The Art of Suffering
This article shows a pragmatic approach to suffering. It answers the folowing questions: Why do we feel bad for no reason? Why do we feel tired and exhausted? How to get unexpected surprises, and how to feel truly great?
Content:
I. Sad Display
II. Voice of Reason
III. My Take
IV. Choose your Suffering!
I. Sad Display
You open your eyes. Some light beams through the window.
One arm from under the blanket.
Brrrr cold.
You put it back.
Mhh I could stay five more minutes — you think to yourself.
You close your eyes. Mhhh.
Bam! One hour later, the alarm clock rings.
You shut if off. After some procrastination you start to move your body slowly.
Your body feels bad. You feel bad. Your head is spinning and your thoughts are slow and gloomy. You’re 30 minutes late to work.
Great! — you think sarcastically.
You somehow manage to get to work.
Door opens. You arrive tired like a sloth and umnotivated, you explain yourself, why you came late.
The whole day seems utterly shitty — you ponder in your thoughts for a while.
Does the universe hate me? Why am I that way? Is waking up so hard, or am I just a fuck up?
Can’t I just wake up and feel good?
Two days pass.
You open your eyes, reach for your phone.
Fuuuuck, two hours late already! You sigh and get up.
Your brain — foggy.
Your mood — bad.
Your smell — worse.
You wonder again — why is this?
II. Voice of Reason
This situation, I encountered countless times. Was I happy with my choices? No! In order to fix that I needed change. I needed to change my life. I needed to change the core of my life itself — me.
So with the excitement of a dog, chasing its own tail I started to be more self-aware. After some time I picked up a strange pattern. Very often, I went out and had a wonderful time. However the next morning I woke up empty inside and dissatisfied with life. Feeling bad for no apparent reason.
Thus, I started to observe my actions of the night before.
Turns out, almost all I did was stimulating myself. Parties with loud music, booze, drunk people around me, fun games, dance, and shitty food we’re a part of my everyday life. The problem was that my body simply released so much dopamine at night, that there was none left in the morning.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and hormone that is responsible for rewarding your body, when doing something “good”. I won’t go into the details since I am not a neuroscientist or expert in this topic. What’s important though is that dopamine is know as the “happiness hormone”. When your brain is expecting a reward, dopamine is released in your body and you get a feeling of joy. Also known as a dopamine hit. When you seek fast gratification with stimulating food, sex, netflix shows or drugs, you simply feel worse afterwards since there is no dopamine to release.
It’s impossible to feel good all the time…sometimes we feel pleasure and sometimes we feel pain. It’s a constant change, a natural change. The sinus graph can be used to show it in an oversimplified way. Since I started to understand that, I automatically began to shift my lifestyle.
PS: The Angel Investor and Philosopher Naval Ravikant defines happiness as the state of peace. Internal peace. Peace is the absence of extreme highs and lows. He and some other people migth try to reduce the fluctuations.
The graph would probably look somewhere like this:
I think it’s a great idea if you strive for an internal serenity. It’s not my choice though. I want to experience extreme bliss and extreme pain in my life. My Graph would appear like this:
III. My Take
First I realised I’m going to suffer.
Always.
There is no way around it. It’s just life. When there are highs there will be also lows. The best thing you can do, is to accept that. Feeling sadness, disappointment, anger is just part of life. Don’t punish yourself for it. Enjoy the experience to be human.
There is one more thing though. I strongly believe, that you can choose your suffering. To understand that I categorised suffering into two groups. The unintentional suffering (bad suffering) where something outside of your influence makes you to feel miserable, and the intentional suffering (good suffering) where you willingly go into pain.
The latter is the one I strive for. Now, “Jacek, why the hell should I want to suffer?” you might ask me.
It’s truly simple.
You choose your suffering or life chooses your suffering.
The jogger, who suffers every run, but has later the benefits of a healthy body or the McDonalds addict, who gratifies himself immediately and later gets sick, fat, lazy and ugly.
The disciplined person, who always cleans the kitchen after cooking or the lazy guy who doesn’t clean and drowns in an ocean of his own trash.
The entrepreneur who learns & builds relentlessly although not knowing, if he will ever make it but, later has more time for family and the joys of life. Or the guy, who chooses and keeps the first standard job after high-school, later having financial troubles, not having time for his family, and being constantly exhausted.
your choice…
The white lines mark the spots in which you define your dopamine high. You already know that you’re going to eat a McDonalds burger or that you’re about to watch a Netflix show. So there is no surprise. Of course you feel for a small moment better, but then you have an unexpected downside. You simply don’t know how bad you’re going to feel.
You define the things, you will suffer through. You’re your own God. Yes you still suffer. But, afterward you don’t know what amazing feelings will come to you. A positive workflow, an unbelievably amazing tasting dish, a talk with an old friends which will suddenly feel like the ecstasy of life. Pure bliss, unexpected, random boosts of happiness.
If you ask me I’ll prefer a good surprise, instead of a bad one!
IV. Choose your suffering!
Don’t let instant gratification through, porn, social media, tv series, fast food, alcohol, drugs, sugar and countless other things ruin your life.
I hate doing many things: laundry, cooking, running, exercise, reading textbooks, bringing out trash. Yet I do them on a daily basis and I like the feeling I get afterwards — it’s worth it!
Life’s short. Life is precious. Use it.
Make it a life worth living.
As Jerzy Gregorek puts it so eloquently.
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life”
Choose your suffering ;)
