suffering. | pidgin philosophy (transcript)

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to a… slightly different channel. As you may have noticed, the channel name has changed. I think after the last time I uploaded, I decided to take a long hiatus. And instead of making another redundant channel update, I decided to just start posting again when I have something to share – and that’s what we’re going to be doing today.

I want to talk about suffering.

Not necessarily in a I’m going to cry on the internet today kind of way. I want to have a look at suffering as a theme and how I view my own. I would like to say that I am by no means promoting the notion that the way that I look at my own suffering is the way that anyone should look at their own – it’s just the way that I’ve decided to perceive my own. I’m also not encouraging anyone to also partake in any marginally questionable actions that I describe here as I’m just sharing my own lived experience and the things that I describe are going to be personal to me. They are just stories, observations and conclusions that I have reached for myself. So please do keep this in mind and remember that you do not have to view this video and your own mental health and comfort comes first. Some of my content just isn’t for everyone.

I will also be linking the transcript of this video in the description where you can find any references and sources if you’d like to have a look at them.

So:

Many different philosophers have addressed suffering, what it means and how we cope with it as people. It’s an inevitability for people to suffer – so much so that I don’t have to reiterate any specific suffering here. I have suffered. You have suffered. Everyone has and will suffer in their own little way as they journey through life and I think that it is really important to think and reflect on the ways that we have suffered – and even the ways that we might make ourselves suffer – in order to understand our experiences.

Some modern philosophical ideas on suffering that I seem to align with are rather dark, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s a bad thing for me to subscribe to. I am what is called a “Pessimist” though I think that the way I view the way that I cope with my suffering quite positive – but I’ll get into this later. To sum up:

Pessimists hold this world to be mainly bad, or even the worst possible, plagued with, among other things, unbearable and unstoppable suffering. Some identify suffering as the nature of the world and conclude that it would be better if life did not exist at all. Arthur Schopenhauer recommends us to take refuge in things like art, philosophy, loss of the will to live, and tolerance toward ‘fellow-sufferers’.

Friedrich Nietzsche, first influenced by Schopenhauer, developed afterward quite another attitude, arguing that the suffering of life is productive, exalting the will to power, despising weak compassion or pity, and recommending us to embrace willfully the ‘eternal return’ of the greatest sufferings.

Source: Wikipedia

Now, I identify with a lot of Pessimist philosophy, but I would like to clarify that I don’t think that suffering in the world is so bad that life shouldn’t exist at all. I do, however, take Nietzsche’s way of looking at my suffering. I see it as a huge tool and motivator for me to use to reach my full potential, to grow into the person that I deserve to be and to gain my own subjective idea of success.

I’m not going to outline all the ways that I’ve suffered. I’ve already talked about some of my more depressing life experiences in other videos across my channel and if you have the time to kill you can watch those to get the full scoop on the things that I’ve gone through and overcome. I’ve also recently come to the conclusion that if I keep retelling over and over again the pain that I’ve experienced, it just becomes a tool for people that don’t like me or agree with me to use against me. It’s happened more than I’d like to admit and I’m kind of over being taken advantage of. It also prevents me from romanticising what’s happened to me, from looking at it as a ‘good’ thing. It’s not. There is no debate that something that has caused you immense and great pain is a bad thing, a thing that causes harm often for far longer than in the instance it happens. A lot of ways that religion looks at suffering is by viewing it through this lens – that’s is a lesson, and it happened for a reason, and god is testing you, and it’s for your own good. Suffering is suffering. It’s not much deeper than it hurts, and you have to live with it. Shit happens and you have to live with it – it is just a part of being a person.

Instead, I want to share some stories that show how I have made myself suffer to describe in a small way the method by which I view my own suffering and how I’ve managed to find it useful. The first story is about a pair of shoes that I adored. Tedious, I know, but bear with me. A few years ago, I had a pair of shoes that I loved. They made me feel tall – and tall was the problem. Being in these shoes was a struggle because the heel was quite tall. But I really liked these shoes, so I was determined to walk in them – and every single day of that year, I did. At one point, a friend of mine wanted to take a long trek in a nearby forest and I agreed. And I wore these shoes for that trek. On the face of it, it seemed and felt nonsensical to do this… no, it is nonsensical to do this. I could have really hurt myself, especially since I had climbed trees for the first time in these shoes. But I was determined. Determined specifically to build callouses on my feet so that the pain of wearing these shoes wouldn’t bother me as much. And, after this excursion, the more I wore these shoes, the more severe these callouses got and the easier it was to wear them. And in a small, nonsensical way – it made me feel quite accomplished. I would turn up to work and be tall and push wheelchairs in my heels. I felt right. I felt like the initial difficulty had been worth it to feel this way. And even if this is small, I think that it’s a significant thought for me.

I don’t wear those shoes anymore, because I’ve conquered them. I don’t need to. But there have been other instances of similar things that I’ve done since then that I’ve noticed. I remember being so angry when I first smoked a cigarette. Not because I had smoked, but because I couldn’t handle it. I remember the way it burned my lungs and throat and how it made me throw up. It made me feel weak. Weak is a key term in my brain, I think. It really makes me act irrationally. Because that anger made me want to smoke to the point where my lungs didn’t feel like that anymore. My body is mine and I wanted control over the very natural response it had to the smoke I put in it. And I got it. I smoked every day to the point where my lungs could handle that feeling. And the moment I realised that the smoke no longer affected me in that way was exhilarating. I’m not promoting smoking – it is bad for your health, and you shouldn’t do it without first understanding those implications – but I can’t lie that being able to now smoke without any coughing or heaving feels like an achievement. Like I overcame something.

