The idea that suffering is romantic isn’t far fetched.
From sad girl music to hustle culture, we as a species tend to find comfort in discomfort. We make songs about our pain, we write about it, paint about it all of which are healthy coping mechanisms.
However, things turned sour when we started reveling in our suffering.
We now take pride in sleepless nights and burnouts.
We boast and brag about how we have no time for leisure and look down on those who lead a seemingly soft life.
We put the serial sufferers on a pedestal, we admire their strength and deep down wish we could fight their battles ( only if we can win them, of course.)
To justify that inclination for pain, we establish a false cause-and-effect relationship between suffering and success and start making up evidence to back it up.
We invented the myth of the tortured artist so that artists can keep believing that their work is only as good as their suffering is deep.
We invented the lie of academic meritocracy to convince ourselves that as long as we study really really hard we will thrive.
A deadly mixture of confirmation and survivorship bias blindsides us: we now have a distorted view of an already distorted reality.
Suffering is then so central to our collective ideal -success- that it becomes aspirational.
Slavoj Žižek summarized the issue in the following quote:
“Renunciation of pleasure can turn into pleasure of renunciation of pleasure”
-Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher
When pain is seen as the prequel to prosperity, it’s only natural for us to seek it.
It becomes first a friend then a lover we can’t seem to get enough of. We start picking the most tedious option every time we make a choice. We make our own battles harder and delude ourselves into believing that it will benefit us in the end.
At last, we take pleasure in the renunciation of pleasure.
Falling out of love with suffering is no easy task but with a few small steps we can at least be more aware of the hold it has on us:
I- Introspection:
The first step is to reflect on our own behavior either by journaling or talking to a friend.
Take the following questions as a starting point:
“Do I tend to romanticize suffering? Is there a link between my value and the amount of pain I endure? What do I feel towards people who have suffered more than me? Does that feeling change when they are successful?”
This step is meant to give you a better understanding of your thought process.
II-Pattern-Identification:
The next step is to identify clear situations in which we have put ourselves through unnecessary pain.
Is there any reoccurring pattern we can find between those situations?
Take note of any common causes to your behavior, reflect on why those things trigger you.
This step is meant to justify your thought process.
III-Realization:
This is the most abstract and time consuming step.
It is all about reaffirming the idea that not all pain is necessary and engraving it in one’s brain.
An approach to this step would be to put on paper everything one could have done instead of suffering.
For example: “ delegating a task instead of taking up a heavy workload could have allowed me to have a day off and be less stressed.”
This gives you an unbiased view of a situation and allows you to see pain for what it is.
It is important to keep in mind that these steps aren’t a foolproof anti-love potion against suffering. Most of their value lies within the insight they give us on ourselves.
The point of this practice is not to promote hedonism but to eliminate all superfluous suffering.
Life is always going to be unexpected, we cannot be completely free from pain and the goal of this article isn’t to tell you that you should be.
The key is identifying when and where suffering is worth it.
