Once upon a time, there was a fragile ape, too scared from climbing down from their tree, lest they ended up as a dinner for a hungry lioness just like their relatives once became. One day, there was this heavy storm, and a serpent made of a million suns climbed down from the skies onto the tree; the tree became a sun itself. The ape quickly jumped to a far branch and fell from it while trying to grip themselves to its tip.

They looked at the tree branch they’ve got at their hands and realized it was also becoming a sun-serpent. Before the ape could even process their own fright, they couldn’t help but realize every animal was running: suddenly, the lioness was fleeing instead of jumping onto the ape. Drowning under their own epinephrine, the ape came to a conclusion which I could translate as “lioness fled, me still standing, me have sun-serpent, sun-serpent friend, me fearsome”.

The ape smiled, before realizing their fur were being eaten by the sun-serpent, and this was painful as hell; they got struck by this sudden urge to keep running, until they accidentally fell into the river, and the sun-serpent stopped consuming their fur; but this was too late: they lost their fur. Now the furless ape found themselves in a covenant they didn’t ask for: they lost the only thing that was barely protecting them from the maw of a lioness, but they got this sun-serpent to protect them, so they got to keep this sun-serpent with them.

Fast-forwarding to present time, the furless apes, the “modern” homininæ, are running in circles. Some of the apes have since been drowning the entire big blue tree a smart ape once called as “Pale Blue Dot” under the breath of the sun-serpent while desiring so badly to climb to this distant big red tree they call as “Mars”. They’ve made big funny phallic rocks become big birds by attaching the sun-serpent to the bottom of big funny phallic rocks. An ape with orange hair have been trying to become the owner of the entire big blue tree and expecting all apes to hand him all bananas from big blue tree. Other apes are trying to make square rock become god-ape by making sun-serpent breathe onto it.

These are a few apes trying to control all the other apes like they (think they) control sun-serpent. As for the majority of the apes, they are too busy trying to be part of sun-serpent controlling underneath the whims of another furless apes, furless “boss” ape, hopefully in exchange for a banana by the end of the month because trees got scorched and no bananas can be harvested other than trees that furless “boss” ape control (and these bananas aren’t even edible bananas to begin with, the tree is a fake plastic tree).

Among them, there’s this strange ape writing a lengthy text about the history of apes using a small decade-old square rock, aware he’s also ape but unable to revert his own nature to fully live in the arms of Mother Nature, because other apes require him to be among apes.

And we apes call this “civilization”. Could this funny strange ape writing long text about history of apes call it “self-inflicted suffering”, other apes would throw rocks at him.

Yet here we are, in a self-inflicted suffering, me included. We’re apes who think we lost our home and have since then wandered around and yearned for a new tree, only for the sun-serpent we carry within us consume every new tree we finally got to stumble upon.

We’re too afraid to return to that old, scorched tree and try to climb it again: we fear sun-serpent would wrathfully descend from the skies again… yet we’re holding sun-serpent at our furless hands and we think we can control it. We fear the sun-serpent because we fear ourselves. Then we want to think we can control sun-serpent because we got no control over ourselves. Because we’ve been seeking to become sun-serpents ourselves; in this pointless endeavor, we’ve become too alienated from the very fauna and flora we belong to, too afraid of begging Mother Nature Her pardon (She is very unlikely to pardon us).

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I go with the buddhist thing. suffering is when we don’t get what we desire. It a bit tricky because things that are common or normal we don’t think about desiring until we don’t have them. People want to be safe and healthy and free and we can’t have this is various ways and when we can’t even have the slightest bit its way worse.

The description of suffering that I identify with is a desire for things to be other than they are. I may experience physical pain and want it to end; that’s a type of suffering. I may desire for my annoying co-worker to stop bragging about his vacation and get to the point of the meeting; that’s another kind of suffering. I know that there are people in concentration camps in the US, right now, suffering who knows what all torments and indignities of their own that I wish to end; that gives me some suffering even though I am not there with them, nor do I know their situation exactly.

All of these things, and millions more, are things about my experience of the world that I desire to be different. The fact that they aren’t as I would like is upsetting, and I must either change them or, if I can’t, I must suffer them.

I can’t think about them all the time. It used to be that I thought my only options were to think about them all the time, which is exhausting, or not think about them at all, which feels callous to the point of psychopathy. A large part of my mental health journey has been tuning how I identify, deal with, and compartmentalize the suffering I do, on my own behalf and on the behalf of others.

I don’t think suffering is bad, or to be avoided. It is a thing to become familiar with, like anger (itself usually a response to suffering), that needs to be identified for what it is and channeled. Suffering is very like an emotion in that it is an indicator in the brain that you want something different. Sometimes, identifying the suffering makes it easier to identify and remedy the cause. Other times, the cause is so huge and overwhelming (the whole US situation right now), that I just have to deal with suffering the whole thing while I do what small things I can to make things a little bit better.