Now these are ways that I have made myself suffer and I understand that. And I definitely do other things like going out in the cold without coat or winter clothing because I want to feel the cold or continuing to watch the Handmaid’s Tale even though it’s incredibly triggering to me. But I feel as though the more uncomfortable I make myself, the less uncomfortable I’ll be. I want to talk about death and abandonment for a moment. I have lost a lot of people in my life. And my goal isn’t to become jaded and desensitised to that. Because it’s never been about trying to attain the feeling of nothingness from all of this experimentation. I don’t want to be numb to what I feel – I want to experience all of my feelings so that I know what they are. And the loss of a person, the loss of people isn’t really something you can get used to or get over. At least not for me. I don’t imagine abandonment or loss feels any “better” for it being more frequent. But being able to know what it is in the moment that it happens – is important to me. Because it’s the only way that I could possibly know how to deal with it. Of course, this isn’t something you can really plan for and by extension it’s not really something you can be ready for – but knowing and sitting in your discomfort is important.

I’ve been reading a book recently that I’ve been really enjoying called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It’s about these rare and interesting neurological diseases and the people who suffer with them. And also, about how they overcame that suffering. I read about a man that, in theory, could not see and so formed the world around him the shape of music. I read about a man that embraced his syndrome partially because it made him feel alive. The book, in several places, describes how people feel as though their pain, their suffering and their disease feels a parts of them and they wouldn’t know who they are without it. As if it becomes melded with their identity. But the book also explicitly and implicitly demonstrates just how resilient and adaptive people are. All of the stories documented in this book are simultaneously tragic and inspiring. The way that these people are able to thrive despite their suffering is incredible. And I so admire and respect that. And I’m drawn to stories like that – fictional or otherwise. They still make me feel a certain level of uncomfortable, because at any moment in the future I could land one of these diseases caused by damage or the process of ageing – but for such a small price, a small amount of discomfort, I’ve gained so much: insight into the lives of these incredible people whose experiences I will never understand unless I actually go through it.

Suffering. It’s inevitable. And it doesn’t discriminate. Everyone gets their taste of it. How do you live with that knowledge? How do you find calm with that anxiety just looming over you? How do we get past the fact that we will suffer?

One of the biggest things in my life that had me fucked up and still probably has me fucked up is when I faced my first biggest loss – I didn’t even acknowledge it happened for 5 years. I tried to speed-run grief in 24 hours and not touch it again – for 5 years. And that pain of acknowledgment, when it finally happened, taught me something valuable: in order for me to be happy, I have to know what makes me uncomfortable. And I have to be able to sit, to really sit, in what makes me uncomfortable. I have to know exactly what my suffering is, I have to be able to revisit it so that I will have a leg up on it. Because it’s going to happen again – to a greater or lesser extent – I will suffer. And I believe that I’m stronger for it. I could be naïve, but I feel physically and mentally stronger than I’ve ever felt in my life. I have goals and aspirations and plans – and they feel within reach. They aren’t fantasies that I would dream about as a child anymore. I’m louder than I’ve ever been. I’m more independent than I’ve ever been. I’ve come such a long way from where I started. And the best part is – I don’t feel like I’m done. I think I can be louder, more self-sustaining and I’m still moving. I had a point to prove to my family and I think I have sufficiently proved it – but I’m not done.

I think we all search for greatness in our lives, we all have a desire to be “seen” and we all define greatness in different ways – and my suffering gives me so much motivation to reach that greatness. Be it the anger, be it the resentment and the need to make a point, be it the sadness – I’ve somehow managed to turn it into fuel and inspiration to keep going. And by sticking with it I’ve found things that I’d never felt before – I felt joy for the first time, I felt loved for the first time, I found where my principles really are. It’s why I would change nothing in my past if I could. There are very few things that personally I would change of my own actions, but I do not think that I would be the same person without having suffered. Suffering causes us to change in ways that we can’t really predict – in good ways and sometimes even in bad ways. But, in the same vein, I’m determined not to be defined by that suffering – I will not be it, it will not be me, I am determined to rise above it. Every difficult thing that passes me no longer feels like a terror. Every bad thing that happens to me just feels like another challenge for me to solve – and yes, of course, it’s still painful but that pain isn’t for nothing. It is the biggest utility that I have at my disposal, and I am determined to use it.

And the better I know it, the better I will be able to do exactly that.

I think that we should all be able to find ways to cope and overcome the ways that we have suffered and recover from the people or events that made us suffer. For me, this was the way and probably will continue to be the way – and a lot of people might see what I do as incredibly destructive or even dangerous. But… it works for me. And ultimately, to me, that’s all that matters, right? I’ve found solace in philosophies that a lot of people – on a surface reading – might virulently reject – but I find comfort in it. I really do. The idea that my suffering might give me an edge to find my path to greatness is an incredibly optimistic one of me. I don’t feel lost or doomed, but instead really empowered and motivated. So, I’m going to stick with it.

I hope that this all makes sense and I hope you share your thoughts on how you cope.

fay. x

mozilla firefay

No Concessions For Oppressors