A Personal Inquiry into Pain, Discomfort, Difficulty, and Growth
Suffering Imposed Upon Us
Suffering is one of those words that seems straightforward until we try to say exactly what we mean by it. Pain, discomfort, difficulty, stress, grief, and suffering overlap, but they are not the same thing. We may voluntarily endure considerable discomfort and not consider ourselves to be suffering at all. At other times, we may be suffering without fully recognizing it.
There is an easy place to begin. Externally imposed oppression or victimization causes genuine and undesirable suffering. War, abuse, exploitation, cruelty, and deprivation can overwhelm a person’s ability to simply choose a different attitude toward what is happening. There is little reason to romanticize such suffering, and certainly no reason to impose it on someone because we imagine it will make them stronger.
The more difficult questions begin with the suffering of ordinary life. How much of it can be avoided? How much do we create ourselves? Can difficulty contribute to growth without becoming suffering? And when suffering cannot be avoided, can changing the way we attend to it change the experience itself?
Suffering We Don’t Acknowledge
Sometimes a person is genuinely suffering but does not acknowledge it. I have done this myself. We push through, minimize what is happening, distract ourselves, or simply refuse to call it suffering. This may be a useful coping mechanism for a time, but as a long-term strategy it is a distortion. Not acknowledging suffering is not the same as being free of it.
There have been times when I mistook my ability to keep going for evidence that I was not suffering. Looking back, the suffering was quite real. Recognizing it was not giving in to it; it was necessary before I could respond appropriately. Sometimes the wiser response is not greater endurance but acknowledging what is happening and taking care of ourselves.
Discomfort and Growth
Growth often involves discomfort, but it may be a mistake to call that suffering when the difficulty is voluntarily undertaken. Athletic training provides an obvious example. We deliberately stress ourselves because we want to increase our capabilities. Fatigue, exertion, and even pain can be unpleasant without necessarily being experienced as suffering.
Much the same applies in ordinary life. Learning something difficult, creating something, caring for others, or working toward a meaningful goal can involve considerable effort and frustration. But when the effort is freely chosen and has purpose, we may experience it as challenge rather than suffering.
Attitude matters here. There is an old saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. Few of us love what we do every day, but the saying contains an insight: the meaning we give to difficulty changes our experience of it.
Looking Directly at Suffering
Buddhism takes the investigation further. A common Buddhist formulation is that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. We cannot avoid unpleasant sensations, illness, aging, loss, and death. But Buddhism asks whether the suffering we add to these experiences arises partly from our resistance to them—our craving for things to be different from the way they are.
“Optional” does not mean that a suffering person can simply decide not to suffer. It points instead to something that can be discovered and developed through practice: our experience may change as our relationship to pain, loss, and adversity changes.
Some meditation practices make this question experiential. There are meditation teachers who teach an Hour of Stillness, in which you try not to move. Eventually something hurts. We quickly label a sensation pain and react: I don’t like this; I want it to stop.
But give the sensation your complete attention and something interesting can happen. What seemed like a single solid thing called pain becomes pressure, heat, tension, pulsing—sensations arising and passing. Sometimes what we had labelled pain diminishes or disappears. More importantly, the suffering surrounding the sensation can diminish even when the sensation remains.
This isn’t a trick for ignoring suffering. It is almost the opposite: looking so closely that we begin to distinguish the sensation itself from our reaction to it. Buddhism takes this insight deeper still. Much of our resistance is organized around a sense of self: I am hurting; I don’t want this; this shouldn’t be happening to me. Buddhist practice ultimately asks us to examine that “I” as closely as we examine the pain. If our sense of a fixed and separate self begins to loosen, so too may some of the suffering organized around protecting it.
The point is not that pain is imaginary. Pain can be present without necessarily becoming suffering.
Avoiding Unnecessary Suffering
There is also something to be said for not creating unnecessary suffering in the first place. At first glance, exercising without pushing yourself very hard can sound lazy. But slow running and low-intensity exercise are established approaches to building fitness.
Endurance athletes commonly do much of their training at an easy, sustainable intensity. The idea is not to prove your fitness on every outing but to build it gradually. Easy training allows longer and more frequent sessions, develops aerobic capacity, and reduces the fatigue associated with repeatedly exercising at high intensity. Approaches such as easy running, conversational-pace running, Zone 2 training, and polarized endurance training differ in their details, but they share an important principle: harder is not always better.
The same principle applies beyond running. Strength training does not require taking every set to failure. A cyclist does not need to finish every ride exhausted. A swimmer can accumulate distance at a comfortable pace and discover, months later, that what once required considerable effort has become easy. Capacity can be built by repeatedly working within one’s limits and allowing those limits to expand.
There is an important distinction here between stress and strain. The aim is not to avoid effort, but to apply enough stress to stimulate adaptation without unnecessarily turning the experience into suffering. By going slowly, we can gradually develop the capacity that eventually allows us to go faster.
We often associate growth with pushing ourselves—no pain, no gain. But another path is consistency, patience, and gradual adaptation. Growth requires challenge, but it does not necessarily require suffering.
What Do We Do With Suffering?
Perhaps the mistake is trying to reach a single verdict on suffering. Suffering is good for you is too crude, but so is suffering should always be avoided. The distinctions matter.
Some suffering should be prevented. Some needs to be acknowledged rather than denied. Some apparent suffering may actually be voluntary discomfort in the service of something we value. And there is wisdom in developing our capabilities gradually rather than making unnecessary hardship into a virtue.
Then there is suffering we cannot prevent: illness, loss, aging, disappointment, and eventually death. Here the question changes. If we cannot remove the experience, what relationship will we have with it?
Sometimes the appropriate response is to change the circumstances. Sometimes it is to rest or ask for help. Sometimes it is to build our capacity patiently. And sometimes it is to look directly at what we are experiencing and see what happens when we stop resisting it.
Perhaps wisdom lies not in learning how to suffer, or even in learning how to avoid suffering, but in learning to recognize what kind of experience we are having and responding to it appropriately.
Last Updated on August 9, 2026 | Published: August 9, 2026