Life is suffering

A basic truth in Buddhist psychology is that life is suffering. This has often been interpreted to mean that Buddhist psychology has a very negative or even nihilistic view of human existence. This is a misunderstanding.

It doesn’t mean that life is suffering all the time but it means that sooner or later we all will experience suffering. For example, someone close to you gets sick or dies. All of us experience moments of anger, loneliness, despair, shame, or fear. And we are all getting older all the time and ultimately, of course, we die. As Jim Morrison observed: “No one here gets out alive”.

We live in what often seems a chaotic and random world where we don’t know what’s going to happen next to us or our loved ones. The recent natural disasters in our part of the world (flooding, cyclones, bushfires and earthquakes) are a stark reminder of this scary fact. If you have an anxious temperament you know how hard it is living with all this uncertainty. The existential truth is this: it is not possible to avoid difficulties in life. In other words, life is (sometimes) suffering.

There are both functional and dysfunctional ways of dealing with the fundamental truth that life is at times really challenging. Some people go through life doing everything in their power to avoid facing this. So they use alcohol or drugs or food or sex or shopping or TV or socialising or being busy or working or reading or sleeping or….you name it. The list goes on and on. They use these things to numb themselves to the scary fact that we have very little control over what happens in our lives. As you can see many of these behaviours are okay in moderation. However the problem arise when we use them to avoid something else because they then become driven by fear and avoidance.

So what to do? Well, we can face the fact that life will sometimes be difficult but that nothing is permanent and the hard times will pass too. And then we can give ourselves permission to enjoy the good times and appreciate the nice things in our lives.