Human Suffering and Reality

Question: Why as human we suffer more than we have to and how understanding our reality can be a remedy.

As humans, we can suffer in a variety of ways. The bad news is that suffering isn’t going away anytime soon. Suffering, for people, is a fundamental state of being, just as our sadness or our happiness. It exists because we ultimately have no control over much of anything and definitely not the external world.

The good news—we can decrease and lessen this negative pain. We can accomplish this in many ways, but the most effective and long lasting has to do with us becoming who we are and living a life of meaning. Now, meaning comes from being more authentic, pure, truthful, and honest with ourselves. We work internally and intuitively first to understand and practice some basic concepts. The second step is to act. For example, taking responsibility for ourselves and those around us. Or even putting ourselves in a position to start doing what we have been avoiding (which is hard, but worth it!)

Nonetheless, suffering is a type of pain in regards to our mind (the conscious and unconscious), our soul, and our emotions. The most occurring being depression, sadness, low self-esteem, feeling lost in life, inability to communicate, being afraid of failure, or afraid of fear. This type of suffering cannot be seen by others and surprisingly at times cannot be seen by us within ourselves. Now that we understand which type of mental anguish we may experience the next question is why. Why do we suffer more than we have to?

The answer: Because we misunderstand some of the most prominent concepts of life.

One of the concepts we misunderstand is our potential to discern and comprehend ourselves. It is known as self-awareness by many people and is ultimately knowing who we are and consciously perceiving ourselves throughout our life. Understanding the meaning of self-awareness will help us place ourselves in society in accordance with our own successful traits and personality and will help us maneuver through distinct roles in our life exceptionally. It will also help create a more meaningful life and help us become the best support and advocate for ourselves.

Another concept we may misinterpret is perception- our ability to perceive the world and our capability to further interpret what is around us. Perception is also directed inwards to the workings of the mind. Similar to self-awareness, it takes deep thinking and continuous practice. Our ability to see the world, sense our environment, and interpret other human beings and interactions is our tunnel into the external world. For that reason, perception is essential to our goal of lessening our suffering.

Next misunderstood concept is materialism. You’ve heard before- how we have started to love things and use people, and why that’s wrong? It’s true, we have started to do the opposite of human nature. Wouldn’t it sound better to love people and use things instead? Our current connection with materials has to do with our unhealthy obsession and love of materials. The way it misleads us is by misdirecting our love, effort, and time into acquiring and maintaining materials in our life. In turn, we are lead to chase the wrong things in our life which furthers us away from meaning.

Now, if you’ve ever heard of Epictetus, the philosopher, you’ve heard of control vs. influence. I mean he lived, ate, slept, and thought control vs. influence. Nonetheless, because of him an understanding of where we might go wrong daily in our life. This concept is about understanding what we have control over (100 percent impact) versus influence (partial impact). Mixing up the two causes us to try and control what we can only influence and leads to suffering and unhappiness.

These are just a handful of some of the concepts we misunderstand every day that lead us to suffer internally. What they all have in common is that they impact our perception of reality, and fundamentally there is where we go wrong. Misconstruing our reality can lead to a life full of suffering and madness. This is because we don’t truly understand ourselves (self-awareness), don’t understand how we see the world (perception), won’t understand the difference between needs and wants (materialism), and won’t understand what we should put the effort in and what we should leave alone (control vs. influence).

All of what we have discussed lead to the making of reality, and so if we try and understand our reality we should be able to lessen the suffering and start living a more meaningful life. Only by figuring out and accepting our reality can we begin to see and act as our true selves and as authentic beings of the world.