You hurt because there is pain in the world.
Even if you did nothing– sat perfectly still, took no unburned fire into your blood– there would still be pain in the world. You would still hurt.
That's the wages of organic life, baby. It's what we get for not being some squiggly little molecules trapped in rock yet unstruck by lightning.
Everything alive hurts. I try not to chase people around with this knowledge because part of moving through society is leaving doors unopened for others, but: a chicken, a fish, a potted bush, a dandelion growing through asphalt. "Life is pain" is an oversimplification. It's that pain is terribly useful for living. You think, but I hate it, and I try not to say, yeah that's the point? You hate being injured. You hate being eaten. You hate being poisoned, burned, drowned. You hate these things with an aversion so visceral that you will do anything to avoid them.
That's the point.
The ones who didn't died early.
And my good motherfucker, you are a single unbroken chain of the ones who didn't die early all the way back to single cells decked in flagella swimming in chemical soup.
This doesn't guarantee you will make it, I just want you to have some perspective.
Buddhism was introduced to me as: the root of suffering is want.
Oh, it's neat to see someone finally get it, I said.
And, Buddhism said, the only cure is to excise all want.
It's a shame, I mumbled, to be so very right yet so very wrong.
It's just, you might as well propose the cure to being a duck is to grow a long scaly tail and antennae and live on Venus. Humans have had more luck arguing with gravity.
You were not born to be happy. You were born to stall death long enough to meet the inscrutable win conditions of organic life's continuation. Most people oversimplify this to "reproducing" but it's so much more complicated than that. So much stupider and stranger.
The key part is: you were not born owed happiness. None of us were.
"I don't like that," you say.
Good!
This is the paradox: you are only owed the ability to experience pain, to loathe and detest so viscerally you'll do anything to escape it. And this is why we want happiness. Why we want contentment, security, peace, good health.
What we are owed (pain) is what drives us to clamor for things we are not owed (happiness).
Another conflict I think about a lot is accepting versus struggling. The far ends of the scale seem fairly visible: some things in life you must accept and make your peace with because there's no sensible alternative. And, some things in life you cannot accept and must struggle against because there's no sensible alternative.
In the middle? That's where all the problems that make the world go 'round are.
I will misquote it over and over again because I'm no good at remembering the translation of the words said by a rabbi of a religion I don't belong to, but it is something like:
Your hands will not be the ones to finish the work, but you are not at liberty to shirk it.
Or to quote some game screenshots stitched together on tumblr:
✅ Accept that you will not win.
✅ Accept that you have to try anyways.
I don't know how to comfort you. I hate that, and I wish it weren't so; it feels like a dereliction of duty to speak to you of existence without giving you a warm blanket afterwards.
(That you have to build your own comfort is probably part of the human condition too, but why would I be writing this if not to complain about that?)
So I will leave you with what I have: High Score.
I don't know when I'll die. I don't know how far I can get in this arcade game before I hit the Game Over screen. I know it will end– unlike many this is a source of comfort for me, to know that pain has a deadline– but when? Uhhhhh. And so I nurture in myself curiosity about how far I can get, how much I can do, to see how high that metaphorical score gets before I reach the leaderboard screen. Abundance mindset as applied to 1UP.
(It is a privilege my ancestors– all our ancestors– toiled for that I can look at it like this.
(But I mean.
(When I said to accept that you will not win but try anyways, what work did you think I was referring to?)
- Pain is real and it's all that organic existence owes you.
- Be kind to each other.
- It's not that kindness solves pain. It's that humans are builders, and if existence won't naturally deliver what we want, we'll build it. Over and over and over.
- (This isn't THE meaning of life, but it's one of them.)
- (Good luck, I'm rooting for you.)