Choosing Your Pain Over Suffering

Okay! It's another week, and I'm here again with my rather intuitive posts to ruin or make your day; your choice.

I couldn't help but notice that a large number of people today unknowingly choose to suffer rather than engage the pain in their lives.

I believe a significant cause of pain and unhappiness today is the popular narrative where people are mainly becoming unhappier due to the fact that we're all narcissistic and grow up being told that we're special, unique beings, leaders of tomorrow who are going to change to the world.

Oh, and we have social media continually exhorting us on how amazing everyone else's lives are, but sadly not our own. By the end of the day, we all feel like losers and wonder where it all went wrong.

Some days ago, I logged into my Facebook and saw a story about a man who got drunk and goes home to end his dog. Then it's followed up by how a soccer fan stabbed another death over a silly argument on...soccer.

This is life now. A constant never-ending of non-relevant and self-referential nonsense that passes through our eyes and out of our brains in the speed of a touchscreen and how fast your WiFi is.

Surprisingly, research shows that social media doesn't cause people to become unhappy. It just gives the unhappy people more opportunities to indulge their unhappiness.

Social media doesn't cause unhappiness or inflict pain in our lives. It's how you use it that determines if it will cause you to feel pain and unhappiness.

Today, we live with more information than any other point in human history. According to Google, the internet produces as much information every two years as the rest of all of human history combined.

And all that information is theoretically instantly accessible by us. Amazing. You can now get answers and have your assignment done in minutes.

Learn how to do pretty much anything with a simple click on Wikipedia, communicate with people who are millions of miles away with the hundreds of communication apps at our disposal. 

Advanced technology isn't changing us; it's changing society. The social media age is changing the underlying economics in our day to day lives. And it is changing them in significant ways that many of us don't even notice. 

And surprisingly it's the famous people who take advantage of it. Famous people who contribute nothing to society are taking advantage of you when you click that charming follow button.

One time I saw a trend about an egg on Instagram, it was a picture of an egg, just an egg. I mean an egg that chickens lay, and this picture got over 45 million likes on Instagram and a few million followers as well. 

Why would 45 million people like a picture of a plain egg and make something stupid popular? 

When you look at all of the criticisms about social media, smartphones, and the internet at large, most of the criticisms boil down to one thing: Attention. 

People don't have any attention span anymore. People don't focus on what's in front of them anymore. They instead focus on other people's lives and wanting what others have. 

If you decide that seeing other people's success on social media makes you sick or hate yourself more, you will suffer. And that's when your brain starts to sing a song inside your head, titled "I'm such a pathetic loser." 

But if you decide that gazing at the success of others make you feel encouraged to work hard and aspire to reach the same level of success, then you will be better off with your pain.

One time in school, after the exams, I saw my results, I flunked out on a course. It hurt. But rather than suffer, I chose to engage my pain and come to terms with the fact that I must re-take the failed course and try again.

I choose to engage my pain because if it's not going to matter in 5-10 years, then you shouldn't spend 5 minutes worrying about it. 

If I had decided that I did well on the exams and didn't deserve to fail, that my results were unfair, then I would suffer. But I was better off with my pain by coming to terms with the fact that it was just an unfavourable outcome.

That I have to pull myself up and try again, if you decide that the pain in your break up means you're a loser and unworthy of love, then you will suffer.

If you decide that your break up means that your partner wasn't the right person for you, then you will be better off with your pain.

If you decide that your health problems are unfair, that you don't deserve them, then you will suffer. If you choose to see your health problems as a way to practice resilience and discipline, then you will be better off with your pain. 

In every case, we choose to avoid our pain or to engage our pain. When we avoid our pain, we suffer. When we engage our pain, we grow. 

Some people who choose not to engage their pain often buy into the narrative of faith and destiny, believing that their pain has some higher purpose that is unknowable. 

Others choose to go the religious route, that the Lord has a plan, and he works in mysterious ways and that their pain is some life test. 

Others even go as far as internalizing their pain, believing that they must be going through such awful luck because something is wrong with them. So, they start to dislike themselves by believing that they deserve to suffer. Well, maybe you do.

Nobody deserves anything—even happiness.

Happiness can be an illusion. Seeing how often happiness is being marketed these days. Buy this and be happy, buy that and be happy. Studies show that nobody is happy all the time; conversely, nobody is unhappy all the time either. 

Actions have consequences, and in a straightforward context, the effects are easy to understand. Therefore, as humans, our default setting is to automatically assume that each of us deserves whatever happens to us.

But what if something awful and unexpected happens? Like, let's say your precious iPhone gets stolen, or a flood destroys your home? Did your actions cause that pain? Of course not. Mother nature did. 

But our minds have a hard time shaking off the feeling that we aren't somehow deserving of our suffering. That's why the most common phrases you hear around any tragedy is some variation of: "What did I do to deserve this?" 

Allow me to propose a less obvious solution to these questions. 

Our believe that anyone deserves anything is wrong. You do things, and sometimes they create good results, sometimes they create bad, regretful results. The solution is to do the things that you believe will more often create excellent results. That's it.

So if your home gets destroyed by a flood or you lost your iPhone to a criminal or an evildoer, or flunk out on a course like I did, that's life. Engage the pain, learn from it and be better, wiser next time. 

No one deserves anything. It might be easy to gaze at someone else's pain and decide that they deserve it. But in their hearts, they feel they don't deserve the pain

Just as you too will feel in your life that you don't deserve a certain amount of pain, while others will look at you and say that you deserve it. 

Conclusion

Letting go of the idea of observing pain is a very difficult thing to do. But the moment you're able to rid yourself of it, it leaves you with a straightforward layout of the world. Do not inflict unnecessary pain on the lives of others and yourself. 

Happiness is not scarce, just that human dignity is. Go with dignity and forget about deserving, because you don't deserve happiness, you don't necessarily deserve anything at all.