Author: Layne

It is not only that suffering can be good. It is that suffering is the arbiter of good. Good does not have the capacity to exist without it. So far in that every meaningful thing is accompanied by an equally sufferable consequence. Where darkness is inversely proportional to the presence of light, so is suffering to meaning, to good. It is this proportionality that we so often neglect when considering what is ‘good’, or ‘natural’, or even what ‘should’ exist. 

 It is easy to realize the discomfort of suffering and, similarly, to realize the benefit. You might concede that, while uncomfortable, or even insufferable, a marathon is good for you; and, despite how much you might detest the idea, you might say that you should run one. As far as the advocacy of suffering goes, this is low-hanging fruit. Of course there is suffering that is to your benefit. Everything of which you benefit from, you will sacrifice and, in some capacity, suffer for. Education sacrifices time and physical and mental health. So does financial success. Physical health is a result of frequent physical suffering. Furthermore, you suffer the things for which you’re passionate. It’s embedded in the word! “Passion” comes from the latin word patior which translates to “to suffer”. The man who is passionate suffers his passion deeply. This too is low-hanging fruit. 

There is, however, the problem of mundane and meaningless suffering. There is an apparent reasonability in the assertion that there is no good in stubbing your toe. Or in the miserable, slow, death of your infant child lost to cancer. I could appeal to the hypothetical father that learns what love is by suffering the death of his child, or the non-profit organization created in the name of said child that saved many children with cancer…. Or that you learn to be more cognizant when you walk. However, this sounds a bit like ‘without cancer, we wouldn’t have the wonders of chemotherapy’ and seems disingenuous in that you are assigning “goodness” to a consequence of something that is “bad”, and that thing of which you are assigning “goodness” to is only good so far in that it opposes the thing that is “bad”. Though, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the inherent growth in human meaning and goodness through the effort of the mitigation of suffering. The attempt to reduce suffering alone, can create meaning and good that is independent of said reduction. 

There is an inherent and implicit underlying philosophical agreement between us all. That of which is ‘the things we find valuable, we find valuable, at least in part, because they will one day perish’. This theme of proportional juxtaposition is an essentially fundamental truth of perception. It is in this agreement that meaningless suffering imbues its proportional inverse with value and meaning. That is to say that the child’s life is valuable given the possibility of death. A better characterization of this idea is that the infant child living out the entirety of its life, without any meaningless or non-inevitable tragedy, is just as good and meaningful as his cancerous, miserable death is bad and insufferable. This is demonstrated by the discrepancy in tragedy felt between the death of an infant and the death of an elderly. Clearly, one causes more suffering than the other. As you mourn the child, you are mourning his 80-90 years of potential good as opposed to the case of mourning an elderly, where they are merely a subject of mourning. You are mostly mourning existence itself. Or vexed and despondent at the fact that death exists. In fact, you might even advocate for the death of the elderly as it would increase their suffering to persist in their mortal coil, so to speak. 

This point shows us that it is not the thing that is bad that we suffer, rather it is the lack of the thing that is good, what could have been good, or what would have been good. This is to say that suffering is a measure of how much good does not exist in a given instant. Or how non-good something is. By realizing that suffering is a measure of non-good, we can open the door to two hypotheses:

1. If suffering is a measure of non-good, then a suffering, or measure of ‘non-good’ has a ‘good’ inverse. In other words if 100=wholly good and 0=wholly non-good, then that necessarily means that any integer chosen will have a differential counterpart. So, 1 has a 99, 2 a 98 and so on.

2. If suffering is a measure of non-good, then good and suffering cannot exist without the other. You cannot have 100 and you cannot have 0. They cannot exist in a vacuum. Nothing is either wholly good or wholly non-good. Thus redeeming all suffering as necessary in order to have good. Under this framework, suffering implicates good into existence. It says ‘if not this, then what?’. Herein lies the good in suffering. It is not that there is any good in the death of a child. It is that the death of a child implicates good into existence. If not the death of the child, then what? Well, a life, of course. Filled with love and tragedy and amazement and wonder. Some amount of good comes from any depth of suffering, if only the beautiful exhibition of the resilience and fortitude of the human spirit. And if not, every suffering implicates its good counterpart into existence.

There has been a great philosophical disservice done to man. The fall of religion marked a turning point in mainstream philosophy. Prior to the modern age of nihilism, absurdism and atheism, we had a scaffolding through which we could meaningfully engage with life. A rule book one might be able to utilize so as to not confront the devastating existentialism that proceeds something like forsaking the possibility of a creator. The disservice has not been done in forsaking the notion that god might exist, no. Rather, it is the forsaking why we felt the need to compose a creator in the first place: Meaning.

I concede that the barren truth very may well be that meaning is a construct to appease the evolutionary accident that is a sentience that begs “why?”. However, constructs exist. Perhaps not outside of the constraints of man; but they do exist. No one would deny the existence of Money, interpersonal interaction, words and their definitions; And yet, they too are constructs. The implicit message that we are being fed is this: If you are religious, heaven holds the goal. If you are not religious, the void is waiting and, likewise, you should do the same. Both messages incentivize stagnation, inactivity, comfort-seeking, nihilism, hedonism and rot. This is what we see. I look around and see the religious wait for heaven and the atheist/agnostic wait for death. Scrolling, eating, smoking, vaping, drinking, decomposing. Everyone is decomposing. We weakly engage with life and we die a nobody that has done nothing and lived a nothing life.

One might be inclined to believe that we engage weakly because it is hard to engage meaningfully. To act like things matter. Indeed, it is very hard. It’s hard to work out every day, it’s hard to work hard in school and in your profession. It’s hard to really love someone. It’s hard to have ambition. It’s hard to expand your intellect. It’s hard to have meaningful relationships. It’s hard to try and it’s hard to fail. After all, if you’re not failing, then you were never trying in the first place. Perhaps, for most of those who weakly engage do so because the alternative is difficult. But there are some. A very competent, hungry and willing some that would engage meaningfully if not for nihilism and religion. It follows that if you cannot justify effort then it is moot to exercise it. Why would a man take care of himself if heaven awaits him? Why would a man act like things matter if they don’t? For the first question, I have no answer. Only sadness and frustration. To the second, however, I will pose an alternative perspective.

It matters now. Who the fuck cares about the end? So what if you sink into the void, doomed to inanimacy in an eternal oblivion? You’re here now and things matter to you! If they didn’t, you would’ve ended it. You will exist until you don’t whether you believe it to mean something or not; and so you are presented with a choice. Live easy, fat, mean, unloving and stupid, and die a man filled with regrets and “what-if’s” reminiscing on everything you didn’t do. Or, live a difficult life where everything you do matters. You work out hard, you read hard, you love hard and you engage with life in an exhausting gratitude. You relentlessly wring every ounce of meaning out of life until you have nothing left; and you die a tired and grateful man whose life you would have chosen to live over and over and over again. You can make life worth living. Must there be a transcendent essence that dictates the meaning of life for you? Are you that meek and suggestable?

I’ll dictate it to you right now. Act like the things you do matter. Act like every moment that you exist is a moment where you EXIST!!! You are one moment closer to not existing anymore and you have chosen to spend that moment doing something that is worth doing. Do that for a life time and you have lived a life worth living. Have some goddamn gratitude for your life and start trying.