seeking solace in the arms of our loved ones. Like a pendulum that we put in motion, others have the power to relieve suffering and the power to cause it. From the moment we interact, there is the potential for suffering--we just hope that we don't have to deal with it as much as happiness. Many animals die alone. They wander off from the group in order to die alone. Animals can't experience constant suffering. (This will get touchy) They can experience constant discomfort and pain due to human abuse, but we are the only animal that can truly suffer at the hands of members of our own species. And that suffering is lasting and potent; though as I said, that suffering enables us to be happy.
Being human is a crazy thing. We are unique in the depth and breadth of our experiences. All we can do is strive to understand this short life we have and embrace it with all the faults that it may contain.
EDIT/UPDATE 1: I don't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that I don't care about your problems. Obviously, if you just got dumped or had a bad day, I would love to lend an ear. I think anyone and everyone should, even if it's a stranger. I just had a friend message me with a very poignant anecdote and what she said/what I took away was that if we all just listened more maybe we would all have stronger relationships and more open minds and hearts. Of course I care. Death notices on Facebook are weird but they still touch my cold heart. I'm really not that much of a jerk--I just wanted to point out the communal side of suffering and how suffering alone is truly impossible (at least from it's inception).