Life. Life itself is suffering. Life is the worst thing to have happened to anyone.

Regarding purpose, no one has any purpose. Purpose is assigned to tools; not to sentient beings with consciousness. Life is utterly meaningless, and it is due to this lack of meaning, that we search for superfluous things like purpose.

The true nature of life is suffering. The default state of life is pain. Everything you do from there is just to temporarily alleviate that pain. You keep doing that until you die.

We have friends and lovers because loneliness is painful. We eat because hunger is painful. We sleep because deprivation from it is painful. We laugh so that we can escape from crying.

People say suffering is a hurdle, and see it as something essential for character development, and whilst I acknowledge the essentiality of some types of pain, I also see it as something contingent on life. We suffer becauae you are alive. All sentient and conscious beings suffer. It just comes with life.

Note that I am not however, promoting termination of life. By terminating your life early, you would be depriving yourself of all the potential pleasures you could have had (regardless of the pain around them). Once you are here, your optimization problem should be maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. So, whilst the asymmetry still exists, the potentiality for pleasure might (/should?) be enough of an reason to continue living. I do acknowledge that exceptions do exist where the asymmetry is so skewed for some, to the extent that there is little to no potential pleasure for them, in which case, it might be preferable for them to terminate their own life (think extremely painful chronic/terminal illnesses). I’m sorry if this feels a bit loosey-goosey.

With all that said, I believe we are all sufferers from the incurable disease of life. And the only thing to do from here is to vehemently struggle and rebel against suffering. To help our fellow sufferers and maximize the pleasurable moments. To do everything we can to cope with life whilst still being aware of the true suffering it stands for.

I tend to agree with Wikipedia. Pain is tricky, some can be enjoyable in certain contexts, so you are right that it’s a response to the stimulus more than the physical sensation.

But combined with “unpleasantness” it’s spot on. When I get a migraine I am suffering even if I try to adjust my mind to accept it differently, it’s unpleasant no matter how I slice it. It’s one of the feelings humans seem wired for.

It’s a word made by humans.

Suffering is an emotion, a mood, a state of mind.
The stimulus is almost irrelevant.

I like the fact that “to suffer” can be a transitive verb, taking a direct object, of which “I don’t suffer fools” is an example, albeit not one relevant to this theme, in which case it partially carries the meaning “to endure”.

Firstly, I don’t think that there is a predetermined or universal purpose of suffering. I think that the Wikipedia abstraction is in fact good, because it moves away from trying to generalize.

Secondly, your examples conflict with the question in the title, because your examples, while helpful for starting discussions, make it sound like you are trying to hear what people think are the worst ways to suffer, simply. The question in the title of your post, on the other hand, is to me much more intriguing, since it enables me to say:

To me, suffering can be sweet, although this interpretation perhaps deviates from its most common connotations, as in, the result of torture, agony, anger, fear, grief and so on. Whenever my self hatred reaches levels that drive me to start imaging hurting people around me in order to release, I instead turn all that destructive energy inwards, and when I do, I want to vomit, scream, bleed, explode, implode and die, but the total result of that, which is one example of what I call suffering, can give me such a kick of adrenaline that I experience some sort of euphoria.

Suffering in itself is nothing more than a Wikipedia abstraction. Only in a context with an active subject/actor does it have purpose or function. For animals, including humans, self aware or not, for instance, it can serve as an indicator that a certain behavior, place or adversary needs to be avoided and that this knowledge has to be passed on to their descendants.

The true nature of suffering is the repetion of mistakes and the observence of the patterns that lead to those mistakes and being concious of the caused sufferung but being powerless and unable to stop it.

I define suffering the same way I define art:

• I know it when I see it
• I can look at someone’s suffering, call it suffering, while some pretentious jagoff next to me goes, “Pff, that’s not suffering. You clearly don’t know what real suffering is.”
• Some suffering I like, some suffering I don’t.
• I had to go to school to learn about other people’s suffering.
• Some of us hide our suffering and some display it
• Some people use their suffering to make money
• I tried to show other people my suffering and they laughed at it. So I don’t show people my suffering anymore.

I think your line of reasoning falls somewhere between the “No True Scotsman” and “Persuasive Definition” logical fallacies.

While one can be aware of their own threshold for what they consider “suffering”, one cannot set that threshold for anyone else. To some, a papercut may be suffering, while others may enjoy physical pain and suffer when their dog dies.

The point I’m trying to make is there is no true suffering. Suffering is whatever the sufferer says it is and it’s a subjective experience, so that would apply only to them. We can, of course, generalize the idea of suffering, as Wikipedia has done in the definition you provided but again, this can really only explain the fact that suffering exists or maybe even the fact that many people consider many of the same things to be forms of suffering.

You may enjoy the teachings of Buddha, as his beginning premise is basically “all life is suffering” and his teachings largely revolve around the nature of suffering and how to accept it / overcome it.

I highly recommend you look into Buddhism. This concept is explored in depth.