Avoiding Suffering Causes Suffering

One way that humans suffer on an almost continuous basis is by trying to avoid unpleasant emotions. Let me tell you something: if you’re angry, you’re angry and you’re just going to have to deal with it. When you pretend not to be, and lie to yourself to convince yourself that you’re not angry, you simply become passive-aggressive, and this personality flaw stays with you, allowing your anger to fester and poison your mind.

It takes a lot of mental energy to repress one’s emotions, as it means that one must maintain a constant state of denial, lying to oneself on a continual basis, never letting the emotion that one denies shine through and find expression. This is foolishness. Don’t deny the fact that you’re angry, or sad, or afraid. It doesn’t work and you’re just going to accumulate emotional problems.

I’d like to have a word on a misconception about fear and the virtue courage, as I think that clearing up inaccurate ideas people have about them is an important thing to do. Courage is a virtue that means doing what one needs or wants to do despite the fact that one is afraid. It does not mean not being afraid. In dangerous or unusual or unfamiliar situations, most people get afraid. It’s part of being a human being. However, denying that this fear exists or trying to control the emotion itself is futile. One can only determine how one responds to it with their thoughts and actions. This is what is possible, and once one knows this, one can be genuinely courageous.

If, on the other hand, one chooses the path of denial and repression, the fear will influence your actions on a subconscious level, where you do not have a say in how it is reacted to. Denying that one is afraid is denying suffering, and I think I have demonstrated in my previous articles that suffering will not be denied. Suffering the fear for a moment is better than suffering it for a lifetime, and not repressing it frees up a lot of mental energy which will expand your sense of self-awareness and allow you to know yourself better.

Repressed love and sexual emotions are another beast, as there is plenty here that gets repressed by almost everyone. Sexual repression is particularly poisonous, because sex and death are linked in the mind; its just a curious fact that one can discover for oneself if one looks at their sexual self honestly. Repressing sexual feelings results in death obsession, unfortunately. I, personally, am guilty of this, I will admit, although I’m working on it. One may look inside oneself after opening up to their sexuality and find that they are attracted to the same sex, or have desires that could be unacceptable to social norms or even criminal. However, once again, if you deny these emotions, they are brought into the subconscious mind where they influence you without any say on your part, working to express themselves through stealth, and showing themselves in destructive and unhealthy thoughts and behaviors.

So don’t repress your emotions. Don’t let them determine your behavior all the time, but don’t keep them buried in the graveyard of your soul. It doesn’t help you or anyone who has to deal with the obnoxious behavior caused by doing this.

It is a curious fact that even though pleasure does not stop the pain of suffering in the long-term, human beings seek this supposed respite over and over again. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, wanton sex: since they do not address the root cause of the suffering, they do not end it, but indeed prolong it, obscure it, and make it worse.

But again and again, these supposed escapes from reality are sought, and the purveyors of vice are only too happy to provide them. Due to the fact that our culture is based on the consumption of products, and alcohol and drugs are the perfect products in such a system, liquor companies and drug dealers make billions upon billions of dollars a year increasing the suffering of those who are trying to escape it. There is no “perfect drug”: they all in their own way increase suffering, and those who seek them out are living a lie.

I do not think that alcohol and drugs should be unavailable. On the contrary, I believe that making them illegal is simply another way of avoiding suffering which makes it worse. Avoiding the suffering caused by drug use through prohibition makes matters worse, and the suffering of these intoxicants is then amplified by the illegal context in which they are taken under. I say to those who take them and ask me “What would I do about my suffering?” and I say to them, without joking, “Suffer!”

I am not a Buddhist in the sense that I do not try to teach a method to alleviate suffering. I say: Do your suffering, and do it now before it becomes immense, and you will reap benefits. Clean your room before it becomes an unimaginable mess. Brush your teeth before they rot out. Get a job before you’re unemployed and on the street. Cook your own food, before your food budget gets out of control. Do your own work, and do not defer what you can do to others, for it is better to do one’s own work. Do your work well, put effort into it (effort in work is suffering), and you will benefit.

There are many healthy respites for the suffering of everyday life, and all of them involve suffering! Exercise is a healthy respite, and involves suffering. The same with any hobby that costs money: the loss of money to buy the materials for the hobby is a form of suffering. Cooking nice meals requires work. On the other hand, going to a bar and drinking does avoid temporarily the suffering in one’s mind that leads one to do it, but there are consequences in the hangovers, loss of money, health problems, addictions, and making a fool of oneself. I say it is best to seek forms of suffering you actually enjoy, that have benefits rather than detriments.

Addiction is actually the nature of the human desire to avoid suffering: when people defer their suffering over and over again, they get involved in a cycle that requires increasing efforts for decreasing returns, which is how an addiction works. Peoples’ suffering becomes ever greater, and the next shot of whatever dope one has picked as their poison–whether actual dope or metaphorical dope–requires one to put more effort into obtaining it, and so the increase of suffering caused by this human behavior is multifaceted and fierce in its destructiveness.

There is a need to suffer to overcome these kinds of addictive behaviors: it requires work, effort, perseverance. Humans do not have to constantly defer their suffering, although they do. It is better to suffer a pin-prick than be run through with a sword a year later, but for some reason humans always seem to choose the sword.

Humans are lazy. This simple, three word statement should be obvious, as most of what surrounds us are tools created by humans to make life in some way easier. The human propensity for tool-making has allowed the species to elevate itself above the natural environment it came from, creating a world apart from the world which is full of luxuries and things that seem to make life easier, but which actually cause more suffering, especially for the unfortunate myriad of animal species sacrificed with nary a shrug in this undertaking called civilization, but also for humans themselves, as the nature of suffering is such that when it is constantly deferred, avoided, and repressed, it creates new forms of suffering which are often even greater than the initial suffering which was cast aside.

Let us consider a very real problem that presents itself: how to get work done. In 1501, the first African slaves arrived at Hispanola, and this importation of humans was an attempt by Europeans to get work done without actually doing any work themselves. I’m sure this was justified as not being a form of laziness, that slavery was necessary because there was too much work to get done and not enough workers to do it, but this illustrates only the fact that humans also, in addition to being lazy, have a tendency to bite off more than they can chew when they do decide to do actual work, which causes problems to overwhelm them, and sets in motion solution after solution that doesn’t actually solve anything and just makes things worse.

In slavery, the slaves themselves suffer incredibly, which is a matter which was cast aside with much hand-waving by European slave-owners. But in the end, Europeans suffered a lot because of slavery too, as they brought into being a racist social system which ultimately would turn on Europeans (who would eventually be known most notoriously as “white people”). Slavery brought into being the need to keep slaves, to constantly repress them, be on guard against any attempt they might make to flee, gain power, or turn on their masters. This was completely poisonous to the dispositions of Europeans, creating a streak of sadism, fear, and paranoia in them, and a constant need to treat other human beings in a way they themselves would not like to be treated. In a way, slavery helped destroy the soul of Europeans in America, and created a culture lacking in empathy, locked in an invisible power struggle with itself.

The civil war was no redemption, as afterward former Black slaves were still treated as sub-human by society in the South and repressed, mostly for fear they would gain too much power, which in the minds of now-soulless European-Americans would lead to the downfall of civilization, as it was feared that Black people would exact revenge on their oppressors. White people are now the diaspora of various European countries, divided against themselves, locked in a cultural war based on race, which is now erupting in chaos and violence, with everyone with a sense of compassion chastising the culture of Whiteness, with all of the suffering white people avoided paying them back.

All because people didn’t want to do work.